I've been at the same level for 40 years and I agree with you as long as the decision doesn't negatively affect the corporations access to capital and other essential resources. The decision to remain in house vs an outside hire wasn't some far fetched stretch. In fact hiring outside of the 50 years of success circle would have been much more of a stretch without any true upside in relationship to the absolute downside that was guaranteed to have happened.
All one has to do is to review every D1 hiring decision in both football and basketball over the last few years to prove that there is no foolproof way to go about it.
Inside hires and outside hires both have success and failure. Even hiring coaches with incredible previous success, especially when you are following a HOF coach has failures. Just ask Alabama.
So your premise is flawed. Simply put there is nothing that says that an outside hire would be doing well.
JW was boxed by a combination of factors that made his decision to hire Red an extremely good business decision. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it is going to work out. He still made the right decision at the time given all of the factors involved.
I wanted to step away after Saturday's game / the frustrating posts afterwards, but I need to respond to this post. And not because you and I disagreed about the approach that should have been undertaken in 2023, but because I fundamentally disagree with what you assert above.
My premise isn't flawed -- at all. "There's no guarantee" -- so what? Nothing is life is certain. That doesn't mean that any potential risk should be shunned.
Someone posted a summary analysis on here toward the end of JB's tenure. I'm going to generalize, but the gist of it was that when it comes to replacing high profile / iconic coaches, about 70% of the replacement hires who followed them ended up being failures. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 out of 10 of them flopped.
Want to know the best way to be in the 30% that
DON'T fail? Do legitimate due diligence. Try to hire the best candidate, using actual performance-based / merit-driven criteria. Don't constrain the candidate pool to a limited number of unproven candidates in-house, that have no coaching experience, and who'd garnered no interest collectively from other schools / programs. Because when you force yourself into choosing between a small number of
LOUSY candidates -- and lets face it, that's what Red / GMac were at the time, for a program of our statue [and I'll lump a Hop in here, as well, who was about to be fired by UW] -- then you are virtually guaranteeing that you will be in the 70% that fails.
And given the precarious position our program was in, coming off of a losing season, barely .500 the following year, with recruiting in the crapper and having missed the NCAA tournament [then, in 2023] something like 3 out of 5 seasons, we couldn't afford to take further steps backwards.
That's why hiring Red was NOT "...an extremely good business decision," as you assert. It was a cop out, that was actually a far riskier move than hiring a proven coach. You always talk about what has to be done to avoid negative outcomes. We couldn't replace JB even though his performance had slipped to unacceptable levels over an extended period of time, because it was disrespectful to his legacy. Then it was we couldn't look outside, because boosters are too loyal to JB. Now we can't fire Red, because we'll alienate Carmelo. When does it end? Does anybody really believe that the AD is handcuffed to such a great extent like this?
John Wildhack is the AD. He gets paid an exorbitant amount of money to run a complicated organization. I don't dispute in any way, shape, or form that there would have been a segment of boosters, former players, and fans who would have been upset if we hired from outside.
But guess what? When a program is successful, people continue to root for the program, and the bad feelings quickly go away.
Managing to accommodate dysfunction -- which is how JW handled JB his last several years -- is not a "good business decision."
Trying to make everybody happy and avoid any "pain" of any kind isn't a viable strategy -- because you can NEVER please everybody. Sometimes you have to take a small step backwards to position things better long term. Bringing in a new coach who wasn't completely unqualified would have accomplished that.
Instead, we have a guy who is a lousy in-game coach, who's an overrated recruiter, who has the wheels falling off in less than a season and a half. We hear reports about the program's finances being in shambles, and that boosters are unhappy.
We know that fans are also now disgruntled, and that revenue will go down in direct proportion to immensely sagging attendance.
And we have disgruntled, prominent players like Derrick Coleman taking to social media to express his dissatisfaction.
We're one of the worst teams in P4, and have lost to several of the lowest projected teams in what shapes up as a lousy year for the ACC.
So what exactly did we "avoid" by choosing the path of least resistance? All of the things you brought up have come to pass, despite hiring from within -- disengaged fanbase, sagging attendance, apathy, financial difficulties, disgruntled boosters / players. And now we're actually worse off than we were in 2023 when JB was forced into stepping down, which was a point that many thought was the program's nadir. Oops.
So don't try to imply that John Wildhack didn't have a choice, or was "forced" into a "good business decision" that has completely blown up in everyone's faces. ADJW made the hard choice, to force Boeheim to step down. THAT was the key. But then he blew it by actually NOT making a good business decision, and instead opting for the path of least resistance, in a failed attempt to avoid pain.
Problem is, that decision has led to more pain than what he was worried about avoiding.
I get that there were politics, and that JB was polarizing, and that he'd held the program / University hostage for a long time, and that the fanbase was split over how to proceed. But that's what an AD is for -- to be the adult in the room when the elderly former HC was acting childish / petty, and to make the difficult decisions when they need to be made.
ADJW took the massively important first step, but didn't take the equally as important second step. Making a "continuity hire" when the program is performing at it's worst level in five decades made zero sense. It certainly wasn't a "good business decision."
