Don't Let The Door Hit You

I must say I am surprised. I said Tubby Smith wouldn't be fired or resign, but it never occurred to me that another school would offer similar money to what he was making at UK. I guess people will overpay for name recognition. As a UL fan, I’m sorry to see him gone. Especially now that we’ve gotten the excessive whining that the people of Kentucky care too much about basketball to the detriment of more important things. Mark Story of the Herald-Leader wished more people cared who would be the next governor (but I'm sure he wants people to continue reading the sports page so he can keep his job where he gets paid to watch basketball games). Pardon me for not spending my time looking into the minutiae of Bruce Lunsford's opinions on the tax code. Truth be told, most people understand fundamental differences between the parties which is why they don't obsess over politics. They generally have a pretty good idea what they are looking for, and besides, elections are infrequent while basketball is always there. Plus, I find it ironic that anyone from the Herald-Leader is complaining about uninformed voters when I've found their coverage of candidates to be pretty damn sad. They'll have a page where they list the responses from the campaigns to a handful of generic questions without any real in depth coverage so you can’t really find out their stands on smaller issues. Basketball is much easier to get information on.

So, is Kentucky too obsessed with basketball? I don't so. Contrary to popular belief, Americans are not that wacked out when it comes to sports. At least compared to other countries. Try watching a soccer game in Latin America. A soccer match sparked a war between El Salvador and Honduras (probably one of those boring 0-0 ties). U.S. cities sometimes have riots after championship games, but in Europe, they have a lot of soccer fans who travel to away games just so they can riot. So, while I will admit the state does have a basketball obsession, I don't think it's that big a deal. Sports are pretty easy for the regular person to follow. Besides, is it better to be obsessed with basketball or blonde bimbos who suddenly drop dead (I want to state for the record that I am not the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby) and US Weekly covergirls who have problems wearing underwear in public?

The funnier part of the whole episode was the belief that Tubby Smith leaving was somehow unprecedented, but that's crap. It doesn’t happen so much in basketball, but that’s because UK is one of the few schools that have such a strong basketball orientation. There are a lot in football. Bill Curry left Alabama for UK after a 10-2 season that ended in the Sugar Bowl. Smith won 76% of his games at UK plus a national championship. At Miami, Larry Coker won 80% of his games, a national title and went to three BCS bowls in six years. He even changed the image of Miami as they no longer dominated police blotters as often as the AP polls. He just got fired for the same reason people bitched about Smith. The program was declining, and the future no longer looked bright. In fact, Coker had a better record, but less time. Yet, while there were some who questioned it (like me), there wasn’t the hyperventilating that happened when Tubby left (and he left on his own). So, no, this is not unprecedented.

We've also got the argument that Smith was treated shabbily. Sorry, I almost never feel sympathy for someone making millions of dollars. I don't care what kind of spotlight or pressure is on them. That attention to their position is the reason they get that kind of money. So deal with it. If he left because he wanted to coach a place with lower expectations, UK is better off without him. This is big time sports. You don't want a coach who wants to take it easy. As for high expectations at UK, why is this seen as a problem? He makes $2 million a year. What other business pays their top man more than just about all their competitors and then doesn't care if he keeps the team on the top? I think the closest case to Smith is Lloyd Carr who been head coach at Michigan since 1995. He’s also won 76% of his games, a title, been to four Rose Bowls, never missed the postseason and been a coach in some capacity at Michigan since 1980. Yet, there are one or two websites devoted to firing him, because he’s recently struggled in bowl games and has fallen behind conference rival Ohio State. Substitute tournament for bowl games and Florida for Ohio State, and you’ve got Tubby Smith. So, other schools have these expectations.

I think that is the point a bunch of people were making that floored me. They said Smith one of the best coaches in the country and was a classy guy. Is Smith a top 10 coach? I don't think so. What are you measuring? He has a title, but so does Rollie Massimino. Coach K, Bob Knight and Jim Calhoun are active coaches with multiple titles. There are several more with one title, but more than one trip to the Final Four. Tom Izzo, Billy Donovan, Jim Boeheim, Lute Olsen and Roy Williams come immediately to mind. Plus, there are some without titles who I believe have coached better than Smith because they weren’t taking over a team at the top like he was. Smith took over a program that had just been to two straight title games. I think Rick Barnes getting a mediocre basketball program at a football school like Texas into the Final Four took better coaching. Ben Howland just hit his second Final Four in four seasons at UCLA. Yet, look at what Smith has done since the title? Yeah, he makes the tournament every year, but so what? UK had been to three Final Fours in the previous five years of his tenure, so maintaining a tournament presence for 10 years is a minimum. Does anyone think if Pete Carroll left Southern Cal that if their next coach won a title in his first year, but never made it back to a BCS bowl, he wouldn’t be on the hot seat?

Now is Smith a classy guy? He doesn’t seem like a bad guy, but I certainly don’t consider him some moral paragon in coaching. In fact, he has shows a lot of traits that get other coaches criticized while he often gets a pass. When the first NCAA Academic Progress Report came out two years ago, UK basketball was 63rd which would be fine if it was out of all division I basketball schools. However, they were 63rd out of the 65 team tournament field. Earlier this year he locked out callers on his call in show. He took Marquis Estill off scholarship because he over signed a recruiting class. He conveniently “found” a fax that got Randolph Morris eligible again. I’m still trying to figure out how he got the Commonwealth Attorney’s office to hold off prosecuting Wayne Turner whose car was used in a hit and run. Oh right, the tournament was starting, and that could have been a distraction. He supported UK’s (admittedly stupid) athlete alcohol policy as long as baseball players were in trouble, but got it done away with once his players started getting in trouble. Which was quite often. Not once, but twice Smith had teams so out of control that they were nicknamed Team Turmoil. His players feared his discipline so little that when he declared he’d had enough, two of them got busted for using fake IDs to get into a bar the next day. His idea of discipline was to kick Corey Sears off the team for getting beat up on the team bus by Gerald Fitch, but never did much to Fitch who was constantly in trouble. Difference? Fitch was a much better player. It doesn’t make Smith necessarily a bad person. Just no better than any other coach who looks the other way while trying to win.

Actually, the way Smith left was anything but “classy”. Some people are still insisting he was forced out, but the evidence makes it pretty clear that wasn’t the case. Hell, apparently UK didn’t even insist on changes to his staff. When he went to Minnesota, he didn’t even have the common courtesy to call the UK administration or possibly even his players. They found out from media reports. Then I found out his agent had been talking with the Gophers for six weeks. Go back six weeks on the UK schedule and you find an 18-5 UK team about to face Florida. Then they finished 4-7. Not saying Tubby was mailing it in, but when you have to start little used walk-on Dwight Perry in a tournament game because you put his name instead of his cousin Bobby Perry’s on the lineup card, you either don’t care anymore or you’re incompetent. Plus, look at the shape Smith left UK in. Randolph Morris signed a contract within a day of Smith leaving which means he was already in negotiations. Smith was probably aware of that. As I’ve mentioned before, without Morris, UK is probably going to struggle next year. So, Tubby’s half-assed recruiting has put UK in this position, but he takes off for Minnesota so that the new coach gets blamed for the mess he leaves behind. In fact, I think this is the reason Smith really left. He saw the roster and knew he probably couldn’t do enough to save his job next year, so why not go elsewhere and get five years with a fresh start?

Truthfully, I don’t do it often, but this time I’ll stick with the UK fans. Smith wants to be paid like a big time coach, but doesn’t want the expectations that go with. So, he puts a program in decline and leaves. I’m not convinced he’s going to do all that great at Minnesota. Remember, he’s coached at two major conference teams, Georgia and Kentucky. At both schools, he peaked his first year with someone else’s recruits. I’m not saying that I agree with Gregg Doyel who thinks Smith will be a miserable failure in Minnesota, but he is dead on about one point – if Smith can’t recruit at UK, who is he going to get to go to Minnesota? The assumption is that the type of recruits he got to UK may not have been good enough for the Wildcats, but he can be successful with them at Minnesota. Only thing is will he be able to get the same recruits at Minnesota? Maybe teh Sheray Thomas' of the world, but do you really think Tayshaun Prince and Keith Bogans would have gone to Minnesota instead of UK to play for Smith there? Look at his last ditch recruiting efforts at UK, Patrick Patterson and Jai Lucas. Both have indicated they probably won’t consider UK without Smith (bet that changes if Billy Donovan ends up there), but I notice neither is even considering Minnesota with Smith there. Since his style fits in the ugly Big Ten (and the Big Ten sucks right now), I can see Smith putting together a team good enough to contend for an occasional Sweet Sixteen, but I think Smith may be in for a rude awakening if he thinks the expectations will be really low. The coach he's replacing had a winning record at Minnesota, and a school that commits that much money to a coach won’t be satisfied with an occasional Sweet Sixteen.