One reason I’m not a sportswriter of the year or a hall of famer, apparently, is, I can’t fathom that the jobs at VCU and Vanderbilt are even on a par with the open UVA Basketball job, much less worthy of a question.
Not that what Mark Byington is doing at Vandy even matters.
This is another reason I guess I don’t have plaques on the walls or my own wing in a hall of fame.
I’ve been covering the UVA Basketball search for the past three months with reports based on the insight of the search committee leading the effort.
Which is to say, I ain’t giving you my personal wish list, or writing about what people are speculating on message boards or social media, or what they send to me in my email inbox.
Our group here at AFP has been doing what you’re supposed to be doing in covering a story.
Which is how it’s come to our attention that the leader in the clubhouse in the search is Marquette’s Shaka Smart.
This is who the search committee wants, and the money people are aiming to try to get.
Now, lots can happen, clearly, between now and the press conference to announce the new guy, as the long-timers will remember from the fallout of the abrupt end to the Terry Holland era in the spring of 1990.
Holland’s surprise retirement jumpstarted a search that, to the credit of that search committee, came up with some damn good names – Wake Forest coach Dave Odom, Xavier coach Pete Gillen, Stanford coach Mike Montgomery and Providence coach Rick Barnes chief among them.
The powers-that-be had their hearts set on Barnes, who would go on to accept the job, then back out at the literal last minute, and in the rush to clean up the mess, we ended up with Jeff Jones, a Holland assistant, who went on to average 21 wins a year in his first five seasons, and took his fifth team to the Elite Eight, before flaming out with two losing seasons in his last three, and resigning the job in 1998.
The lessons learned from the 1990 search are why you don’t just settle on one guy, in the event that the one guy pulls a Rick Barnes.
Which is why Ryan Odom, currently 22-5 in his second season at VCU, after stints at UMBC and Utah State, is high on the list of the search committee folks.
And in case you’re wondering, no, Ryan Odom isn’t long for VCU Basketball, which, despite assertions otherwise, doesn’t have the money to be competitive nationally.
Odom is almost certainly on the short lists for several jobs, with some good ones on the table this spring – Utah comes to mind for Odom, given his two years at Utah State; Florida State is an intriguing possibility for him as well.
It doesn’t take much to envision a scenario in which Marquette, in the event that Virginia makes a full-court press for Shaka Smart, backs up a pair of Brink trucks to augment his salary and boost the NIL budget to convince him to stay.
VCU isn’t capable of playing the money game, and then there’s the roster overhaul issue – four starters and the sixth man are fifth- or sixth-year seniors.
You’d know the part about the lack of money if you talked with folks around VCU Athletics.
The part about the roster just involves looking at a box score.
The search is down to Shaka Smart and Ryan Odom right now.
If anything changes on that – not my mind, not the consensus of the folks on the message boards and social media, but the minds of the people who are actually leading the effort to get a new guy in place – I’ll let you know.
Share
Chris Graham
