Coaches pay the price for lack of patience by schools

Sporting News, The, April 5, 1999 by Mike DeCourcy

There will never be another Jim O'Brien. No one has time for that. No one has the patience. No one, perhaps, can afford the luxury of allowing a coach to find his voice, so to speak as he loses a few games.

A coach either makes it happen now, or he makes his living outside the game.

O'Brien and Ohio State spent last weekend in the company of Mike Krzyzewski, Tom Izzo and Jim Calhoun, the lot of them envied by all of the other coaches attending the National Association of Basketball Coaches convention that coincided with the more exclusive party known as the Final Four. A lot of those coaches, too many, were looking for work.

Promising Joe Dooley was fired from East Carolina after four years and 57 wins. It seems he was hired during the transition between athletic directors Dave Hart and Mike Hamrick, and Hamrick wanted his own guy. It's taking him awhile to find one--Fran Fraschilla turned down the job and opted for the New Mexico opening instead.

Bobby Hussey at Virginia Tech and Ron Jirsa at Georgia got two years each to prove their worth after being promoted from assistant to head coach. Tech fans weren't buying enough tickets and Georgia wasn't winning enough games.

Marquette decided Mike Deane did not recruit at a high-enough level and was too content with mediocrity--meaning, the NIT --and apparently was less passionate than Deane about signing only athletes with a legitimate chance of graduating. He averaged 20 wins.

There can be no better evidence than O'Brien that coaches should not be treated like yesterday's newspapers--casually discarded, with only a few recycled. This was the last Final Four of the 1990s, but as the first was played, it seemed O'Brien might not even be a coach by the time the decade ended, let alone one who would guide his team to the Final Four.

He was at Boston College then, and he gave the school almost no tangible evidence of his ability in his first five seasons. He produced one winning season in that period. He owned a 127-140 record after a combined nine years with the Eagles and St. Bonaventure.

Boston College resisted firing him in part because of the recruitment of McDonald's All-American Bill Curley, but also because of the family tragedy that occurred in 1991 when O'Brien's wife, Christine, died from heart failure after a battle with cancer. A few days later, he coached the Eagles in the Big East Tournament first round against Villanova and saw them blow a comfortable lead in the last three minutes and lose. It was painful to watch. If Boston College's early '90s administration had been too quick to judge O'Brien a failure, the Final Four would have been short one coach this year.

Coaches learn, like people in any other business, and they grow even smarter as they place themselves in the company of better players. O'Brien was nearly a genius after four years with Curley, Howard Eisley, Malcolm Huckaby and Gerrod Abram. They were 11-19 in 1990-91, their first season together as Eagles. They reached the NCAA Elite Eight in 1994, just a few points and one win short of the achievement O'Brien finally attained last weekend.

O'Brien still is only 22 games over .500 for his career, but four of his past six teams have reached the NCAA Tournament and his record in those games is 9-4. He has become one of the nation's best coaches. He has company from Deane in that distinction, the difference being that O'Brien has a job. But the progression toward competence or excellence might never occur for Hussey, Jirsa and Dooley, and dozens of others like them who were dismissed in the past several years.

This is not to say coaches who are fired never deserve it, or that change is not the best course for a program. O'Brien would not be at Ohio State if not for the dismissal of Randy Ayers in 1997, but Ayers was given eight years and endured four consecutive losing seasons.

There isn't much doubt Jirsa was terribly underqualified as the Bulldogs' head coach. His teams were neither inspired nor efficient. Yet the decision to promote him before he was prepared had no consequences for A.D. Vince Dooley, who was guilty of a major judgment error. But it leaves Jirsa in the position of having to rebuild his career completely. Or find another one.

RELATED ARTICLE: 10 for the millennium

As college basketball heads into its third century, the identity of the teams in charge seems unlikely to change a great deal. It may take the Y2K bug to stop these guys from becoming the elite of the 1999-2000 season:

Arizona. The Wildcats will be even younger next season, with Jason Terry and A.J. Bramlett gone, but Eugene Edgerson may be just the sort of leader this group needs if Lute Olson will give him enough playing responsibility for his teammates to take him seriously.

Cincinnati. The only severe loss is shooting guard Melvin Levett, and the Bearcats replace him with McDonald's Ali-American Kenny Satterfield, a far more complete offensive player. Redshirt Donald Little and 6-11 freshman B.J. Grove add to an already-deep frontcourt.