If Maryland’s inability to land Sean Miller as its basketball coach can be analogized to an open layup that was blown over the rim, how best to describe the Terps’ decision to hire Mark Turgeon? One might say it’s like shooting at the other team’s goal.
Pursuing Miller was the right idea but horribly executed.
Hiring Turgeon away from Texas A&M was well executed by Maryland athletic director Kevin Anderson, but he missed the target by a lot.
It’s hard to find anyone to say a bad word about Turgeon, and it doesn’t feel so great right here, right now. If he’d stayed at A&M, where reaching the NCAA Tournament regularly with overachieving players was more than acceptable under the circumstances, there never would have been any reason to criticize him.
Mark Turgeon instructs his now former Texas A&M players. Turgeon agreed Monday to become head coach at Maryland. (AP Photo)Turgeon's teams play hard. They defend. They execute their offense. They lose the majority of their biggest games, but that was OK so long as he remained at A&M, where folks don't care passionately about basketball.
It was a perfect marriage.
It didn’t matter that A&M’s record in the Big 12 Tournament was 4-4. It didn’t matter that the Aggies never once beat Kansas under Turgeon, not in six tries. It mattered a little more that Texas, those hated Longhorns, owned a 6-3 series edge against Turgeon's teams, but at least there was the chance to celebrate those three victories.
Things weren’t much different at Wichita State. He did a lovely job building up the program from the mediocrity that reigned before he arrived toward a series of first-division finishes in the conference. But the Shockers lost all three Missouri Valley Tournament championship games they reached. Turgeon coached the program during Creighton’s strongest period under Dana Altman; the Shockers were 4-12 in that matchup.
In 13 seasons as a head coach, Turgeon never has won a conference tournament. Only once has he advanced beyond the first weekend of the NCAAs, when Wichita State reached the Sweet 16 in 2006. His teams won a single regular-season league championship, again in '06, when the Shockers beat out five strong contenders to finish first in the Valley.
Through all of that, what might be most disconcerting about placing Turgeon in the position of Maryland head coach is that the opportunity that exists for the new man to improve upon the otherwise extraordinary work done by Gary Williams—to broaden their recruiting reach to include elite players, to deepen the program’s ties with area AAU teams—is not Turgeon’s specialty as a coach.
In four recruiting years at A&M, including the Class of 2011, Turgeon once collected a class ranked in Scout.com’s top 25. How long has it been since he was part of a staff that regularly was "in" with the nation’s top players? Years? No, decades—since he was at Kansas under Larry Brown and Roy Williams in the late '80s and early '90s.
Is it possible Turgeon suddenly can repair all the rifts that exist between the Maryland program and the best area AAU programs, the ones that in recent years have produced Kevin Durant and Ty Lawson and Michael Beasley and Nolan Smith and Quinn Cook—and too many others to fit into a single paragraph? Absolutely. Turgeon is a bright, decent person.
Is he the ideal fit for this job, though?
Not even close.
What we saw in this case, and in so many other coaching positions that opened and closed this spring, is how much less common it is becoming for even the best jobs to wind up in the proper hands. That’s largely because so many athletic directors have no idea what a qualified basketball coach looks like. It’s also because ADs that have such quality coaches are compensating them so well that climbing the coaching ladder no longer is essential.
Maryland had everything a coach could want: pristine facilities, passionate public support, a recent history of success and perhaps the country’s most fertile talent base. But Maryland couldn’t get Miller, even though it was closer to his Western Pennsylvania roots and the part of the country where he has spent most of his life, even though he clearly recognized the advantages of recruiting in the corridor that runs from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., to Northern Virginia.
When Miller rejected the offer, Maryland might have turned to any number of gifted coaches with demonstrated prowess in coaching and recruiting: Shaka Smart of VCU, Chris Mack of Xavier, Mick Cronin of Cincinnati, perhaps Anthony Grant of Alabama, if his interest could be stimulated.
Instead, the Terps wound up with a choice that seemed safe, mostly because Turgeon’s name had been in other stories about other coaching searches.
Read more: http://aol.sportingnews.com/ncaa-basketball/story/2011-05-09/turgeon-the-safe-but-not-the-right-hire-for-maryland#ixzz1LvBp3d9f
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