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Nothing But Pain (Wake Bball article)

"All the while, last year the team went 8-24 under first-year coach Jeff [Redacted]. It was the school's worst overall record in 43 years. It's an uneasy time, considering the one thing that should be happening, the Skip Prosser Classic, is temporarily on hold. The scheduled 10-year series between Wake Forest and Xavier, two schools at which Prosser coached, could not be slated this season. Many believe, myself included, it is Wake's doing that the series is taking a break this year.

It should not have come to that. It's embarrassing that schedule quirks were used as an excuse to bypass this year's honoring of the man who defined two proud programs.

All of this uncertainty and turbulence in the program is not all Bzedlik's fault, but I ask: Is he the guy to get it all turned around? When you look at what Wake Forest has been, what it can be and where it's going, does [Redacted] seem the right guy to be in place to pick up the pieces, especially when he's partly responsible for the mess before him? The man has a 94-98 all-time coaching record and no NCAA tournament wins.

What is Wake's identity with Bzedlik? Right now, there is none -- there is only a reputation, and it comes with a laugh track. If it's not all [Redacted]'s fault, but it is all his responsibility now. If he can't get Wake back on track, and soon, the unintended consequences of Prosser's death will lead to the fourth Wake Forest coach in just over half a decade's time, the first of those coach's ghosts still lingering over the program until someone can come along and revitalize it the way Prosser did from 2001 through 2007."

Facepalm
fuuuu
 
Cold, but dead on except for one key thing:

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Gaudio, some believed, didn't deserve to be fired, but despite the NBA talent he lured to campus, there was a general sense of underachievement. Call it Georgia Tech East in the ACC. Gaudio's tenure was erratic. There were all these NBA guys around (Jeff Teague, James Johnson, Al-Farouq Aminu), but no NCAA tournament success to show for it. Prosser won regularly with less talent in a better ACC when he was running the program.
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Not really if you're talking about post-season. Fewer NBA players, but better ones in a senior Josh Howard and two years of Chris Paul.

The writer ignores the status of the program when Skip passed. His death was a major tragedy, but the cause of the decline of Wake basketball is making a commitment to Dino as head coach for sentimental reasons and to keep the AT&T class. If we had just made Battle or Dino the interim coach and moved on with a high profile coaching search, things may have been better ASSUMING Wellman didn't have his head up his butt in the coaching search.
 
Melvin Tabb happened.

Hemingway couldn't have said it better.
 
bobknightfan said:
One gets crucified on the boards for saying it, but if Skip had lived he would have probably been fired, too, by now. His last two teams finished last & next to last in the ACC with an 8-24 conference record. It's not like WF was sitting on top of the basketball world at the time of his tragic & untimely death.
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He would have done more with the NBA talent he recruited. Dino squandered it. I doubt he would have been fired. We'll never know unfortunately.
 
I'm not going to lie, more than once I've looked back upon everything that has happened to us from 2007 on and thought we must be cursed.
 
I hate this. It saddens and sickens me. I'm thankful we have fine young men like Travis McKie and CJ Harris to help us dig out of this mess, but it pains me to consider how and why this happened.
 
Ph -

The writer ignores the status of the program when Skip passed. His death was a major tragedy, but the cause of the decline of Wake basketball is making a commitment to Dino as head coach for sentimental reasons and to keep the AT&T class. If we had just made Battle or Dino the interim coach and moved on with a high profile coaching search, things may have been better ASSUMING Wellman didn't have his head up his butt in the coaching search.
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Respectfully, I mildly disagree.

I'm 50-50 here but I dunno if making Dino an interim coach would have been a better avenue. We knew ( via Seth Greenburg's heads-up alert ) that a couple dirt bags ( Billy Donovan ? ) had pounced on the AT&T selling garbage before Skip was even cold. Despite Dino's lackluster head coaching resume, he was Skip's right arm for many years and the logical/obvious choice to take over and eliminate the 'doubt' that some competitors were selling. I'm pretty certain recruiting would have been dismal under an 'interim' head coach and staff.3 years later, we know Dino wasn't let go solely on the basis of W-L records. Some other things were going on....some unconfirmed and some unfortunately confirmed over the last 18 months.

It's the selection of Buzz that didn't and still doesn't make sense to most of us. HOWEVER, there is no doubt at this point that Buzz walked into an unfolding internal mess.
 
If you're approaching it from the perspective that the top priority was keeping AT&T, you're right. If you believe getting the best coach we can get was the priority, you're not. That was the debate at the time and Wellman chose poorly. Dino wasn't the best coach we could get after an interim year.

tsy, the nutpunch curse is real. We can't ignore it. It is real.
 
I feel as though even if we had a mediocre 2008 recruiting class Wellman thought that bringing in a totally new staff at that point would be very difficult and not very prudent. The only other option Wellman could have taken that he didn't would have been sticking the interim tag on Dino, which has obvious downsides as well.
 
Oh no doubt. He went with the sentimental hire instead of getting the best coach possible.
 
bobknightfan said:
I loved Skip as a person. I really feel that he was probably as fine an example of a human being & the kind of person WF would want representing the University as anyone who has ever been associated with the school. He was instrumental in getting so many things done regarding improving the atmosphere at games, getting the students involved, etc. And there has to be a special place in heaven for anyone who would volunteer his time on the weekend to take dogs for a walk from the pound, as I have heard that he & his wife did. However, having said all of that, I never got the feeling that Skip was really all that great of a bench coach....and particularly on the defensive side of the game. I always had the feeling that his strategy was to get as many race horses as he could find, then put them on the floor and let them run. The idea was simply to try to outscore your opponent. And I think this is why his teams seem to run into difficulty in the post-season. As I have said, you can beat inferior teams with superior talent, but when you get into the post-season you eventually run into teams with equal talent....and you cannot beat those teams simply by trying to outscore them. So I question how much that Skip could have developed AT&T, though I don't doubt that the sheer magnetism of his personality would have guaranteed better results than were possible without him. In the first place, though, they weren't going to stay here long enough to do very much "developing". And, in retrospect, that class was probably overrated, anyway....no matter who was the coach. Just a few thoughts about a very complex person, God rest his soul.
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Good goobeldy goom - I actually agree with bkf.
 
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