I'll say he's been close to awful for Wake. How's that?
I do think there is a reality to college hoops that started to hit four or five years ago where there are going to be six or seven stacked teams with 3 or more 1st round NBA picks, or certainly projected that way when they show up at college (remember when Amile Jefferson was a 5star recruit passing through Duke for a year?), and it is going to be really hard to be a better or more talented team than those schools (or more specifically, those coaches), so you have two choices. You try and find a coach who will eventually become an icon (like Jimmy B or Coach K) and get those players or you try and find a guy who can really coach who leads a program with guys that usually stay 3 or 4 years, utilizing experience, behing well-coached, cohesiveness like a Brad Stevens. Wellman chose the later and he failed. Or possibly worse, Wellman tried to grab a poor man's Stevens with NBA cred and hope that you toss that up and out pops some sort of Stevens-Coach B hybrid. We got a lemon instead sadly.
Which is not necessarily saying that Bzd sucks ass. It's more, considering how much he sucks at leading a program, leading a staff, recruiting elite players, etc..., it turned out he was not nearly a good enough coach to overcome those failures/weaknesses. Add to that the rug was sort of pulled out from under him to start and he chose arrogantly to insist on guys doing what he was teaching (half ass defense, half ass uptempo Princeton offense) at the expense of using height and athleticism to run the bunnies on our schedule off the court (or at least beat them 10-15 points and build some confidence) - at which point the majority of the fanbase was already branding him Dead Man Walking. His personality was not going to recover from that. Skip could have. This dude no.
But college basketball is so much about confidence. The NBA is about talent. Talent and coaching. College basketball is about talent, confidence and coaching. And Bzd has some sort of innate ability to fuck with the confidence of college players.
But I was dead wrong on this guy and am totally willing to own up to that. I was hoping he'd be fired last year. I pulled for the team and for him this year because from what I understand, he's a pretty good guy off the court. And he was the Wake coach after all. I just can't bring myself to pull against the team for an end goal of getting rid of him. But all that said, yes I was super high on the hire at the start, unconcerned at the end of year 1, happy as shit to lose all the transfers at the end of year 2 save Carson (who is tearing it up at Providence averaging 2 pts 3 rebounds a game), and I liked the make up of the team after year 3 though had given up on Bzd being anything more than a Herb Sendek jock sniffer. Sadly, as year 4 ends, I can't say I'm even high on the make up of the team even though I pretty much like everyone getting minutes.
Over out.