OT: Amaker's Harvard team in playoff
While Tommy Amaker couldn't get it done here, he was always a classy guy. I remember him calling his recruits, including Manny Harris, urging them to honor their Michigan commitments after he was fired. Anyway, he is in a one game playoff with Yale today at 4 pm to get into the NCAA tournament, and I'll be cheering him on.
Just avoid any (unlikely I hope) coaching debates -- this isn't meant to be anything otherr than a positive comment on a former coach. I think that John Beilein may be the best coach we've ever had, and hope that he finishes his career here some time far off into the future.
We've had Tommy Amaker vs. John Beilein arguments?
At least no one has since Beilein's 2nd year.
I'm rooting for Yale, soley because they haven't been to the Tourney since 1962. For me, streaks like that are a trump card
You must be a huge Northwestern fan.
March 14th, 2015 at 10:57 PM ^
March 15th, 2015 at 12:21 PM ^
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Never had good schemes and didn't develop players. I would have loved to see Daniel Horton or Blanchard play for Beilein.
Tommy Amaker might be the first D1 coach who kept his job because of his wife's importance to the university as a dean.
neither humorless or quiet = nice. A robotic coach and personality who had no idea how to adjust to his talent or how to make in-game adjustments. I still have nightmares of Courtney Sims and Graham Brown holding the ball 30 feet from the basket waiting for something to occur--presumably the opposing team falling down en masse.
And Amaker has had more than one questionable recruiting issue since he went to Harvard.
Bonus edit: spankings by MSU
He's won an NCAA tournament game in each of the last two years. At a school that hadn't made the tournament since the 1940's before his arrival.
Blanchard and Horton were both 1st team All-Conference players at UM.
Amaker's time here was disappointing because the team didn't get over the hump, but it isn't like we sucked at basketball. He had a shitty first season and a shitty third one when Horton was out. Other than that we were a .500 team in the Big Ten. In those days that just wasn't good enough to make the tourney (unlike in Beilein's first two tourney appearances). The guy had 2 losing seasons out of 6 in the Big Ten. Tom Crean has 4 in 8 seasons at IU.
The only real mistake he made here was in thinking Horton was a point guard and never bringing in anybody else to run the offense. Most of the bitching about his "system" came down to not really having a playmaker like Morris or Burke to set things in motion.
Making the NCAA tournament was definitely good enough. Had he made it in his second to last or final year, he would have retained his job for sure. And people were fairly content with the NIT title as as it was supposed to be a turning point. The Big Ten was also not quite as good then as it was the past two seasons. Four of Tommy's six seasons, the conference had two or less ranked teams. The other two seasons, they had three.
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That team deserved to get in. Finished 5th in the Big Ten, then beat #4 Iowa in the conference tourney before losing to Illinois. The conference only got three teams into the tournament. Conference USA got 6 bids. We won the NIT.
If that momentum of making the tournament is able to build, then maybe things go a little differently and we get one or two extra players. Similarly, if the 2009 team (the league only had two ranked teams again, just like in 2004) that finished tied for 7th doesn't get in, what do things look like in the middle of year 4 for Beilein when we start the conference season 1-6?
When I say coach at a high level, I mean competing against top flight coaches night in and night out, which he struggled to do. He had a losing record in both the Big East and Big Ten for a reason.
There's little pressure and weaker competition and his wife can hold a high-powered job at Harvard Med and Mclean Hospital.
Amaker had 3 highly-recruited, notoriously under-achieving teams at Seton Hall. He was hired at Michigan for one reason--his connection with Coach K.
I don't think any of the parallels are really that close. There are 3 of them on this arbitrary timeline. RR wasn't anywhere near as bad of a coach as Ellerbe, and the comparison of scandals is a freepian stretch.
A few good players, but a whole lot of guys with character and academic issues.
Ellerbe was kind of a goober who couldn't run a program and (not coincidentally) hasn't coached anywhere in college since he left Michigan. RR just put together a pretty impressive 10-win season at Arizona and has been a winner everywhere except Michigan, and was trending upward when he was let go. As others have noted, RR is more like Amaker, but only in the sense that they had experienced some success before and after they arrived at UM. Amaker's Seton Hall teams weren't THAT good (they had one Sweet 16 run but they were bounced in the first round of the NIT in his other 3 seasons), and while he's been good at Harvard the Ivy League is such a unique basketball conference that it's hard to tell if he could translate that success elsewhere. But credit should be given to him for that.
RR didn't "fit in" because the culture around UM after Carr was toxic to an outsider, especially one who struggled as he did with a depleted roster and mismatched talent. Aamker was given 6 years at UM and finished above .500 in the league once. He was a good coach, and maybe he learned at UM and took those skills to Harvard, but he was given ample opportunities to prove himself at UM and he did, well, fine.
And Hoke was a much better recruiter than Amaker, though obviously not a particularly astute coach on this stage.
I do agree Beilein and Harbaugh seem like the positive outcomes for both progressions, though I will go to my grave that RR could have worked at UM had no many axes pointed at his back as soon as he got to A2.
While I agree that Hoke's recruiting was better than Amaker's both were good recruiters given the hands they were dealt (I would argue that even in down periods Michigan football is a bigger name) and both were good program representatives. Obviously they were dissapointments in their overall win-loss records though again both tended to do better than their overall records would suggest against rivals (Tommy split with Izzo his last 3 years and Hoke had Michigan's only wins against OSU and MSU in the last 7 years).
March 14th, 2015 at 10:11 PM ^
I think it could also apply to the overall quality of their assistants.
Seems like both teams choked. Harvard lost 2 of their final 4, one of which was to lowly Cornell. Yale only had to beat middling Dartmouth and they lost on a near buzzer beater.
Here's the WatchESPN link. I might check it out after the Maryland-MSU game, but really don't care to follow Amaker's post-UM career very closely.
Open secret in Cambridge is that Harvard, with pressure from powerful alums including Steve Ballmer to field a competitive hoop team, has been recruiting ball players with non-Ivy credentials, giving the team the lowest academic stats in the Ivy League. Notice the roster is full of sociology aims. Tommy is sleaze.
March 14th, 2015 at 11:28 PM ^
Touche. Semantics. I'm unfamiliar with "Ivy League Academic Index." Please advise. From what I gather, most of his roster aren't nearly an academic fit for Harvard coursework. It's not as if the Ivy League offer any remedial coursework to hide kids in, so it's a complete sham if you let in hoopers in without the capacity. Which is what students and faculty are Harvard are claiming. Dartmouth and Brown have similar student-athlete scandals brewing.
Ivy League schools are supposed to be above stooping too low. Standards are obviously lower, but the dialogue in the Ivy League is that Harvard's team is the weakest academically in the League. This is allegedly because billionaire alums including Steve Ballmer want to see a competitive team [by any means necessary]. That is why they keep making the tourney. 99% of the people in Cambridge could not care less about their basketball team.
March 15th, 2015 at 12:40 PM ^
I think it's well-known that Ivy league schools have had different standards for athletes since long before Tommy Amaker arrived in Cambridge. Former Harvard president Derek Bok acknowledged that fact a book about higher education. I know people who wouldn't have gone to Princeton or Stanford without being able to play an intercollegiate.
The question is then not would all the basketballs have gotten if they weren't basketball players -- sure, in many cases the answer is probably no, as it is probably no for many football, hockey, tennis players etc. To me, the question is can they handle the academics? I would suspect that the infrastructure of tutoring etc. is less there than schools with national sports profiles.
March 15th, 2015 at 12:31 PM ^
March 15th, 2015 at 12:45 PM ^