This afternoon it was announced that Kentucky's head basketball coach, Billy Gillispie, was fired. He was only there for two years. Both years, the basketball team failed to make the SEC Tournament semifinals, and this year was the first year the team failed to make the NCAA tournament in 18 years, instead having to settle for the NIT.
Kentucky has a huge tradition when it comes to basketball, having won 43 regular season SEC titles, for most in the conference. Second? LSU with only 10 in comparison. With such a long tradition of excellence comes a very high pressure coaching job with other-worldly expectations of winning everything, or at least coming very close to it, every year. Other basketball coaching jobs with similar expectations are at Duke, UNC, Indiana, and UCLA, other schools with long traditions of basketball excellence. For football schools like Michigan, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, and Oklahoma. Professional sports have those kinds of jobs too, like in the NFL with the Dallas Cowboys, or the MLB with the New York Yankees.
Would you ever want a job like that? I wouldn't. I'd rather be at a lower-profile school that has less frequent, but still plenty of success. A school like LSU for basketball, or Virginia Tech for football (although, schools like these do have their own fair share of harsh and critical fans that can be very vocal, especially in the first couple of years after a coaching change, or when things hit a downward slump for a number of years in a row).
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2 comments:
Two years to build a program is too short a time. The program was not that strong at the end of the Tubby Smith era. They had not had the same recruiting success as they had in the past. Recruiting machine Patino is just down the road pulling in the best from that area of the country.
With its tradition the expectations placed upon the basketball coach at Kentucky are very high. He has to be able to walk upon water. Gillispie and Ky was a poor match....he was expected to walk on water and produce miracles. He did not turn water into wine so he is out. He will soon be the coach at a quality school, and will take their program to the next level.
Well, gee whiz, Dave. Is Gillispie supposed to walk on water or turn it into wine? Surely, you can't mean that he should do both! ;-)
Iowa is more like LSU - middle of the pack - but the football and men's basketball coaches there face some pretty serious pressures too. You couldn't pay me enough to take a job like that.
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