So, everyone has an opinion
one way or the other. It was strange
that as I was driving home I couldn’t fine one XM – Sirius station talking
about this hire!
After that mind-blowing
search, I flipped it over to the local stations. 1050 AM (which I can barely
get in my area) was praising the hire as one of the best college coaching
“gets” in 25 years. In fact they looked
at and compared Juwan to the last 25 NCAA Hoops hires and in just about every
head to head comp I heard, they would have taken Juwan. That included
Chris Beard at TTU based on the fact that before this season, would you have
hired Chris Beard not knowing what he was capable of?
THEN, I tuned into 97.1 and the local
village idiot named Mike Valenti that wears the Green “S” on his chest that was
pooh-poohing this hire last night. HE claimed that Michigan NEVER EVER would
have done this with their football program - handing the reins to
a “complete unknown” as far as his capabilities at the collegiate level. “All
Sizzle and No Steak” were his EXACT words. I
turned the radio off at that point. It’s
kind of like politics. You’ll never
change a conservative or liberals mind no matter how hard you try. One is logical, the other is emotional. It’s a rare person that can see the middle
and the things that are “correct” for society.
That’s Michigan and Sparty in a nutshell. Sparty’ll ALWAYS HAVE THE CHIP and Michigan
will always be the Big Brother, superior in all ways.
An Open Text to Michigan's Newest BB Coach:
Dear Juwan: Please make sweeping the LNU a number 1
priority for next season. I don’t know
how you’ll do it, I don’t really care what it takes. Use dynamite if necessary but completely
DESTROY those clowns when the time comes.
Some other takes:
I don’t think you ever use the “JH” moniker for Harbaugh, so you’re
probably ok. But this is going to suck
for the “JH” crowd. Shared initials!
Huh. Yeah, I never really thought about it until
just now. I used JB a lot as I used to get
tired of typing out Beilein’s name as it wasn’t a natural word or combination
of letters. But Harbaugh, Harbs, Jimmy,
are what I use and I imagine I’ll use Howard in the future quite a bit.
Is the Howard hold-up because he wants an out clause if the NBA offers him
a head coaching position without any pay-off clause?
This didn’t seem like any kind
of issue to me. Juwan Howard was the 5th
pick when he was drafted and was the FIRST PLAYER EVER to sign a contract for
over $100M dollars.
I don’t believe Howard needs
the money and I doubt the amount he was making was a driving factor. HE was looking for the opportunity. IF anything, my guess he was actually trying
to figure out how he could get his assistants more money as he knows
how the game works. By taking $2M
annually for 5 Seasons, that opens up a lot of room for salary for the
assistants.
Would you sign someone as your head coach if he said that he might
leave next year for another position?
Uh…Isn’t that a risk when you sign
ANY COACH, regardless of the buyout?
People bail all the time.
Especially in hoops. I mean, we
just watched it happened! And we just
watched UCLA go through all that with several coaches that had hefty exit fees and
we also saw that some of those are negotiated down and some actually keep the
coach at their current school.
But here’s my take: Do
I WANT to keep a coach that looks at another offer and thinks he’s getting a
better deal at a better institution or in the Association that what he’s
got with me? In the case or Juwan, $2M
is peanuts. IF he has any early success,
you can bet that contract is renegotiated to get him to stay. I know
it’s a pain in the ass to go through in less than 5 years, but that’s the world
today friends. There are very few
lifers.
Why didn’t one of the teams in the NBA hire Juwan?
I’ve been kind of scratching
my head on that one also. And I believe
it’s a combination of things. Juwan
was coaching under one of the best NBA coaches out there. He also coached under Pat Riley. So while he probably learned a LOT, what
could you say about his potential success as a head coach in the NBA (or
college?). Now, in Michigan’s
case, he’s an alumni, former player, will probably be able to recruit and he
may be successful. Michigan was willing to take the
gamble for $2M a year. The NBA guys
probably looked at it and said, “Not yet.” I think the better question (that I can’t answer
either) is if Juwan got an offer from any of those teams, did he turn them
down?
Just read your post of
yesterday….EXCELLENT WORK!!! I wholly concur.
Well, Thanks! I do appreciate that, even though
there’s not much there that I believe anyone looking at the tea-leaves
correctly couldn’t have concluded otherwise.
Now, if you want to put a bias on it, by all means, there’s
about a THOUSAND different positions you could take on this one…But I do think
it was Michigan’s best option, though it clearly wasn’t Warde’s first
option (Cooley) which again, I’ll never understand other than Warde knows the
guy…
This hire is a mistake. Michigan
just took the “one and done” mantra to the next level…
I really don’t know how you
can classify it as a mistake yet. If
there’s anything we all should have learned by now is you don’t know who’s a
good or bad hire until you know. And
then you’re either extremely happy or figure that you’ve just wasted the last 4
years or whatever with a bad decision.
Don’t get hung up on what is a mistake right now. Let things play out. I’m sure there were many people that thought Bo
Schembechler was a mistake in 1969. That
one worked out ok. The MMQ initially thought
Lloyd Carr was a HUGE mistake. But
again, I worked with Moeller and knew him the best. What does anyone really know?
Hang in there MMQ, Juwan is not done yet, and Rick Pit is
still in the wings. Boy that would sting, eh???
We shall never speak or mention
the words “Michigan” and “Pitino” in the same sentence ever again. Those who do will be banished from the Blog!
No comments:
Post a Comment