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Nothing But Pain (Wake Bball article)

The solution is to grow some balls.
 
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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I can't really blame Wellman for the move, but in hindsight this was the decision that killed the program.

Not Skip's passing, not the [Redacted] hire, not Tabb or Tony or Walker or Ari - it was forgoing a high profile coaching search when we were still an attractive target.

By the time the next search came around, the writing was on the wall. Decent coaches could see just how big the talent gap was, and how much of a rebuilding effort was coming. The big names quickly, quietly, and resolutely turned us down, leaving Wellman with a "rebuild our program with a new culture" as his best pitch.

It's like the kid who could have gotten into Wake if he'd applied early decision, but waited until his grades dropped later in the semester and ended up at Clemson.
 
Hindsight for some I guess.

Taking over Skip's program would have been an honor. Taking over Dino's program was a chore. Who knows what taking over Bz' program will be viewed as.
 
What happened to this program when Skip died was a tragedy, but I agree with an earlier poster who said that Skip would likely have been fired within 2-3 years. Skip was a wonderful person whom we all loved. He was the perfect representative of Wake Forest University, a man of class and dignity, but he was not that great of a coach. His recruiting was inconsistent at best, and he was certainly not great in bench coaching. His overall strategy was to recruit the best athletes he could get through Admissions, then let them run up and down the court and outscore people. That strategy worked most of the time in the regular season, sometimes spectacularly; it flopped miserably in the post-season.

While the Dino hire in retrospect was obviously a mistake, at the time it was justifiable for a lot of reasons. I think it is unfair in the extreme to criticize Ron Wellman for the Dino hire, given the context.

On the other hand, the Bzz hire was absurd on its face. The man has never won a post-season game, he is a journeyman who never built a sustainable winning program anywhere. Maybe lightning will strike and he will do at Wake what he's never done anywhere else, but maybe I'll win the multistate lottery as well.
 
PhDeac said:
Hindsight for some I guess.

Taking over Skip's program would have been an honor. Taking over Dino's program was a chore. Who knows what taking over Bz' program will be viewed as.
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Ugh, probably a career-ending clusterfuck.
 
Fact remains that Ron Wellman has made two poor hires to his Athletic Department's flagship program in the space of four years.

He goes as [Redacted] goes, I would suggest.
 
I agree with both the Buzz-iners and the Buzz-outers and think DCDeac makes an excellent point.

Gaudio was a horrible hire at the time. He started a downward program spiral that was largely hidden by a few good early regular season moments and a ton of NBA talent.

The ship Buzz inherited was already sinking. He came into a terrible situation with a program void of most talent and experience. However that being said, he was also a horrible hire. Even given what he had to start with, our program is even worse off now a year and a half after he got here. Just like Obama can only blame Bush for so long, it's already past time for Buzz to start turning the corner, yet we continue in free fall, with really no current light at the end of the tunnel.

Both of them are/were terrible hires for the program. Their combined terribleness accounts for just how far we have fallen.

Unfortunately, the hole is so deep right now that I think we are 3-5 years away from being an average team again, and that's assuming we catch a good break with the next coaching hire.
 
Apparently a nut punch gets you 10 years of suckitude.
 
Whatever curse we have goes way before the NP. Randolph's flu, "scoreboard play", BKF abandoning the team... we've had crappy luck for decades. Maybe it's a curse for leaving the town of Wake Forest for tobacco money.
 
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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Great post, I agree with every word. Even before we lost Skip I mentioned my concern that it seemed we were recruiting athletes, but not necessarily good basketball players. How long has it been since we had guys that were fundamentally good in all aspects of the game. To me LD was a perfect example. Great athlete, suposedly a good defender(I think he was over-rated) but couldn't hit a dam jump shot; not a very good resume for a shooting guard. I personally think if he had worked on his shooting(a bunch of shots every day during the summer) he could have corrected this and had a shot at the NBA. However everytime I saw him in the summer league it was more of the same, doing what he was best at which was a coule of highlight reel dunks.

I have said before, I"M neither a Buzz out or a Buzz in, but I think he deserves a chance to right the ship. I know we will be under-dogs in practically every game this year, but I want to see how hard and smart the guys play. If we see progress, that and a better recruiting class that the 2012class seems to be, perhaps we will turn the corner.
 
DCDeac said:
I can't really blame Wellman for the move, but in hindsight this was the decision that killed the program.

Not Skip's passing, not the [Redacted] hire, not Tabb or Tony or Walker or Ari - it was forgoing a high profile coaching search when we were still an attractive target.

By the time the next search came around, the writing was on the wall. Decent coaches could see just how big the talent gap was, and how much of a rebuilding effort was coming. The big names quickly, quietly, and resolutely turned us down, leaving Wellman with a "rebuild our program with a new culture" as his best pitch.

It's like the kid who could have gotten into Wake if he'd applied early decision, but waited until his grades dropped later in the semester and ended up at Clemson.
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There is little, if any, evidence to support this. Most to all of the accounts are that [Redacted] was an early target and no one else was even interviewed. This after Ron had supposedly sewn everything up at the Final Four before even deciding to fire Dino.


FreeStateDeac said:
What happened to this program when Skip died was a tragedy, but I agree with an earlier poster who said that Skip would likely have been fired within 2-3 years. Skip was a wonderful person whom we all loved. He was the perfect representative of Wake Forest University, a man of class and dignity, but he was not that great of a coach. His recruiting was inconsistent at best, and he was certainly not great in bench coaching. His overall strategy was to recruit the best athletes he could get through Admissions, then let them run up and down the court and outscore people. That strategy worked most of the time in the regular season, sometimes spectacularly; it flopped miserably in the post-season.

While the Dino hire in retrospect was obviously a mistake, at the time it was justifiable for a lot of reasons. I think it is unfair in the extreme to criticize Ron Wellman for the Dino hire, given the context.

On the other hand, the Bzz hire was absurd on its face. The man has never won a post-season game, he is a journeyman who never built a sustainable winning program anywhere. Maybe lightning will strike and he will do at Wake what he's never done anywhere else, but maybe I'll win the multistate lottery as well.
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Agreed WRT Dino and Bz. The Dino hiring was absolutely justified at the time even if it did turn out to be the wrong move (of course, based on the results Dino's first year I think he would have been kept on even if he had only been the interim coach). And yeah, there's pretty much nothing in Bz's resume prior to coming here that would justify him getting the head coach job at Wake Forest.
 
PhDeac said:
Hindsight for some I guess.

Taking over Skip's program would have been an honor. Taking over Dino's program was a chore. Who knows what taking over Bz' program will be viewed as.
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A charity.
 
Hondo said:
Ph -



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.
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What are the confirmed things? I must have missed those.
 
wfumike02 said:
Most to all of the accounts are that [Redacted] was an early target and no one else was even interviewed. This after Ron had supposedly sewn everything up at the Final Four before even deciding to fire Dino.
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This is the transition that was botched. Dino had to handle the Skip aftermath, a transition from friend to father among players, and trying to find a way to have a unique identity. That's a lot on the plate. Wellman panicked for whatever reason, blamed culture, and fired Dino out of the blue.

Well if you blame culture then you have to blame Skip because it was his culture that Dino simply continued, so why did Wellman place so much emphasis on ATT if culture was the problem? He needed ATT to reverse 2 prior seasons of suckitude under Skip. But then he fired Dino and put himself in the exact same situation. He had to worry about the legacy recruiting class. F'd up.

Then he grossly limited his options for no apparent reason and hired Bz. Bzz was supposed to be the role model for this recruiting class and other young players, and reverse the perceived problems with culture. But Bz is about as 180° from Dino as you can get and thus not the right coach for Dino's recruits. Epic disaster of Wellman's creation.
 
Maybe our program will become so much of a trainwreck that some hot shot recently retired coach might take the job as a pet project.


When is Jim Boeheim retiring?

Gary Williams?
 
wfumike02 said:
There is little, if any, evidence to support this. Most to all of the accounts are that [Redacted] was an early target and no one else was even interviewed. This after Ron had supposedly sewn everything up at the Final Four before even deciding to fire Dino.

If you want to believe that Wellman locked in on Jeff [Redacted] of all people without exploring other options, go ahead. I don't think a single person with inside info would agree with this. I know for a fact other coaches were contacted (family connection), but posters have fallen in love with demonizing the hire as some sort of buddy conspiracy, insinuating that Wellman basically lost his mind and turned into a complete idiot after being a thoroughly competent AD for over a decade.

What makes more sense? That we approached coaches behind closed doors so as not to suffer an NC State style embarrassment in the media? Or that Wellman suddenly turned incompetent after hires like Grobe and Prosser?

Might as well start advocating for Debbie Yow as Wellman's replacement if your standard is moronic transparency at the expense of the program.
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Ralph Medlin said:
Maybe our program will become so much of a trainwreck that some hot shot recently retired coach might take the job as a pet project.


When is Jim Boeheim retiring?

Gary Williams?
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Add Bobby Knight to that list. He could turn us around. Might have some bruised and battered players, but he could get results. lol
 
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