Gerry McNamara needs to be the next coach

[MSOrange]

Basically your argument comes down to one game then - this year’s MAAC championship. Basing a decision on one game is not a great strategy.

The Cowboys beat the Steelers in Super Bowl XXX, and cornerback Larry Brown was the MVP. Based on that one game, the Raiders signed Brown to a huge free agent contract. That press conference sounded a lot like what I would anticipate McNamara’s would sound like - he’s a winner, he comes through in big games, yadda yadda yadda. The problem is that one game for Brown was a career outlier - he was a decent but not great CB who had a great game. What we don’t know right now is if that championship was an outlier for McNamara and he’s a decent but not great coach, or if it’s the first of many in a great career.

He might be a great coach. I want more than one data point to decide that on, because it’s a big, big risk to use one data point. The guys pushing for McNamara are too emotionally invested and are putting way too much stock in one data point. The “throw out the Kenpom and Net, just look at the championship” position is really “let’s throw out all the other data and focus solely on the one data point I like!”

I knew we should have canned JB and hired the Richmond coach in 1991

 

[SuFTW]

Siena certainly have nice facilities, but not as much visibility as a team that plays in the NYC vicinity.

You also become a more practical recruiting choice for a City kid than it is to get them to come up to Albany to play. Their families can still see them in person at Iona, and will have a handful of games on TV.

There is way more upside to the quality of players you can get to a 2nd or 3rd tier school in New York City than you can to a small city in a rural northern state. Just look at home many good programs there are in Philadelphia. Same idea.

But I agree that he is set up to have a great year next year. Then he will be able to have more and better choices available to him a year from now.

It’s still a lateral move and prior coaches have done well at Siena and moved on to bigger jobs. If you do well at Siena, the visibility to higher level jobs is the same. Plus some kids are looking to get out of the City.