Dino should not have been fired, IF the best replacement was [Redacted]. Ron Wellman got up and gave the reasons for firing Dino and then was exposed as a liar the second he hired [Redacted], because if the reasons for firing Dino were really the ones Wellman gave publically, there is no way you hire [Redacted] to replace him. The question of whether Dino needed to be fired was impossible to answer until we knew who the replacement would be. Since [Redacted] was that replacement, then no Dino didn't need to be fired. If the replacement had been a real coach, with a legitimate record of success, then yes Wellman should've pulled the trigger on Dino. That's not even 20/20 hindsight either. If we had hired a coach that looked to be a legitimate upgrade and we still stunk, I wouldn't look back and say we shouldn't have fired Dino. I would chalk it up to sometimes things don't work out. I think with the [Redacted] hire, 90 percent of us didn't think it would go well.
All this "he's a liar" stuff is such childish melodrama.
For better or for worse, obviously worse at this point, Wellman let Dino pursue the Skip plan of big time recruiting for championship caliber teams on the shoulders of kids like CPIII or James Johnson. One or 2 and dones. He fired Dino because despite getting that level of NBA talent, he still couldn't win even a single ACC tournament game with it.
I think Wellman looked at Grobe and football, he looked at Wake in general, and he looked at Butler as an example and bought into the idea that if we recruit very good players and keep them here 4 years with solid coaching, we can compete more often than if we gamble on big time recruits and lose out on many of them. So he pursued Stevens, missed, and picked a guy he knew a little bit about, a guy who torched one of those big name Wake teams, a guy with NBA contacts, and a guy who if you blind jumble his quotes with Stevens quotes you have zero chance of telling who said which.
Fans don't want to hear any of that "rebuild" nonsense because we went to the tournament the year before. Nobody wanted to acknowledge we returned zero starters from a team that barely limped into the tournament and took a miracle shot to beat a horrible Texas team only to get flat out embarrassed by Kentucky. Or that a highly ranked class might be just another flame-out, which the Stetson game made look awfully likely.
I think he made those changes in good faith. I think he believed they would work and that he loves Wake Forest and wants to have great student athletes that compete AND make the school proud.
I think it's a fair argument to say that in today's game that is naive, outdated, and basically a hopeless endeavor. I think [Redacted] then came in with a very poor first recruiting class that basically set us back an entire year, even if I do think the transfers on the whole were good for the program because most of those kids were either douchebags or not ACC caliber. I mean, I rooted for Chennault but he wouldn't play a minute for this year's team. Carson couldn't even manage Devin's numbers as a sophomore.
The media thinks we're getting better, but they don't really care about us because it's not interesting to slowly build a program on 4-year players until they start winning 20+ games. Which, with [Redacted] at the helm, is likely impossible.
