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"Dino Gotta-go"

RicoSuave said:
I'd like to see a show of hands of those who were on the "Dino Gotta-go" bandwagon a few years ago. On the Scout Board, there was a very vocal group of fans who were absolutely insistent that Dino be canned. We were ranked #1 in the country under Dino at one point and made a few trips to the NCAA tournament under him, but as the Gotta-go crowd pointed out, Dino had a "deer in the headlights" look on his face during gametime, unlike the youthful dynamic Brad Stevens. At times, the hatred directed toward Dino rivaled the hatred we now have toward Bzzz, except that the Strattons didn't sieze the opportunity for fame and fortune until Bzzz came along. I tried to defend Dino at times, but the Gotta-go crowd was having none of it.

Will anybody here admit to being Dino Gotta-Go back in the day?
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Not even close.
 
WRS said:
Even if you believe Wellman didn't CONSIDER other options that doesn't mean there WEREN'T other options. It's not that damn hard to understand. The question as it stands is: Could Wake have upgraded its basketball coach when Dino Gaudio was fired? The answer is unequivocally yes. End of story.
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There are always going to be better coaches "available" than the ones we have, if we can't or won't hire them it doesn't matter. Obviously winning an ACC tournament game is pretty unimportant and random in the grand scheme of things considering that Bzz now has more ACC tournament wins than Dino had.
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
I disagree that firing and hiring are two separate events to be judged independently, but I've made that clear on a dozen other threads in the past 3 years so I'll let it go this time.
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myDeaconmyhand said:
The idea that there were other possibilities should be dead by now, based on how quickly we hired Bzz. Bzz was on the hot seat in Colorado, so his hiring required no necessity, yet we hired him barely a week after Dino was canned. I believe that Wellman fired Dino in order to hire Bzz. Even if that weren't the case, the decision to fire someone based on production, barring extra circumstances, is only as good as the production you get from their successor.
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myDeaconmyhand said:
Links?
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myDeaconmyhand said:
There are always going to be better coaches "available" than the ones we have, if we can't or won't hire them it doesn't matter. Obviously winning an ACC tournament game is pretty unimportant and random in the grand scheme of things considering that Bzz now has more ACC tournament wins than Dino had.
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..
 
Good thread question. An honest answer for me is yes. If your goal is to win a national championship, and I can't imagine why that would ever not be our goal, Dino clearly had to go.
 
I was. Dino needed to be fired. Bzz didn't need to be hired. I maintain Dino was what we needed following skips death and did a great job recruiting talent, but he wasn't a great coach.

Bzz is neither of those things, and has no business coaching in the acc.
 
I see you haven't lost enough weight on the elliptical because you clearly still have a ton of fat sucking oxygen from your brain.
 
I don't think Dino was a great recruiter, at least not as a head coach. I think he was better at some other aspects than maybe he gets credit for.

Ultimately, we weren't headed anywhere great with him, but Ron should have let him actually fail. He would have gone ~0.500 in his year 4. Much easier to fire him then than 6 months after an extension coming off a NCAAT win.
 
WFU Lurker said:
I don't think Dino was a great recruiter, at least not as a head coach. I think he was better at some other aspects than maybe he gets credit for.

Ultimately, we weren't headed anywhere great with him, but Ron should have let him actually fail. He would have gone ~0.500 in his year 4. Much easier to fire him then than 6 months after an extension coming off a NCAAT win.
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Yeah, it wouldn't have looked as bad if he had a terrible year in 2010-2011, although I doubt it would have been as bad as 8-24. Firing him after an NCAAT win looked bad even though it was needed.

Wellman made the right call then, but lost all credibility when he hired and then retained Bzzzz for 4 seasons. It's just bizarre behavior.
 
91deac said:
I was not on the 'Dino gotta go' team, but I did buy 6 ACCT ticket books and got to watch that debacle vs Miami up close. I was surprised he got canned, especially the timing, but I wasn't upset about it either.
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Pretty much sums up my feelings at the time as well. I never imagined we would hire someone like Bz.
 
I didn't like the hiring of Dino from the start, but understood why RW felt he had to do it. I said it was going to end like Guthridge, with some early success, but ultimately with a face plant and long term damage to the program that would need rebuilding. I always thought he could have given it a couple of more weeks, and have Dino as interim HC until the emotions were less raw and the situation seemed less desperate, and then make a decision on an HC of our flagship program. That was a difficult time and we needed a great leader to make some difficult choices for the long term viability of our bball program, and RW, frankly, failed. He rushed it and snap-hooked it into the deep woods. There is no way that, objectively, and Skip's death notwithstanding, that Dino would have been considered for the HC job at any ACC school given his credentials. So, he shouldn't have been hired. It would have been less expensive and more compassionate had he hired someone else, and given any assistants who were not retained a bonus severance. There were plenty of options, but he pushed the panic button and tried to sell Dino as the right guy.

I have no way of knowing it, but still wonder how many people RW spoke to before he hired Buzz, and how many good coaches turned him down knowing we were going to be bad for a while, and figuring they'd be more successful where they were. Buzz had nothing of what he was looking for, but we'll never know if Buzz was RW's first, 2nd, 3rd, 10th choice.
 
WRS said:
For the last goddamn damn the Dino firing was a step forward and the Bz hiring was 10,000 steps back. Please learn to separate these actions.
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This. I was Dino gotta-go and I still think firing him was the right call. He didn't fit at Wake and may well have committed some slimy actions (violations?) that will never see the light of day. (I have no idea...but remember the weird, secretive atmosphere around his dismissal). He also seemed to have a problem with team discipline/player control.

But the Bzz hire was not a necessary consequence of firing Gaudio. We could have hired literally hundreds of better coaches.
 
Brangus said:
But the Bzz hire was not a necessary consequence of firing Gaudio. We could have hired literally hundreds of better coaches.
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Ding ding ding.

Take a look at this list of coaching changes this offseason, and tell me that we wouldn't have been better off with any number of them than with Gaudio. A lot of them might have horrified the fanbase at the time, but so did Bz, and in hindsight, many of these guys have killed it at their new jobs.
 
88Deac said:
I didn't like the hiring of Dino from the start, but understood why RW felt he had to do it. I said it was going to end like Guthridge, with some early success, but ultimately with a face plant and long term damage to the program that would need rebuilding. I always thought he could have given it a couple of more weeks, and have Dino as interim HC until the emotions were less raw and the situation seemed less desperate, and then make a decision on an HC of our flagship program. That was a difficult time and we needed a great leader to make some difficult choices for the long term viability of our bball program, and RW, frankly, failed. He rushed it and snap-hooked it into the deep woods. There is no way that, objectively, and Skip's death notwithstanding, that Dino would have been considered for the HC job at any ACC school given his credentials. So, he shouldn't have been hired. It would have been less expensive and more compassionate had he hired someone else, and given any assistants who were not retained a bonus severance. There were plenty of options, but he pushed the panic button and tried to sell Dino as the right guy.
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I think you had to promote an assistant to head coach that first year. The teams psyche needed it, and you had 3 Top 20 recruits coming the following year....at least according to Rivals.com rankings (top one listed when I Googled 2008 college basketball recruiting class). http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/recruiting/rankings/rank-1617 Skip died the last week of July. Dino was named coach August 8. You wanted to wait a couple more weeks....when class had already started to name a coach to replace Skip? Who was not coaching at that time that was on your list, because no active D1 coach is leaving his team in August.
 
Certainly not an ideal situation, but I think an upwardly mobile, mid-major guy would have left in August or September given the circumstances and big pay raise. Anthony Grant to name one at the time. Perhaps would have brought Shaka with him as an assistant, or perhaps VCU would have made him the HC that much sooner and younger, and Anthony keeps our assistants. As it was, Bama hired him after more successes. And we would have had the advantage of no one to compete with since no one else is looking. Then if you couldn't get anyone, you could remove the interim tag from Dino and make him HC. I just think RW rushed it and didn't consider options when he could have always fallen back on Dino.
 
And we were loaded with that team and recruiting class. Lots of coaches would have strongly considered it and taken the opportunity.
 
I was in the gotta-go camp. After that Cleveland State debacle end of that season, I thought he should have been fired. That team had 4 NBA players on it, 4. The fact that it didn't win a single game in the tourney is outrageous (as is the fact that it was beaten in their 1st ACC tourney game).

Having said that, had I known [Redacted] was going to take over and take our program backwards, I would have preferred Dino stay. Dino wasn't the guy to take us to new heights and when he was fired I was excited as to what we could possibly bring in.The fact that we brought in this bozo completely derailed that.
 
Hiring Dino off the bat pisses me off more and more as I think about it again. Usually a mid-major upwardly mobile guy has to take a job at a high level bball school when it is in bad shape, in need of rebuilding, and the prior coach was fired. We were loaded and a top recruiting class coming in. We had significant options and were very attractive to most anyone. Teague, Johnson, AFA and Ty were all recognized as legit NBA prospects, and with a lot of other solid pieces. I think we could have really gotten a good one then to follow Skip, and should have tried.
 
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