Dick Weiss on College Basketball
PITTSBURGH, Pa.—Memphis coach Tubby Smith—who won a national championship at Kentucky in 1998—is by all accounts an honorable man who was a pioneer among black coaches, much like John Thompson, Nolan Richardson and John Chaney. Smith coached the Tigers– who weathered a storm of transfers—to 21 wins and 7 of his last nine with eight new scholarship players before losing to AP eighth-ranked Cincinnati, 70-60, in the semi-finals of the American Athletic Conference tournament in his second year on the job.
Today, he is out of work. He told reporters Thursday afternoon he was no longer the head coach of Memphis after a 20 minute meeting with president M. David Rudd and AD Tom Bowen.
What’s wrong with this picture.
Plenty.
This is the sad state of college basketball. Win big or go home. Smith won. He was 40-26 in two years, but it wasn’t good enough.
Memphis athletic officials fired Smith yesterday because they felt he was never able to move the needle or connect with rabid Memphis fans, who think they should be basketball royalty. Average home attendance in this basketball town dropped to 6,225—the lowest total since 1969-1970—from 16,000 Josh Pastner’s final year, putting the school at risk of missing out on an $800,000 payment from the NBA Memphis Grizzlies, who control the FedEx Forum and athletic donations dropped $1.1 million since 2016-17.
Memphis’ biggest win this season came Feb. 22 with a 91-85 upset of No. 23 Houston, only the second win over a ranked team under Smith. The Tigers finished the season with an RPI of 106 and a strength of schedule of 112 a decade after the program lost to Kansas in overtime in the national championship game under John Calipari.
The 66-year old Smith was hired to Memphis in April 2016 after resurrecting Texas Tech. Smith was one of only two coaches to lead five different schools—Tulsa, Georgia, Kentucky, Minnesota and Tech– to the NCAA tournament. When Pastner left for Georgia Tech one step ahead of the posse, Memphis hired Smith away from Tech with hopes of switching to the Big 12 and gave him a five-year contract for $15.45 million that paid him $2.9 million this year with $3.25 million due each of the next three seasons.
Smith was hired as a direct reaction to Pastner, who showed he could recruit well enough to make the NCAA tournament, but never made a dent once he got there, going 2-4 in seven seasons. Smith was a far more sophisticated bench coach, although his best days were behind him. He had back to back No. 1 seeds in 2003 and 2004, but his teams were never seated higher than eighth after he left Kentucky and he missed the tournament five times in the past 13 years, including the last two seasons.
Smith probably didn’t help himself his first year when he elected to move former assistant coach Keelon Lawson to director of player personnel and bring in his coaching staff from Texas Tech. The Tigers won 19 games but lost six of their last eight and six players sought to transfer, including the team’s top three scorers. Dedric Lawson and KJ Lawson landed at Kansas while Keelon Lawson, their father, left the staff.
Memphis technically owes Smith a $9.75 million buyout and Rudd said he will receive all of it over the course of six years.
There is always a chance Smith could land on his feet at his alma mater, High Point, along with his two sons, if he wants. As for the big-time donors at Memphis, they will get what they want– hometown legend Penny Hardaway, who played at Memphis between 1991 and 1993 under coach Larry Finch before leaving for the NBA where he was a multi-year All Star and an Olympic gold medalist before his career was derailed by injuries. appears to be a lock for the job.
The announcement should come next week once the state tournament is over.
Hardaway is nothing like the cerebral Smith.
He currently sponsors a summer travel team with his name on it and is also the coach at Memphis East High, a top 5 team that will be playing for a third straight Tennessee AAA state championship. East has five high level Division I prospects on its roster, including 6-10 center junior center James Wiseman, the second-ranked player in the class of 2019 who played travel team ball for Hardaway and transferred to East this year from Enworth, a private school in Nashville. Not surprisingly, they all played for the travel team Hardaway bankrolled, but did not coach.
Wiseman’s parented relocated to Memphis to their son could attend East. But both Wiseman and point guard Ryan Boyce from Houston, who signed with UAB, were ruled ineligible earlier by the Tennessee Secondary Athletic Association because of their prior relationship with Hardaway but has since played after a temporary restraining order cleared the way.
Hardaway is a celebrity in this town who has a reputation for being street smart and political. Smith’s lawyer Ricky Lefft went as far as to question Hardaway’s role in Smith’s inability to recruit Memphis area players. “If you’ve got somebody that wants the job and they’re controlling most of the talent in the city, I’m not casting aspersions. I’ll let you draw conclusions,’’ Lefft told the Memphis Commerical Appeal.
Fans are hoping the 48-year old Hardaway can inject some adrenalin into a stagnant program by signing the core players from East and bring back a sense of nostalgia for a historically strong, but probation haunted program that has played in three Final Fours but had to vacate two of those appearances in 1985 and 2008.
But no one knows whether he can coach at the college level, especially in a league with quality coaches like Kelvin Sampson of Houston, Wichita State’s Gregg Marshall and Cincinnati’s Mike Cronin. One least one rumor is circulating he might hire ageless Hall of Famer Larry Brown, who coached UCLA, Kansas and SMU to the NCAA tournament but also put all three programs on probation, to help him over the rough spots.
It is a gamble desperate schools take.
