Goodbye Tubby, Hello.....??/ Rich Pitino

[milkingman]

Nothing wrong with mediocrity? Isn"t this why we watch sports? To see who is the best. Whether it is High School or college we watch a game to see two teams try to compete against each other. The outcome is to see who is better. If we wanted mediocrity in college sports I don't think they would last that long. We watch to cheer and get excited for a big game. The bigger the game, the more interest.

I would hope we would want teams that strive for more than mediocrity.

[schmitty3]

No reason we can't be a contender in the B1G. Just look at the in state talent we MN has been kicking out of high school. We need to draw more of these players to come here, and once we do get good talent take advantage of it.

Being content finishing around 9th in the conference every year is beyond ridiculous. Especially with the type of talent they had this year.

[DTro]

well duh, of course no nobody strives for mediocrity, but if the U and their fans would just accept the fact that the are not in the same league as the same top teams that always nab the blue chip players and in the dance every year, then they wouldn't have to dump a coach and psss away more money every 3-5 years.

I don't have remind everyone what the definition of insanity is.

Tubby is a good coach, but more importantly a better person, and the U should have kept him around as long as he wanted to be here and celebrate the one or two years he would have taken them to a final four and accept the middle of the pack years that would have been (and has been) the norm.

Now they jump back into the perpetual cycle.

[milkingman]

Well duh. I'm not the one who said there is nothing wrong with mediocrity. 6 years and three tourney appearances with one win. I"m sure those two final fours were just around the corner

[schmitty3]

You can't be serious? Tubby was never gonna take them to the final 4. How long would you recommend they sit and wait for that to happen? He had a very talented team this year and they went nowhere.

[DTro]

I guess we'll never know that now will we.

How many National Championships do the past Gopher coaches have altogether?? and now how many for Tubby?

But yeah, bring a guy in for 6 years and he needs to get to a final four or he gets the boot.

Gopher BB and FB fans are delusional.

There is a reason we have such a great hockey program, and it has VERY LITTLE to do with coaching.

[milkingman]

Lets see, How many basketball teams are there and how many hockey teams are there? I guess that"s a fair comparision

[schmitty3]

But yeah, bring a guy in for 6 years and he needs to get to a final four or he gets the boot.

Nobody ever said he needed to bring them to the final four. More than 1 NCAA win in those 6 years would have been nice though. You were the one that said he would have brought them to 2 final four appearances.

[Slabasaurus]

I guess we'll never know that now will we.

How many National Championships do the past Gopher coaches have altogether?? and now how many for Tubby?

But yeah, bring a guy in for 6 years and he needs to get to a final four or he gets the boot.

Gopher BB and FB fans are delusional.

There is a reason we have such a great hockey program, and it has VERY LITTLE to do with coaching.

I think it was more his big 10 record that was the issue... It's why I am more or less indifferent about his firing.

I agree with you about 'realistic' expectations with gopher b-ball for the most part... but I would like to see them do better than 500 in big ten play.

[YiGGiN4SLoBS]

46-62 in the big ten is far from mediocre. But I guess thats what some people think is all the better we should ever be able to do. Sad

[DTro]

Check out the Big Ten record for the first 4-6 years on most of the conference teams coaches. Its not much better. BO Ryan was miserable the first few years.

Izzo and Matta are about the only ones who made a dramatic impact in the first 5 years, and look at the program handed to them.

The B10 historically beats each other up all year.

Listen to Tice, "enjoy the season" because this program will most likely NEVER consistently be on the same level as Mich St and Ohio St.

[toughguy]

Here is how the Gophers are viewed in this conference..... Ralph Wiggum . I'm a Gopher fan and I agree. It's sad. It's going to take some time but hopefully we can improve and someday in a few years maybe we can be Milhouse. Maybe in 50 years+ Fat Tony. You have to start somewhere.

[toughguy]

Here are the rest. Most of these are right on the mark only helping to confirm that ole Ralph is the one chanting Ski-U-Mah

[DTro]

You know what would even be better? Keeping an able bodied coach who has a proven track record and instead use the money to give 100 random worthy kids a full ride.

But nope, if that could possibly keep us from cheering ski u mah at the dance every now and then we can't have it.

[toughguy]

Tubby lost his fire. He simply didn't care anymore. He's old and had gotten lazy. His teams used to play smart basketball. I don't think anyone would argue against the fact that this team had talent. Stupid mistakes an laziness on the court are more the coaches fault than the players fault IMO. Can anyone name a player that came in as a freshman and left 4 years later a dramatically better player? Players seemed to flatline here. Ralph Sampson III is a perfect example of this. In fact he may have left a worse player than when he came in. The basketball program would have lost more than $2.5M if they would have let him continue to serve the term of his contract in decreased fundraising and ticket revenue. The public was tired of this coach.

I wad also tired of going through every offseason with speculation that Tubby might leave. He used the rumors to gain leverage on his own contract and this cost us on recruiting. He could have come out and put the rumors to bed but he never did. The local kids and parents heard these rumors and went elsewhere to a more certain situation.

[Scott M]

More proof that Minnesota is flyover country…have you listened to the national media’s reaction to Tubby’s firing? It’s evident they have not been watching this team. Cowherd, Mike and Mike, Vitale, Bilas, on and on…these guys are shills for each other. “Winning a game in the tourney isn’t good enough?”, “winning while running a clean program isn’t good enough?”, “there’s nothing for recruits in Minnesota? (wow, worst take ever from a past, present, or future recruits glance), more rhetoric…hello? Have they watched what has happened in 6 years? In the last 3? February has been brutal under Tubby. Big Ten play has been atrocious. Tubby would have had to go undefeated in conference play in 2014 to get 2 games above .500! As I stated earlier, I was happy when Tubby came to Minnesota, and I read what all the Kentucky people wrote: “He can’t run a halfcourt offense, if another team throws something different at him he can’t adjust at halftime, players tune him out by their senior year”…I gave him the benefit of the doubt, especially when I looked at his conference record in the SEC. .750! If Tubby was winning at a .750 clip in the B1G, he’d still be here! I love all the national pundits talking about the fall of college basketball, like it was purely about academics and love of the game before Tubby was fired. It was always about winning! Yes, Minnesota has had scandal problems, but 95% of coaches out there don’t have scandals on their resume. If half the field had scandals on their resume, then it would be about winning and doing so cleanly. The fact is, winning comes first because its assumed that a clean program comes hand in hand. Maybe that’s a poor assumption, but you can’t keep Johnny DoGooder as the coach while the losses pile up.

Tubby’s 62. I’d listen to him on the post game and he sounded 82. Mumbled clichés and not an ounce of passion in his voice. His quotes yesterday (admittedly a hard day for any man) suggest he’ll take stock of his options. But many talked about this being his retirement job. Funny, if that was the case why was he not squashing rumors of him running off to all sorts of jobs (USC, Alabama, etc.). It just seemed to me that he didn’t have the fire, or at least he couldn’t convey the fire to his players. I didn’t see the scrap, the emotion, the drove. I wouldn’t be surprised if he hangs it up. He’s a new grandfather with a 3.35 million dollar check to cash. Even without the money, I’ll be curious to see if he steps into another job. It was just hard to see so many listless performances from the team and from the coaches on the sidelines. Teams pick up the mentality of their coaches and if he can’t get the players to work hard and get after it, it’s on him as much as them.

I’ll give Eamonn Brennan credit. He’s the one guy that saw how it was at the national level:

Quote:

Two weeks ago, after his team's 51-49 loss to Illinois, Tubby Smith sat down at his news conference in the bowels of the United Center and tried to answer the same question -- differently phrased -- over and over: Why?

He sighed and rubbed his temples and looked at the stat sheet and tried to explain why the Gophers had finished their pre-NCAA tournament season with 11 losses in 16 games. Why his team could swarm No. 1 Indiana in its own building but couldn't focus against Nebraska or Purdue on the road. Why the Gophers still couldn't stop turning the ball over, why they couldn't give consistent effort on defense, and most of all, why -- despite having a sixth-year senior and former Big Ten rebounding champ in Trevor Mbakwe who had returned from an ACL injury to make one final March run -- the Gophers never found a clear leader.

"We just haven't had that take-charge, 'I got it under control, I'm in control here' type person," Smith said.

Which is when I probably figured it was time for Smith to move on. On Monday, as originally reported by CBS Sports' Jeff Goodman, Minnesota athletic director Norwood Teague agreed.

Smith's answer -- that the team lacked leadership -- was a common refrain for him this season. It has some merit: You can't be with players every second of every day. You need hard workers to instill that in their teammates, and you need players who embrace the big moment and make their teammates feel trusted and supported and one big happy family. I get all of that.

But you're the coach. You get paid seven figures; your players get a scholarship, a dorm room and some free food. You're standing 15 feet from these 18- to 22-year-olds during games, you get approximately 453 timeouts per every 40 minutes of basketball, you see them every day during the season, you can work out with them in the summers -- at what point do you have to admit that it's on you? That if a college basketball coach is there to do anything -- after all, he can't set down screens -- it's to recruit promising players and then cultivate leadership and maturity among them? And that if they don't have those qualities by their fourth year in your program (or, in Mbakwe's case, his sixth), that maybe that whole process isn't going so well?

Many will cite Smith's 46-62 record in the Big Ten, but even more darning is his record in February. To wit:

2013: 3-4

2012: 1-7

2011: 1-6

2010: 4-3

2009: 2-5

2008: 4-4

All told that's 15-29 in February, the month in which college basketball teams are supposed to be improving and even peaking in advance of the NCAA tournament. It is not the be-all and end-all, and Smith did suffer an inordinate number of bad breaks with injuries and defections, but it can't be explained away. It's why this weekend's win over similarly cooked No. 6 seed UCLA was the Gophers' first tournament win under Tubby. They just never got better down the stretch.

This season was particularly frustrating in that regard, because there were none of the horribly timed injuries or defections that plagued Smith in recent years. There may have been personnel issues -- Mbakwe never seemed to get along with his coach, and he didn't exactly start the season off with a leadership bang -- but at the very least the Gophers were whole. They were promising, athletic, deep, with as physical a front line and as imposing a guard tandem as anyone in the country. Despite some obvious flaws (turnovers, most importantly) they began the season 15-1 and amassed some of the more unimpeachable RPI numbers in the country.

But they never got better. If anything, they got worse. They finished eighth in the Big Ten in points per possession allowed. They turned the ball over at a higher rate than any team in the league. Given that Minnesota led the nation in offensive rebounding rate, turnovers were doubly bad, because it meant the Gophers weren't even giving themselves a shot to go up and get the ball. And this very obvious flaw was never corrected during the season. In the loss to Illinois, Minnesota turned the ball over 19 times ... in 55 possessions.

Smith is by no means a bad coach. He won a national title at Kentucky, and he has a list of impressive credentials on his résumé, including 18 20-win seasons in his 21 years as a head coach. Frustrated Minnesota fans clapping along during this post should at least brace themselves for the other side of the coin: Minnesota is not a particularly desirable job. There are no practice facilities to speak of. It is cold. The Barn is charming, but 17-year-olds typically prefer futuristic and flashy to charm. Recruiting against the rest of the Big Ten is hard enough already, but now that Iowa is locking down more and more in-state talent and Iowa State is becoming a resurgent power under Fred Hoiberg -- not to mention the huge money Nebraska is investing into its program right now -- well, let's just say Gophers fans ought to be realistic about what to expect. The ceiling is limited. It's a challenge.

But so what? That doesn't mean they, or Teague, should be satisfied. In the past few years Gophers teams have not only been mediocre but downright lifeless. For whatever reason, Smith never got it going, never imbued the program with any energy or spark. Systemic challenges or no, who wants to settle for that?

No, the point is to compete. College basketball teams compete for tangible things -- Big Ten titles and tournament bids and Final Four appearances and banners -- but they also compete in more intangible ways. They compete with effort and hustle and spirit and a sense of community around an alma mater and players that kids can look up to, and if everyone buys in you don't have to go to the Final Four every year for fans to be happy. They just want to watch their team play hard.

Tangibly and intangibly, Smith's Gophers too often didn't compete -- even in this, their most promising and injury-free season.

What better sign that it's time for a coach to move on than that?

It’s funny how Tom Izzo was just floored by Tubby moving on. Of course Izzo wanted him to stay, Izzo beat him 12 out of 14 times in the last 6 years! That kind of domination shouldn’t happen to someone with Smith’s pedigree, but for many around the country, they look no further than pedigree and don’t take the time to look at what’s happened here in 6 years!

I just love how people don’t have boo to say about Gophers basketball all year but the day Tubby is fired there are tons of comments in the papers and online. I get it, it’s the A topic. And I totally get that the University is wasting money with these buyouts and that as a public institution that receives tax dollars, that’s not acceptable. I’ve said the same thing. Joel Maturi put us back light years, especially with finances, and Teague is already going out on a similar limb. But he’s shown he’s not afraid to take the tough steps, and he won’t have someone else do his job by hiring a search firm and wasting more money. But where I don’t agree with some of the chatter is that mediocrity has to be acceptable, that Minnesota can’t do better than .400 in the conference. Good programs have one thing in common – good coaches. It’s not facilities or weather or social scene or whatever bum excuses gets trotted out – it’s good coaches that can motivate, coach up players, recruit the best of them, and go out there and get wins. And when you miss with a coach, you show him or her the door and try again until you get it right. That’s just the way it is. Sometimes it takes 3-4 failures, and sometimes you reload with good coaches. But accept mediocrity? My goodness. Yes, this program is stuck. Old fans, old facilities, money problems. But it should not be that way.

I’m thankful for Tubby’s time here and he was a classy guy. I split season tickets and I sat about 30 rows up from Donna Smith. She was at all the home games, the Smiths embraced this area, he did a great job in the community, but I can’t tell you how many times I walked outta Williams Arena shaking my head at another collapse, another lackluster effort. If he could have won at his Kentucky clip, if he could have kept Iverson, Joseph, Cobbs, if he better developed a Ralph Sampson or a Rodney Williams, if if if. It always comes down to winning. If it wasn’t about winning, then stop paying the job two million dollars and shut down the program.

[B. Amish]

what about this character from FGCU?

[CodyDawg]

One of the things I have seen many times lately is how great of a guy he was. I have to disagree with that somewhat. It has also been documented how he would not take accountability for his teams failures and in fact publicly criticized his players.....and IMO it was totally unjustified. His criticism of Blake Hoffarber was a great example. Blake was not a PG and when forced into that role, Tubby criticized him. Rodney tweeted this year, "we have been thrown under the bus boys" in regards to Tubby's comments. He said his team had no leadership....that is a real slam to all the kids and not a way to encourage a good atmosphere. The funny part of that though, he was right...they had no leadership from their head coach! A head coach who blames his players and shirks accountability is not a high character guy and has lost all his integrity as far as I am concerned.

[SkunkedAgain]

If we get the right coach, we could compete for the Big 10 title and do well in the tourney on a regular basis.

Not picking on you specifically Getanet, but this is the kind of hopeful statement that fuels fiscal irresponsibility. Gamblers cling to the same mantra, "If I only get the right card, then I'll be set for life." It's fantasy. Of course the right coach can make a difference, BUT WHEN HAVE WE EVER GOTTEN THE RIGHT COACH?!?!? How is THIS signing going to be any different, except UofM Athletics is now massively in debt. Sheesh!

[rundrave]

does anyone else think they already have a coach picked out and ready to go? I think it would to much to risk to get rid of Tubby if they didn't already have their guy? Especially with other coaching positions open.

They don't have a committee looking (thankfully no more wasted $ etc) but I would almost be surprised if we don't find out who the new coach is with in a couple days.

[PierBridge]

Nailed it Da_Chise!

I think we all wanted to believeve Tubby was a great coach when he came here after being FIRED by Kentucky shortly after WINNING a National Championship LOL. But sadly as we all witnessed he turned out to be a very poor coach top to bottom and the firing was a no-brainer!

And thats coming from somebody who back's coaches religiously like Childress, Frazier, Tice, Musslemen, and yes Denny Green.

And as far the money goes its chump change and a Tax write off so don't frett a whole lot on that moot point!

[DTro]

If money was a moot point tuition wouldn't go up every year.

Honor the contact, THEN move on.

[Scott K]

and dont extend it 3 years first, then fire him.

[SkunkedAgain]

I think we all wanted to believeve Tubby was a great coach when he came here after being FIRED by Kentucky shortly after WINNING a National Championship LOL. But sadly as we all witnessed he turned out to be a very poor coach top to bottom and the firing was a no-brainer!

[Getanet]

Not picking on you specifically Getanet, but this is the kind of hopeful statement that fuels fiscal irresponsibility. Gamblers cling to the same mantra, "If I only get the right card, then I'll be set for life." It's fantasy. Of course the right coach can make a difference, BUT WHEN HAVE WE EVER GOTTEN THE RIGHT COACH?!?!? How is THIS signing going to be any different, except UofM Athletics is now massively in debt. Sheesh!

I'm assuming we will see in the next day or two. I can't believe they would fire a coach of Tubby's stature without having an agreement in place with another coach. If it's Shaka Smart or Flip - I think we would see things turn around here very quickly. If it's a lesser known name, than I agree, letting Tubby linger for the remainder of his contract would be a wiser move.

Tubby instantly brought some excitement back to the program when he was hired. But under his watch many of our most talented players have transferred. Others spent 4 years here and never seemed to improve. Teams never reached their potential.

Any coaching change is a gamble, but Shaka or Flip could get fans, boosters and recruits excited about the Gophers again. And if that happens, that $2.5 million will be recouped quickly.

The big difference this time is Teague's ties to Shaka, and/or Flip being available. Again, if we go with a lesser name coach - a Jerry Kill for the basketball team if you will - than I agree it was a poor move.