Again, from Dan Collins on - appropriately - April 1st....
All that said, I'm not the only one who has been hearing for going on two weeks now that Wake Forest is looking for a "home run hire.'' It certainly needs one to help everyone forget, as soon as possible, how much the program has struggled these past four years with Jeff [name redacted] as head coach
The only way that Ron Wellman hits a home run by hiring Danny Manning is if he grounds one across third base and it rattles around in the corner long enough for Wellman to leg out an inside-the-parker. He's going to have to lay down some serious tracks to convince a fractured fan base looking askance at his every move that a coach who has all of 67 games as a college coach under his belt is the man to pull the Wake program out of the morass into which it has found itself.
And once again, the numbers inside the numbers aren't all that impressive. Sure the Golden Hurricane had a really nice season, but it didn't beat anybody worth noting outside of conference play. It did, however lose to Oral Roberts, Missouri State, Wichita State, Creighton, TCU (twice), Green Bay, Oklahoma and Maryland. Few of those loses were in doubt down the stretch.
Maybe Ron Wellman will stand up in a day or two or three and introduce Danny Manning as Wake's next coach. Personally, I'm skeptical.
I feel pretty certain Wake has reached out to Manning, as it has probably to more coaches than we'll ever know. But from the way Bill Haisten's piece in the Tulsa World read, it looked like Manning was awfully anxious to get the fact that Wake was interested in him out there.
He was, after all, going into negotiations with his president and director of athletics.
I'm guessing Dan is a little pissed that he was fed this 'swinging for the fences' bull dung perhaps in return for making Wellman look bad at the Buzz presser.
