In the quest for speed, I won't be linking to any of these guys' bios, but here goes, and, yes, this is in the order of how I'm handicapping the race to succeed Joe Scott:
1. Craig Robinson. What's not to like? He is a Princeton alum, two-time Ivy Player of the Year, former Northwestern assistant, current Brown head coach and brother-in-law to Presidential wannabe Barack Obama (great line on article about Craig in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the eve of Penn's home game against Brown, where he talked about his then-brother-in-law to be and said that Obama told him he was interested in being President some day and Craig responded, "President of what?" Naturally, the Obama tie is a nice add-on, but it's meaningless in terms of credentials, although Obama's cache could help in recruiting). Nice guy, coached well this year, and my Penn friends said he did a great job coaching against Penn (and perhaps the best coaching job of any Ivy opposing coach at the Palestra this year). Downside: he's only been at Brown for a year, only been a head coach for a year, and might not move after one year. I don't think that the first two factors matter much, as many programs hire long-time assistants for head coaching jobs who didn't have head coaching experience prior to getting that job. Robinson has, and he's the favorite on the board. I don't think Princeton would care to poach Robinson from Brown, and the Princeton job presents a unique opportunity for Robinson that wouldn't likely arise again.
2 (tie) Mitch Henderson and Sydney Johnson. Both are young, both haven't been head coaches, both are Princeton alums, and Henderson has spent the past 6 years assisting (one-time Princeton head coach) Bill Carmody at Northwestern while Johnson played in Europe for a while and has spent the past several years assisting (one-time Princeton head coach) John Thompson III at Georgetown. Henderson was lightly recruited and made himself into an outstanding point guard, so much so that former Penn coach (now Temple coach) Fran Dunphy once said that he had nightmares of Henderson breaking his team's press. Johnson was a big recruit who, like Robinson, once was Ivy Player of the Year and was beloved on campus. After a Princeton loss against Indiana his senior year, then Indiana coach (now at Texas Tech) Bob Knight took Johnson aside for several minutes after the game and complimented him on the way he played the game. Both are young, both are untested, and both have great potential. Whether Princeton wants to go with an untested coach at this time is uncertain.
3. Chris Mooney. Princeton alum and two-time first-team all-Ivy player in the mid-1990's, Mooney was Joe Scott's top assistant during the "Miracle at Air Force." When Scott left for Princeton three seasons ago, Mooney became head coach and led the team to an 18-14 record (I think that's it, I'm writing from memory). After that season, Mooney moved to Richmond, where he's had two losing seasons in a row. (Former Nuggets' head coach Jeff Bzdelik took over from Mooney and has done at excellent job in Colorado Springs over the past 2 seasons). Mooney has three years of head-coaching experience and is part of the Princeton family, but the guess here is that he's too closely aligned with memories of Joe Scott and won't get the call. Had he had two good-to-outstanding seasons at Richmond, things might be different.
4. Rob Burke. Burke is a former teammate of John Thompson III's in high school (Gonzaga in DC) and was Thompson's top assistant at Princeton. Currently, he's Thompson's top assistant at Georgetown, and the Hoyas are a red-hot team. The pros to Burke is that he's helped assist a proven winner in a ramped-up and evolved version of the Princeton system and that he's known to Princeton. The con, perhaps, or at least perhaps to A.D. Gary Walters, is that Burke isn't part of the "Cappon Line" that I wrote about the other day. I don't know whether the absence of a more pure Princeton connection will hurt Burke (it wouldn't if I were A.D.), but my guess is that Burke wouldn't be interested. Truth be told, he could get a better job -- in the CAA or the A-10, to name a few conferences. Why settle for the Ivies if you can go to a place where recruiting is easier and where, if you succeed, you could end up getting a head coaching job in one of the top 8 conferences?
5. tie, current assistants Mike Brennan and Howie Levy. My guess is that Brennan will be a head coach somewhere some day, and even if he's viewed as a rising star it would be difficult for Walters to sell his elevation on the heels of a 2-12 Ivy season. Levy's been a perennial assistant and seems happy in that role.
6. Who else? The question is whether the Tigers will think outside the Cappon Line box and look elsewhere. I harken back to Duke in the early 1980's, a heralded ACC program whose coach, Bill Foster, left for Northwestern of all places after reaching the NCAA Final Game with Mike Gminski, Jim Spanarkel and Gene Banks. Did Duke take a head coach from a major program? No, they took a head coach from a service academy who barely had a winning record in his 6-7 seasons there and who would have gone to Iowa State had he not gotten the Duke job. The guy's name is Krzyzewski and he's a Hall of Famer. Now, there could be a great DIII head coach or an outstanding DI assistant out there with no real ties to the school but with great energy, an understanding of the Ivies' mission and the ability to innovate and win. I'm not so sure how easy it might be to find this coach, but there are plenty of possibilities out there. That would be daring. One thought would be to lure Lafayette's Fran O'Hanlon, a well-respected and innovative coach, to Tigertown. Penn approached him last year to replace his good friend Fran Dunphy, and O'Hanlon declined. My guess is that if O'Hanlon decided not to return to his native Philadelphia, he won't leave Easton for Princeton, either.
What does Princeton need? Someone who can turn the program around and make it a perennial title contender again. That's the job description, short and sweet.
As for Joe Scott, I wish him well, admire his knowledge of the game and his passion for it. His zeal might have been misplaced at times, but he did his best, made some mistakes and meant well. Some Princeton fans are frustrated or angry that he's leaving for Denver and leaving the program in the state it's in. But can you blame him? He doesn't have the best job security in central New Jersey, his family lived in Colorado before and liked it, the Denver job offers (much) better job security and he's viewed as a coaching demigod in the Mountain States. How could he really pass that up, and, if given the chance and put in his shoes, would you? I'm not sure that I would have taken the Princeton job when Scott did, if only because he excelled at a higher level and, to me, the Princeton job, regardless of his ties to Tigertown, was a step down. I'm sure that Coach Scott didn't expect his return to Princeton to be easy, especially with Fran Dunphy at Penn, but I'm equally sure that he didn't expect the path to be this difficult.
Expect Princeton to move quickly. There are recruits to be dealt with and existing players to be kept in the fold. Princeton lost out on Jonathan Wallace when JTIII bolted for Georgetown (he was headed for Princeton, and what a difference would have have made), and you'd hate to see recruits lose interest or existing players transfer because of an uneasy transition.
What do you think? What have you heard?
Stay tuned, and please keep me posted.
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10 comments:
SportsProf -
I agree with your picks.
This article about PU hoops was written and posted at Slate before Scott left, but it remains ridiculous.
The Slate article doesn't seem ridiculous to me. It's interesting and provocative social criticism. Beyond that, Joe Scott's ability to recruit black players seemed pretty weak. Sports have cultural meaning.
For a different vision of Princeton, check out Lorene Cary's youthful autobiography "Black Ice." It's about her time at St. Paul's. Near the end it addresses why she chose to attend Penn over Princeton.
While I don't endorse the visceral quality of these lyrics, one of the old athletic "fight songs" at Penn had these lines: "Hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree." No doubt times have mostly changed for the better at Princeton, but Old Nassau was famous historically as a destination for the Southern artistocracy w Confederate roots.
Nick in New Orleans
Thanks, Escort and Nick, for your comments.
To Nick Spitzer: Your social commentary on the differences between Penn and Princeton is becoming unreadable. I've heard it all before, and it's interesting because Penn people usually accuse Princeton people of looking down upon them, when in fact to a degree you're doing the same to Princeton people. Roots in the Confederacy? That ship sailed a long time ago.
Sportsprof
I'm not trying to be unreadable. The comment was that the Richard Just article in Slate seemed ridiculous. I didn't see it that way. From an historical POV these things may have cultural continuity...though clearly the Princeton of today is not the institution of the 1860s or even the 1960s in terms of association and exclusion based on race, class etc. Still other Ivies have done more (like Brown) to pecifically address these aspects of the past, and Princeton of Lorrene Cary's 70s era had enough cultural difference and aura that was uncomfortable to her, that she wrote about it in a compelling way. Penn's history of providing a home to W.E.B. DuBois or black Rhodes Scholar and B-Ball player John Edgar Wideman is really something worth touting.
The paucity of black players , especialy under Joe Scott, can't be a good thing for Princeton; while Just's showing that the "system" was workable elsewhere helped debunk the idea that was floating about regarding who had the ability make that system work.
Do I find Penn's urbane diversity and legacy, and relative meritocracy--what the social critics call consent over descent in how the institution or group is organiuzed--as an organizing principle more socially and culturally appealing than schools that seem more bounded? Yes. Is Princeton more gaurded and less diverse than many other similar elite schools no, but because of its prominence academically and (formerly) in basketball and the Southern legacy of appeal of say Princeton and UVA oversay Penn or Columbia, it becomes the example from Lorene Cary to Richard Just.
I doubt Princeton writ large can be said to look down on Penn. My guess is that most people don't care or think about it. Though among that select bunch of b-ball fans, there is some intellectual hooliganism implicit in chanting "Safety School" and"SAT" when the Tigers are losing. As regretable and sophomoric as the generic, obscene "You suck" cheers are from Penn students, these seem to be nastier somehow.
But Princeton is a big place, and I doubt these cheers or the the other historical legacies are significant these days in the daily life of students, faculty, admin etc.
Back to who's next in restoring the proud basketball legacy of the Orange and Black.
NS
Nick in New Orleans -
I suppose I should have been more specific in stating what I thought was ridiculous about the Slate piece: the notion that there was any overt or covert racism within the Princeton basketball program during any time since the beginning of the Carril era. There is simply no evidence to support that assertion. Play whatever statistical games you want with representation figures (the number of non-white basketball players at Princeton vs. other Ivy League schools, the percentage of non-whites on the team vs. the percentage at the school as a whole, etc.). The idea that Carril, Carmody, Thompson or Scott couldn't or didn't want to recruit African-American student athletes, or treated them differently some how once on campus, is simply laughable. Anyone who knew Carril knows that if he "discriminated" against anyone, it was white suburban kids who went to private schools with school names that started with the word "The" or ended with "Country Day" -- he just didn't think they'd be tough enough. Even he didn't really take that seriously, it was just a line he'd use, and a good thing, too, since both Barnes Hauptfuhrer and Steve Goodrich came from "The William Penn Charter School" (also my alma mater, and my grandfather's as well).
The article seems to hinge on one racist statement regarding "affirmative action" made by a PU fan directed at a ref during an NIT game against Georgetown. Are there ignorant statements made by fans, even Ivy League fans, in the heat of the moment? No doubt, and it is worthy of condemnation. Does that constitute grounds for an indictment of a program or a university? I just don't think so, unless it's repeated, wide-spread, and embraced by the culture at the school. You are making the perfect the enemy of the good by doing so.
The other part of the article talks about the racial implications of the Princeton Offense, which is further nonsense. The SI article some years ago that documented the spread of the offense to other programs also stated that Carril did not share tapes. He understood that as other coaches adopted it, it would be more familiar and possibly easier for teams to defend against it in the long run. This phenomenon happens in football over the course of time. Carril wanted every advantage he could and never held summer clinics entitled "this is how you run the Princeton Offense." Eventually, it was reverse engineered, and coaches from the Princeton tree went elsewhere as well. Now, even the NJ Nets run a version of it. Can the Princeton Offense be regarded fairly through a racial lens because a Yoda-like white coach of Spanish descent wanted to keep it closely held? I suppose to the extent everything or anything else in society can be analyzed in terms of a racial construct. When Larry Brown talks/talked about "playing the right way," (to try to change the way AI played his game) is that a statement with racial overtones as well? Can't we all just get along as basketball fans? We all know what racism looks like, and this is not it.
As far as Penn is concerned, my father grew up next door to campus (where his father had received his degree in 1909), but had the good sense to get away from home and attend Princeton. He will be going to his 70th reunion of his class on 1937 in a few months. His younger sister also went to Penn. My cousin went there. My father has been friends with many Penn professors in the past. It's a great school -- especially the graduate schools (Vet, Med, Dental, Law, B School). It OK for Penn undergrad students to acknowledge that from a purely quantitative standpoint (number of applicants divided by number of admitted candidates), it's an easier school to get into than Princeton or (I believe) any other Ivy League school. There's no shame in that. It's still an elite school. Sure, I would have considered Penn a back-up, but that was because a) I had been brainwashed from birth and b) probably 20% of my class at Penn Charter applied to Penn, and it was possible to be a second quintile student at Penn Charter and still get into Penn in the 1970s. I used Middlebury as a backup instead.
Penn fans should not rejoice in the fall of the PU hoops program. In a very literal sense (RPI), the strength of your adversaries is a measure of your own success.
Funny that all this broader discussion, including the Richard Just article emmanates from this year's implosion of Joe Scott and the Tiger team.
I think Sportsprof, if he's still talking to me, will vouch that off line (or maybe it was on his blog...I'm old enough to be forgetting) that I have suggested the collapse of Princeton B-ball IS really bad for Penn. We need a worthy rival; the games are often dramatic and facinating; when one team is having an off season, a victory over the rival can somewhat relieve that; and it is terrible for the Ivy League's ability to get respect from recruits and in seedings for the NCAAs to have Princeton collapse like this.
It's also bad for Princeton to not have basketball success to take the edge off the burden of being at the socal and academic top, with only Harvard and Yale (my favorite for intellectual atmosphere) as stereotypically accepted Ivy rivals. Great sporst of high visibility humanize the place to the broader world (and I'm not saying you guys are inhumane or that tPrinceton has no humanity).
I can't undo Princeton's history of associations and historic exclusions based on race, reglion, class etc. I acknowledged at various points that is surely not the Princeton of today. Yet I know that--fair or not--Princeton has an aura of being effete, very "white" culturally n style if not numbers comparatively, and somewhat insular. In these realms Penn, as an urban school w Quaker roots of relative inclusivity that has been diverse w women, blacks, Jews for well over a century, has some advantages as a intellectual and social community. Granted, this is a matter of opinion and personal preference.
I partly brought this up because, Joe Scott's personal demeanor (I compared him to nGens. Cornwallis and Custer) and the lack of African-American players--even Africans educated in American and English prep schools as Penn especially and the other Ivies have done) seemed a throwback. I also argued that Carril system sans the lovable (and he is/was deeply appreciated by many Penn fans) Yoda was rather inorganic. I also suggsted in other responses that it was time for P-ton to bag its romantic essentialism about itself at least in breaking from the various kindred "lines" and basically do what Penn did, go try to get the best guy for the job.
In the course of all this, I mentioned that I thought "SAT" and "safteys school" as chants when P-ton is losing to Penn are immature and, I'll add, arrogant. Like my 4 year old calling my 2 year old "stupid." I didn't condone bad behavior from Penn fans, but suggested "You suck" is a bit less personal.
As a teacher at a 4th tier third world public university in New Orleans, the parsing of acceptance rates from the contested ground of Philly and surburban Jersey private schools seems trivial. Not only are the schools pretty close from afar, I have to admire that Penn has moved up so much in the rankings since I was there and managed to have their mean SATs pretty close to the top, while still holding down 9000 students in 4 diverse schools. There is a Princeton+ profile inside Penn, but there is so much more there. A Harvard prof recently complaind that the top Ivies students are "too perfect, like polished river stones." I know what he means. 35 years ago I chose Penn over Yale because of the insularity I felt there 40 miles from my CT home. I like a few jagged edged stones ad different ways of looking at the world that class and cultural diversity produce. I like William Carlos Williams (Penn '05) poetic critiques of modernity better than the tales of disloute elites from F. Scott Fitzgerald. So be it. Realtivism allows many flowers to bloom while old hierarchies labor on.
A great man, Fran Dunphy, once said (paraphrasing) that Penn is more opnn-minded, it it's an Ivy not afraid to show it's "blue collar." The late Philadelphia social historian Digby Baltzell addresses this issue of a meritocracy based in the Quaker foundations of creative pragmatism and doing social good. He worried that old WASP elites (of which he was a member) were failing because they were not keeping up w the democratizing of a social order increasingly based on merit and ability. I wish that prophecy has coime trur, as to howe the social order has gone, but I believe his observations and hopes for elites were correct.
Not every Princetonian is a doddering out of time Thatcher Longstreth (SP?). Not every Penn person is a hip solid citizen intellectual of the highest order responding to (ahem) Amy Gutmann's call to service. But when it comes to basketball, on paper Joe Scott had both merit and the acceptable Princeton patrimony. My argument is that--Scott'smerit revealed as not...merited--maybe it was time for Princeton to get out of its pedigreed (and larger too Platonic academic box) in seeking a new coach...for the good of dear old Ivy sports...and dear old society.
The Richard Just article never calls the coaches racist. He'd be foolish to do so. He, a Princeton fan(!), is dealing with public symbols and social history of basketball. It's a funny, nuanced artcle that in the end validated the Princeton system in its application in larger contexts--while hoping Princeton would grow up and out of its symbolic entrapment.
Now, let's see who replaces Joe Scott...and as I've said before, when watching Princeton play in the NCAAs in the days of yore, Let's Go Tigers!
NS
Hi:
I'm still talking to everyone and not mad at anyone -- and that means you, NS -- it's just that as a Princetonian who grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs (as a son of Penn alums who were very happy for me to go to Princeton, by the way, perhaps for the same reasons you were happy to get away from Connecticut -- the world doesn't revolve around New Haven and, as I learned, the world doesn't revolve around Philadelphia -- or Princeton)the commentary about who goes where for what reason and what the schools stand for is old news to me. I personally thought the Slate article was provocative but wrong, but so be it.
As for the new head coach, they need to find the right guy to recruit and coach today's Ivy athlete. Joe Scott made mistakes and graciously admitted he did in his interviews upon accepting the Denver job. The Tigers need a good basketball strategist, a good recruiter and an upbeat guy who's in touch with today's kid. JTIII was a great recruiter and an upbeat guy, also a solid coach but perhaps not as good at the time as Fran Dunphy. Scott in a pure sense is a good strategist (we can't discount his Air Force success totally), but he wasn't that good a recruiter and wasn't upbeat in the sense that I think is needed in the Ivies (the days of recruiting "blue collar" kids with the proverbial nowhere else to go who will take a lot of verbal abuse are long gone).
The Princeton line still has some solid coaches, but two probably aren't ready yet (Mitch Henderson and Sydney Johnson) and one is -- Craig Robinson, who seemingly fits the bill. That said, it's not as though any historic program -- be it Penn, Princeton, Temple, Duke, Carolina, Kansas -- has a neverending monopoly on quality coaching progeny.
As I've always said, all ADs should harken back to the educated guess Duke took almost 25 years ago when it hired Coach K, who was far from a proven commodity. That gamble worked out swimmingly for the Blue Devils. I was surprised that Penn didn't get more creative in its search, and it will be interesting to see what Princeton does.
I'd still bet on Craig Robinson.
And let's not infer tone from what I write -- I didn't mean anything personal to NS in my criticism of his commentary, it's just that I'd heard a lot of it before and don't think it bears on this discussion.
All fair enough Sportsprof (your legal name now right?). Maybe because I'm so far away from it these days, and I deal w kids--20% of whom could be at any great private university based on their native ability and their huge will to succeed, but won't go because of lack of awareness by institutions and the kids--that I find the concern for percentiles and the numeric culture- class- bound ideas of intellectual ability so irrelevant. All th while as an academic looking at cultural symbols, I never tire of these familair ones even if I've heard it all before...and isn't that partly the wonderful discourse underpinning the rivalry most obviously manifest in sports. As you and the other correspondent note...in your families the "lines" are all crossed up. Reminds me that the regional (and personal) aspects of the supposedly universally significant Ivies are partly just that.
Sports issues connect me back to that world (hey I've been lobbying Tulane to play Penn and Princeton). But they also connect in a big way to the larger social and symbolic issues of life for me at least. In that sense i'm probably less of a true believer in some of the verities of any one team fan base.
All that said, I know you think Craig Robinson could backdoor the moon, but wouldn't it be ungentlemanly of him to drop Brown after such a short time? Recall the explanation Penn came up with in not admitting Glen Miller's star Keenan Jepersen (was it?)?
This will be really interesting. I'll stay tuned to your blog in studied slience for now.
NS
Amen, and amen.
Nick in New Orleans:
1. As for Craig Robinson, sure, it might be viewed that it's unfair to only stay at Brown for a year. But, and this is a big point, he's a Princeton alum and a two-time Ivy Player of the Year, so it's not like he'd be leaving for a school with which he has no connection. It's his alma mater, and there are plenty of coaches out there who have "out" clauses for certain schools. Brown would look bad in the process, losing two head coaches in two years to other Ivies, but this is a unique situation.
2. I probably don't see as much in the rivalries as you do, but my profession doesn't focus on the types of themes that yours does. Penn vies Princeton as its archrival, but, and I think you pointed this out too, I don't think that Princetonians view the rivalry the same way (except for sports where both teams excel, like basketball). Princetonians who are basketball fans or who are from Philadelphia sense the rivalry, but in the Princeton universe those not from the area or into the "best game ever invented" don't think about it. There's no slight of Penn, it's just that they're into other things (if they're into sports at all).
3. What you suggest, to a degree, reminds me of John McPhee's book describing a tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner (and, in the book, he went so far as to describe the houses in which the players grew up as predictors for the way they'd play tennis). The problem with that analysis is that it might have held true say 30-40 years ago and beyond, but both universities are vastly different today, as the dynamics of change dictate that they be. I'm not sure that you can read too much into Joe Scott's inability to recruit black players; you can read much into Joe Scott's inability to recruit good players, regardless of race. The record speaks for itself.
4. Your comment about Ivy students being "too polished and too perfect" is a very good one. I was at a gathering with Princeton classmates the other night, and one conversation focused on whether or not any of our kids could gain admission to the place today. We joked that it's pretty hard, that your kid basically has to invent his own cell line and help liberate a third-world country in order to get considered. Almost all of us acknowledged that we're raising our kids to be good, happy kids, and if they get in, great, but life won't end if they don't (assuming they want to apply in the first place) and who wants to raise their kids in a single-minded fashion so that if they don't get in they'll be disappointed with wherever they go? (As for your comment that Princeton is better than Penn re: alumni children, you're right, they are, but being a native Philadelphian I can say that it was almost as if Penn wanted to tick off its alums vis a vis alumni kid admissions. My father-in-law is a Penn alum and a man from modest circumstances, and when my wife had an alumni interview, the Penn alumni interviewer suggested that were her father to make a good donation to the annual giving fund, that would enhance her chances. She didn't apply to Penn and went to one of the top DIII schools in New England. In other words, there are goofballs wherever you look).
I'll keep you posted as to what I hear on the Joe Scott front, but I doubt it's much. What I have been hearing are rumors about compensation. The last I heard was that Scott was making about $178,000/year, which was far less than the $325,000 Fran Dunphy was making in his last year at Penn. Now, Dunphy was at Penn for 17 years and was the dean of Ivy coaches, but Scott performed a coaching miracle at Air Force five years ago and probably made more there. All that this is illustrative of is how overpaid college basketball coaches can be, and I hope that my kids go to a school where no coach makes more than the schools' president.
And, now, SportsProf is not my legal name and I know you were joking, and I'm sorry to have used your last name (I erroneously thought that you had). Retrospectively I should have used the name "Good Sport", because that's the type of dialogue I like to encourage on this blog. It's far better than having big school partisans write profanity when you suggest that Joe Paterno should retire.
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