Tulane to the Big East

[unclejohn]

Jeez, does every thread have to be brought back to this???

You have no idea what LW and the Marquette administration is doing behind the scenes.

Agreed. I think Steve Cottingham got treated poorly as well. And he did more than just hire Buzz. He hired the volleyball coach who has the team in its best shape ever. He added lacrosse.

And when he hired Buzz, and even thereafter, I was reading on some of these boards what a dummy he was. The immediate reaction to Buzz's hiring from many people was "What? You have to be kidding! We didn't hire the next John Wooden? Dean Smith didn't come out of retirement to take the job for free? We couldn't get Bill Self to dump that lousy job at Kansas?"

On one board, one poster tried to put his MBA degree to use and demonstrate conclusively that it was a bad hire. He did that by quantifying the factors that should be considered in hiring a coach. How did he do that? He asked his beer drinking buddies what they thought, added up their answers, and turned them all into numbers. So the ideal coach should be based on x% ability to recruit, x% game coaching, x% fitting into the institution, etc. Then he quoted from Cottingham's remarks at the press conference about what a great fit Buzz was for the university, and Buzz's remarks about how happy he was to be here, and said, "See. The only factor they considered was institutional fit! They don't even know if this guy can coach!" Of course, Cottingham and others involved knew a lot more than that, and he did not try and lay out a detailed description of his hiring process in his introductory remarks. And of course, the critic's numbers were all nonsense anyway. All they were was one guy throwing numbers around to try and prove that his opinion was more than just that - one guy's uninformed opinion.

After a year or two, when Buzz turned out to be pretty good and everybody liked him, there was still plenty of criticism. People weren't complaining about the result, mind you, just the PROCESS! Cottingham screwed up the whole process, but he got lucky. Turns out this guy is not so bad. But that doesn't mean we were wrong!

So it is here. Anybody who thinks our AD has been sitting around with his finger in his nose just idly watching the situation develop is a fool. There is plenty going on behind the scenes. There have been some hints of that from time to time, like leaks that the non-football schools have had discussions among themselves, but most of that is being kept private, as it is intended to be. There are certainly contingency plans in the works.

The unfortunate part of this is that if things do not work out as well as we would like, there might be nothing Larry Williams or the administration could do about it. Bill Cords did a great job getting us into the Big East, and it has been a great place to be. It was also lucky. We were in the right place at the right time. Anybody who was paying attention knew the situation was unstable, and there have been constant discussions since Marquette joined the Big East that we had better enjoy it while it lasts. I hope when all is said and done, we land on our feet in a good position, but it is highly likely that whatever anybody does, we are going to wind up in a less attractive conference, getting less money for TV rights, than we have enjoyed for the last seven years or so. I do not think there is anything Larry or any other AD could do to prevent that. That doesn't mean he is not doing the best he can with a tough situation. Let's see how it works out before trashing the guy.