(02-22-2016, 01:14 PM)washingtonismoney link Wrote:You've got to be kidding me. What coach is going to shy away because fans are uninterested in a one-in-seven NCAA appearance record? Only a terminally frightened coach, really. A coach of any ambition realizes that Stanford fan demands are far less, and far more forgiving, than virtually any major job.
I don't wish to take part in most of the silliness of this thread, but somewhere in here is a question I wonder about.
I guess it's sort of two questions, but I think they are related.
Just how attractive is Stanford as a destination for a basketball coach?
No real idea here, but Stanford's pitiful history in men's basketball makes one wonder if the attraction is all that high. For the most part "fans demand less" is probably not a positive feature for most coaches - certainly aggressive ones. I don't see any reason basketball coaches would have a different view of having actual academic standards any differently than football coaches would, but I am not certain. Which leads to ...
Is there any reason it should be harder for Stanford to succeed as men's basketball than football?
I think the answer is no, in fact it should be a little easier as Stanford only needs to recruit a few good hoops players to have a top team (at least compared to the number of football players needed).
The only reason the question comes up at all is that outside of the Monty years, Stanford basketball has been almost uniformly awful.
Here are Stanford bastketball coaches since WWII. Overall it's a rather sorry record, with a very clear exception of Monty and the arguable case of Johnson (which has been argued ad nauseum in this thread).
The whole thing makes me fear that whomever becomes Dawkins replacement is unlikely to do better.
Everett Dean*
11 seasons, 1939-51 (no basketball 1944,1945)
58% wins overall, 45% in conference
Robert Burnett
3 seasons, 1952-54
51% overall, 31% in conference
Howie Dallmar**
21 seasons, 1955-1975
49% overall, 45% in conference
Richard DiBiaso
7 seasons, 1976-82
37% overall, 25% in conference
Tom Davis
4 seasons, 1983-86
50% overall, 35% in conference
Mike Montgomery
13 seasons, 1987-04
70% overall, 65% in conference
Trent Johnson
4 seasons, 2005-08
63% overall, 63% in conference
Johnny Dawkins***
<8 seasons, 2009-16
58% overall, 46% in conference
* Dean did win a national title, which I guess means his evaluation should get an extra boost over and above his overall record. On the other hand, that really good year (which really was two really good years) means the others were even worse to end up at that average.
** I had to do the counting of conference total myself from the Stanford basketball wikipedia page. Dallmar has so many seasons there is a chance I made a mistake - glancing at the year by year records would seem to indicate the conference record shouldn't be that high.
*** The Wikipedia page has math errors in adding the overall wins and losses for Dawkins. I suspect the totals were added mid-last season. But, that does make me wonder if the total weren't correct for some of the others (though I didn't catch other mistakes).