This Substack article from Craig Meyer lists his 13 worst coaching hires from the last 26 years
, or if you prefer, this century. Five of them were ACC hires:- 13 – Matt Doherty, UNC
- 12 – James Johnson, Virginia Tech
- 8 – Jeff Bzdelik, Wake Forest
- 3 – Kevin Stallings, Pitt
- 2 – Kenny Payne, Louisville
It’s a useful chart, and when you think about it, even with one major absence, if you take a small bit of license, about a third of of the ACC takes up about a third of the chart.
We’ll return to the absence soon, but listing bad hires this way really underscores our theory that bad coaching hires really hurt the ACC over the last couple of decades.
How bad is is that Doherty is the best of the worst? He’s important, though: he’s the prime example of how bad things can get when you stay within your tradition and comfort level. People knew, though. When UNC asked an unidentified former teammate about hiring Doherty, the guy said, “big mistake! Big mistake!”
Johnson was probably a lazy hire. Also available in 2012: Richard Pitino, John Groce, Frank Martin, and Wagner’s Dan Hurley.
Bzdelik inspired the most awesome fan rebellion we’ve ever seen. Wake Forest fans just walked away. He was not an exciting coach, but he was fundamentally sound.
Still, he struggled, and the fans truly came to hate him. Wake has not really recovered.
Kevin Stallings was an okay coach at Vanderbilt, but the program was flailing and he basically jumped before he got pushed. He ended up hated at Pitt about as much as Bzdelik was hated at Wake Forest. It just got ugly. Jeff Capel hasn’t killed it at Pitt, but he’s vastly more popular than Stallings was.
And then there’s Payne, who was highly regarded as an assistant, but who utterly failed as a head coach. He was dreadful.
It’s worth noting that he was also the popular choice at Louisville. The fans wanted “one of their own,” and there was a big push to hire an African-American coach.
A.D. Josh Heird could not resist the pressure and hired Payne, who played for Denny Crum and helped the Cardinals win the national championship in 1986 over Duke. Fortunately for Heird, he corrected the error two years ago when he hired Pat Kelsey, who has substantially revived Louisville’s program.
And that leads us to the coach who missed this list: NC State’s Will Wade.
Boo Corrigan made a similar mistake: the fans, understandably tired of mediocrity, started a fanciful drive to hire McNeese State’s Will Wade. It got his attention, and he slipped away from McNeese and back to a major power conference job.
Like Professor Harold Hill in the Music Man, Wade arrived and showed a lot of charisma – at least before the season started.
Once it did, we learned quickly that he had put together a flawed roster, and that the charisma, the cockiness, was all an act. He had enough talent to do well, but he had no idea what to do with it.
The excuses started to flow fast, then the defiance. This, he thundered, would be the worst team he would ever have at State.
That much turned out to be true. Fans soon learned that he had been secretly negotiating a return to LSU, a school where he had suffered a great fall.
He left State with a very bad taste, but Corrigan, now chastened, appears to have made a smart hire when he brought in former State guard Justin Gainey, who appears to have stabilized the program.
Wade has taken his show on the road again, but his roster building problems continue. Turns out it’s not so easy to cheat when everyone can pay, and he’s had to find new ways to bend the rules. He’s signed a team that’s much older than most college teams, and with a couple of players who have competed professionally at different levels, including two-way NBA contracts.
The silver lining?
College basketball has really united in its scorn for Wade. Jeff Goodman ripped him the other day. We understand that one of the coaches that he cited is apparently Michigan State’s Tom Izzo.
Florida’s Todd Golden, hardly an NCAA paragon of virtue, has said that Wade has gone too far. And now legendary reporter Mike DeCourcey has weighed in as well. He’s a bit more refined than is Goodman, but the message is the same: Wade is an awful person and terrible for the game.
All in all, between this and the stupid expansion of the NCAA tournament, it’s a great time to revisit Mike Krzyzewski’s argument that college basketball needs a commissioner.
- Golden rips LSU recruiting former pro players: ‘Not what CBB is supposed to be’
- Todd Golden Refutes Will Wade’s Strategy As LSU HC Faces More Backlash by Analyst Jeff Goodman
- Will Wade back to old ways with controversial signing
- Will Wade’s Return to LSU Is Already Pushing Bounds of NCAA Eligibility Audaciously
- LSU knew exactly what it was getting with Will Wade, the most hated coach in college basketball
- A Broken Sport – Will Wade Is The Biggest Villain In College Hoops After He Got RJ Luis
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