Which B1G Basketball Team Got the Bigger Coaching Upgrade
Barring NBA hirings and potential changes related to dominos falling, there were only two head coaching changes in men's basketball within the league this year, Archie Miller to IU and Brad Underwood to Illinois.
While I think Miller's a fine coach and a spectacular sweater, and I'm sure he'll be fine at IU, i just don't see him as a huge upgrade on Tom Crean, who after all, had gotten to a Final Four before and, despite being let go, has already been mentioned as a potential candidate for good jobs like Georgetown.
Underwood, on the other hand, is replacing a guy who was pretty obviously in over his head, and, with our own recent experience, runs a pretty terrifying offensive system that will be different than what anyone else in the conference runs.
I just think Illinois did more to raise their ceiling with their hire here than IU did, though I also think IU still has a higher floor.
Also: On Crean’s potential candidacy at Georgetown, I’d highly recommend Deadspin’s piece on what’s going on at Georgetown, and the way the 50-year-old Big John-Morgan Wootten feud plays a part.
Thought this might be about football. Kind of moved on mentally from B1G basketball, tbh
By not firing John Beilein.
The Beilein boo birds will be back out like clockwork.
Next season? One of them is bitching right now about how Beilein didn't do enough to recruit Mo Bamba when he was in diapers.
Archie was great at Dayton; imagine what he can potentially do with IU...gonna be fun to watch
There were only two coaching changes. Get with it!
Really?!?!
i wouldn't think you'd go back to the Ivy League after JT3 came from there, but, in fairness, he has done a good job upgrading the recruiting at Harvard, and that seems to have been a major issue at Georgetown.
I don't know if he's a leading candidate, but he has been mentioned quite a bit. FWIW, Georgetown fans seem almost universally opposed to the idea. However, they're also a delusional bunch who seem to think Georgetown is in the same category as Duke, UNC, Kansas, and Kentucky.
March 30th, 2017 at 10:15 PM ^
and there are plenty of our fans who think we are or should be in the top tier, as well.
How the hell does Patrick Ewing not get a shot at the Georgetown job? The dude more than paid his dues. He deserves a head coaching job somewhere whether it's the NBA or college.
GTown would be perfect for him.
March 30th, 2017 at 10:19 PM ^
IMO. Never been a HC at any level and never been a coach in college. He's being mentioned and I'm sure he'll get a shot, but he's risky as an unproven coach.
I'll take Archie Miller as the better hire. Underwood was at Ok St for one year. They looked pretty good, but I didn't seen a well coached team (only watched our game), i just saw a fast team with a couple of key players. I'm not sure what his coaching style is or if he can recruit and/or build a team. Further, he's jumping around a lot. Will he make Illinois good in 2 years and jump somewhere else? Archie Miller was at Dayton for 6 or 7 years and built them into a very solid team with back to back conference championships. I don't know a ton about either guy from an x and o perspective or recruiting, but I like Archie better by a wide margin.
is that it came down to money. The OK St. AD offered him around a million dollars and told him take it or leave it. Illinois swooped in and tripled his salary, If I were Underwood I would've left too.
He was making $1 million already. Illinois came in and offered $3M a year. Oklahoma State then countered with something like $2M a year. They didn't want to match Illinois's offer, as they are still paying off their previous coach, Travis Ford. Underwood left.
that IU went for an up and comer, vs a big name. I think IU could go after a Scott Drew or Andrew Miller ... not to mention Alford. While my IU fans are excited ... I think there may have been higher level options for the Hoosiers.
Go Blue!
I wish they had hired Scott Drew. He makes Tommy Amaker look like a master of in-game coaching adjustment.
Don't think that Alford was going to come and Scott Drew is basically a Tom Crean clone -- great recruiter, suspect in-game coach.
Not sure Andrew Miller is qualified to coach basketball, but I definitely won't question his pitching abilities.
From what I understand about college coaching, Archie was one of the most sought after coaches on the market. He was the current version of Shaka Smart a few years ago.
then Illinois wins in a landslide, because Crean > Groce.
With Groce, Illinois went with the hot MAC guy and it didn't pan out.
This time, they grabbed another hot name with one relatively successful year at Okie State, and 3 good years at a lower-level school (Southland conference isn't mid-major IMO). He's hardly a proven commodity.
OSU sucked the year before he came, but they made the NCAA's the three previous years - last year didn't represent a magical transformation.
Some folks questioned Beilein's bona fides when he was hired here (spent most of his career at lower levels, only big school experience was WVU, etc.). Underwood has exactly one year at a big school, and a few years at Stephen F. Austin. Prior to that, he was an assistant.
That said, he could be fantastic. OSU was fun to watch, and he did work under some pretty good coaches.
Miller is somewhat more a known quantity IMO. Dayton is firmly mid-major, and he's had a very successful 6 year run there. He also assisted under some good coaches (including his brother).
Indiana probably has a better foundation for success (historically great program, rabid fan base, etc.) but that comes with crazy expectations and little patience.
IMO Archie has proven he can coach, while Underwood is less certain. As I said at the top, if they're equals, then Illinois gains more due to lower baseline.
As for which guy will be more successful overall, it probably comes down to recruiting chops. If that's the case, there's really no way to tell; it will play out in time. Underwood probably has more time to prove himself, but Indiana probably has a higher ceiling.
While I think that Archie Miller is a good coach, he is replacing Tom Crean who has won the big ten outright 2 times in the last 5 years. Where Brad Underwood is replacing John Groce who hasn't even made the NCAA tournament the last 4 years, and hasn't even been close to competing for a Big Ten Championship in his 5 year tenure. Illinois should and will be better then they were in the Groce Era.
Apparently the guy we had in January was terrible. The guy we had in March was awesome.
/s
I'm sure he's a very good coach. He took Dayton farther in the tournament than anyone had in a long time. But winning at Dayton is something others did before him. Miller's two predecessors, Oliver Purnell and Brian Gregory, both did well enough to be hired away by ACC schools (Purnell to Clemson and Gregory to Georgia Tech).
As for Crean, I don't like him, but the guy won two Big Ten regular season titles and made it to three Sweet Sixteens at IU. And he was named Big Ten coach of the year last year. It's not clear to me that Miller is an upgrade.
I think people give him a bump for his brother's success. I'm not saying it's right to attach Sean's success with Archie, but it is what some people think. Time will tell of course.
Connect. Miller is actually getting a ton of heat at Zona.
...he has been unable to take Arizona to the Final Four in 8 seasons despite having 4 stacked teams.
Granted, Miller had the misfortune of running into Wisconsin in 2014 and 2015. Both games resulted in Elite 8 losses.
But this year's Final Four was set-up for Arizona to not only reach the Final Four but also dominate. The Arizona Wildcats playing in Phoenix would have been tantamout to playing home games.
What Crean did. He had some incredible players on that floor and wasn't able to get past the S16 any season (Watford, Victor O, Zeller, Yogi, Vonleh, Williams, Blackmon, Johnson, etc... The list goes on and on).
That may be an accomplishment for some schools, but Indiana should be getting much more out of their talent.
...he was underacheiving with talent that he brought to the school. IU has its own pull, but as we saw with Coach Rodriguez at Michigan, you've got to have a coach who recruits want to play for even when you're a program with great tradition.
166-135 (which includes all those gimme non-con games), 71-91 in conference. He was a failure at Indiana.
He went 6–25 , 10-21, and 12-20 in his first three years, which can’t all be put on him, given the hole he was climbing out of. The program was, in fact, ruined when he got there, though Jeff Meyer probably didn't have a ton to do with that.
Went 21-14 in his 2nd year after pulling an even more catastrophic program out of the dust, can we just say he does not deserve the credit?
IU actually was on probation at the time. A lot can be said about Amaker’s faults, but he had at least restored the program to a NIT/bubble team level. IU was a wasteland after Sampson left.
Lost the allure of the program. They are a poor man's Michigan football. There's such a rich history with them that it shouldn't take an eternity to bring them back up.
And he did, but then they completely tailed off and look to be getting worse after he peaked.
If you don't want to say he failed, that's fine. But he sure as hell didn't succeed.
But it’s also true that Bob Knight’s last Final Four came in 1992, and his last Sweet Sixteen was two years later. IU hadn’t been peak IU for a long time before Knight left.
But it's no secret that he mailed it in w/r/t recruiting. After Knight's recent bitter comments about IU's administratiors, Dan Dakich talked about how Knight refused to seriously engage in recruiting during the late 90s which cost IU blue chip players like Raef LaFrentz and Jackie Vaughn.
Indiana didn't make the final 4 in 1993. I think elite 8 and they had bad luck with injuries that season
March 31st, 2017 at 12:04 PM ^
That was the year they were an absolute machine until Alan Henderson went down with an injury. They went 17-1 in Big Ten play (beating us twice by 1 point).
has done a good job but UM was pretty well removed from the NCAA sanctions and punishments by the time JB took over, no?
Was Crean's 27 for 27 game. I feel like it was the moment where portions of the fan base who might have been supportive turned and things largely went downhill. It exposed something lacking in his coaching, especially given the lopsided nature of the game. Last year they had a nice run, but I'm not sure he could have survived anything short of an Elite Eight run this year even if everyone had been healthy.
is a very fickle thing. How many coach of the year guys are out of a job within 24 months.
and interpretations by the commentariat.
if you think of it in terms of magnitude of the upgrade relative to previous state, I can see that Illinois probably did better. But in terms of absolute expected performance/outcome, it could be that Indiana is in better shape. To put it into a crude hypothetical numerical scale, it'd be like Illinois starting at a 20/100 and IU starting at 50/100. Illinois may have improved 50 points to 70/100 while IU improves 30 points to 80/100. UI gets a bigger upgrade, but IU still ends up being a "better" team.
It seems the concensus, at least, that IU has the higher floor and higher ceiling, although UI has much more room to improve.
Underwood had huge success with Stephen F Austin as a defensive minded team. He goes to OkSt and they start the Big 12 0-6 trying to run his defense before he realizes it isn't working and switches gears, then they win 10 of 11 with the best offense in the country. That to me sounds like a fantastic coach who can win with elite defense or elite offense and be flexible enough adapt to his roster.
Interesting. Who doesn't enjoy a near 40 year old racially charged fued between high school basketball coaches?
Some people just can't get over themselves.
It's really hard for me to imagine any major program, in a big-time league, in either revenue sport, hiring a coach directly from high school. Yet it was apparently something that both Georgetown did and Maryland had very real thoughts about doing.
I guess that's how Gerry Faust really changed things, in terms of making such an idea ridiculous.
Why is Shaka Smart considered an obvious candidate for the Georgetown job? He's done poorly at Texas thus far. Is it just that he used to coach nearby at VCU?
Ewing would be an interesting choice. No HC experience but a ton of NBA assistant jobs, and a name that would get him in the door in recruiting. Could he outfit his team in Ewing shoes?
....and well connected in the DC area. And that is, if true, a result of his time at VCU.