I had the impression that coaching started to be not as much fun for Dave Odom. He was (and probably still is) as competitive as ever, but I had the impression he wasn't enjoying all the aspects of coaching as much as he seemed to earlier. Perhaps completely unrelated, but after he left Wake he never reached the levels of success at South Carolina he regularly had at Wake, even though he was a great coach.
Odom
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devi8
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not sure even a healthy Rutland gets us past that 96 UK team
Sure did hurt. We missed him in so many ways, including that baseline jumper you could take to the bank.
And 97, where all the 'recruiting' should have come together with a Duncan that was one year away from being announced NBA ROY and 1st team All NBA?
A total waste of Tim's senior season.
In Tim's last game he played with:
Sean Allen - IIRC Juco transfer
Peral - from Tim's class
Braswell - Jr. starting backcourt
Rutland - Jr. starting backcourt, never the same after the knee
Goolsby - Jr. role player
Amonett - Soph, career 2.7ppg. Odom's traditional great high school shooter that couldn't hit a shot in the ACC
Woods - Fr. Tim's supposed replacement
Just tell me where the recruiting is for Tim's senior year. The entire team was based on Tim's class and the class after his. If Tim had bolted for the NBA, we had nothing. Odom missed on recruiting for two years. Other than Woods there was no one that could even remotely help Tim win a championship. Odom need to bring in legit 2's 3's and 4's, we got none of that. Which is why we spent 3 years in the NIT after Tim graduated.
If Rutland had a healthy knee and Woods wasn't such a pussy, we would have been a pretty decent team the year following Duncan. Lay off Odom; he did great things for us and stood toe to toe with Dean Smith and Coach K for a decade but then had some recruiting and injury bad luck so people soured on him. The revisionist history surrounding Odom's recruiting and/or weak coaching is as bad or worse than saying Dino had a culture problem.
TheReff
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Exactly. Rutland's 3 pointer from the corner was all but in against Big Country and Ok St and we go to the Final Four as long as we can get past UMass, which would have been a rematch game for Timmy D. Rutland was playing his best basketball in 96 and we were rolling when he blows his knee out late in the first half of the ACC final against Marbury & GT and we still win our back to back titles. And somehow we willed 2 NCAA wins against Texas & Purdue I think that year. In 97, Stanford beat the hell out of Timmy in the post and only about half were called. That was just the start of the physiciality that they are cracking down on now finally.
Still I will take Odom any day as our coach and he still could have been here, just like Boeheim is at Syracuse if not for being run off by RW. He had a great core of players returning but just had 1 year left on his contract. JHo, Dawson, Antwan Scott, O'Kelly and Darius along with Taron Downey, Vytas & Levy in the incoming class. He probably would have won another couple ACC titles and done much more with all that talent than what Skip did with it as far as ACC tourney & NCAA play. But we will never know. GDO teams scored the ball AND played rugged defense. We always had shooters and always played with heart.
Odom was the luckiest coach in the country, Chris King found him one of the greatest all-time basketball players and had virtually no competition to bring him to Wake.
So it was really just bad luck that got Odom fired or forced to move on? Okay Butthead!
NashvegasDeac
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This x1000
ProbationDeac
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Agreed for the most part. Our recruiting under Dave with a few exceptions was really good. Duncan never got the final 4 due in large part to Rutlands injury in 1996 and the fact that our guards lost all confidence shooting the 3 in 97. I remember some quotes from Dave in March to Madness about that. I don't miss some of the struggles we had on offense under Dave during his last few seasons here.
I don't recall the quotes from Dave after the Butler game but I do remember we were picked to be upset by Butler by several people nationally that week. There was an article in the Journal the day of the game with Dave stating our players weren't going to fall into the trap of looking past Butler. I am not saying we lost to Butler by looking them past them by the way.
There is a difference between being picked to be upset and getting blown out in the 1st ten minutes of the game.
People seem to forget we first embarrassed ourselves in the ACCT against MD, when we were probably on the NCAA bubble. In that game, it seemed several players were completely ignoring Odom. No idea how you go from that crappy game to looking past anyone.
Sure our guards lost their confidence, helped by Davey's refusal to adapt. UVA exposed us in January. The were the first to figure out that Duncan was going to score, so take your chances he's not getting 50 and focus on our perimeter shooters. The season was effectively over from there as Odom would not change up the offense to adjust. And as pointed out previously, where were the hot shooting frosh and sophs to bring anything to the offense. He banked Tim's entire senior season on Rutland, Braswell and Peral. We teams took them away, he had zero options on the bench.
awaken
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After the UNC loss, Dave over-reacted and tightened up on the team, eventually squeezing the life out of them. Had he just rolled with the UNC loss and attributed it to an unlucky bounce (of a loose ball right to Brendan Haywood), he might have righted the ship. Hard to believe that we beat Kansas by 40 the same season we got Butlerized.
ProbationDeac
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I agree, my point was there was some irony reading the article after the game. I remember that season well from jumping to a ranking of #4, the "mangler" comment from Gillen, the loss at UNC, Duhon's shot at home on senior day, lots of bad memories from that season after January. We weren't on the NCAA bubble in the ACCT that year though, we were in despite the rocky finish to the year.
Ralph Medlin
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Odom started to lose me after the Tech shot clock fiasco and then I was gone forever when he fielded a team starting Jim Fitzpatrick at point guard