[CTcard]

We've had coaches who didn't represent Stanford well. [i]Doctor[/i] Tom Davis, with his constant whining about admissions is one. Idiotface, with his grunting caveman approach to coaching and his regular pronouncements that his players were crummy, is another. I would have despised those guys even if they won all the time -- which, of course, they didn't. I'm happy to give Dawkins credit on this score; he seems like a genuinely nice guy. That's not enough.

A few thoughts.

1. It's easy to say "doesn't represent Stanford well" is an important criteria when using these two coaches, since they also didn't win nearly as much as the guys who followed them. Much tougher to find a guy who won a lot, and then say he doesn't represent Stanford well.

2. Both Davis and Wlat were good examples that fit matters, at least at Stanford. Neither appeared to really know what they were in for with respect to Stanford admissions and Stanford athletes. Neither were objectively terrible coaches overall, but neither could perform well at Stanford because they bristled so much at what Stanford wasn't that they couldn't take advantage of what it was.

An extreme counter-example is Harbaugh. I am not sure that he places a particularly high value on academics overall versus football concerns, but he managed to buy into the Stanford package while he was here and sold it well.

3. As to the Mick-Garvin "Davis, was he any good" dispute ...

As Mick briefly mentioned, Davis did at least make Stanford a lot better than before he got there. Not only was Stanford terrible the previous three years, it really had been awful in basketball for most of 30 years at that point. Davis' four years were:
1982-3: 14-14 (6-12)  [win improvement of 7 overall and 4 in conference]
1983-4: 19-12 (8-10)
1984-5: 11-17 (3-15)  [trouble replacing Revelli and Jones]
1985-86: 14-16 (8-10) [Lichti and Wright appear as frosh]

It is unclear where the program was going with Davis, and his unease with the Stanford-way was not going to help him long term. But at the least, he left Stanford basketball in better shape than he found it.

[CTcard]

We've had coaches who didn't represent Stanford well. [i]Doctor[/i] Tom Davis, with his constant whining about admissions is one. Idiotface, with his grunting caveman approach to coaching and his regular pronouncements that his players were crummy, is another. I would have despised those guys even if they won all the time -- which, of course, they didn't. I'm happy to give Dawkins credit on this score; he seems like a genuinely nice guy. That's not enough.

A few thoughts.

1. It's easy to say "doesn't represent Stanford well" is an important criteria when using these two coaches, since they also didn't win nearly as much as the guys who followed them. Much tougher to find a guy who won a lot, and then say he doesn't represent Stanford well.

2. Both Davis and Wlat were good examples that fit matters, at least at Stanford. Neither appeared to really know what they were in for with respect to Stanford admissions and Stanford athletes. Neither were objectively terrible coaches overall, but neither could perform well at Stanford because they bristled so much at what Stanford wasn't that they couldn't take advantage of what it was.

An extreme counter-example is Harbaugh. I am not sure that he places a particularly high value on academics overall versus football concerns, but he managed to buy into the Stanford package while he was here and sold it well.

3. As to the Mick-Garvin "Davis, was he any good" dispute ...

As Mick briefly mentioned, Davis did at least make Stanford a lot better than before he got there. Not only was Stanford terrible the previous three years, it really had been awful in basketball for most of 30 years at that point. Davis' four years were:
1982-3: 14-14 (6-12)  [win improvement of 7 overall and 4 in conference]
1983-4: 19-12 (8-10)
1984-5: 11-17 (3-15)  [trouble replacing Revelli and Jones]
1985-86: 14-16 (8-10) [Lichti and Wright appear as frosh]

It is unclear where the program was going with Davis, and his unease with the Stanford-way was not going to help him long term. But at the least, he left Stanford basketball in better shape than he found it.