Thursday, March 31, 2005
Could Jones connection factor into UVa search?
Doughty makes a case for Odom
Doug Doughty
Doug Doughty's UVa Insider is exclusive to roanoke.com and is posted by 5 p.m. Thursdays in season.
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Only in the third week of Virginia’s search for a men’s basketball coach could a beat reporter take a week’s vacation and not miss anything.
While running one boy to basketball camp and another to driver’s ed, sandwiched around one lousy round of golf while the rest of the family is out of town, I have made a few calls and tried to pay attention to what is being written elsewhere.
The most intriguing name I’ve heard is John Calipari – intriguing not because he’s going to get the job but because I hadn’t heard his name previously. The intrigue continued when I was told that Calipari had links to a UVa booster.
Calipari is in his fifth season as the head coach at the University of Memphis, hometown to Virginia benefactor Paul Tudor Jones, who has given $35 million toward UVa’s new, 15,000-seat arena. His father, John Paul Jones, for whom the arena has been named, still lives in Memphis.
Does Calipari even know the Joneses? I don’t know.
On the surface, Calipari, 46, would make an attractive candidate. In 13 years as a Division I head coach, the first eight at Massachusetts, he has a 308-119 record (more than 25 wins per season). He has 11 straight 20-win seasons. Plus, the Cavaliers could get him. Memphis will be playing in a watered-down Conference USA next year following the departure of Cincinnati, Louisville, DePaul and Marquette and there is a perception that Calipari is itching to leave.
On the other hand, Calipari has made the NCAA Tournament only twice in his five seasons at Memphis and the Tigers’ 16 losses this year were the high for one of Calipari’s teams since his first year at UMass in 1988-89. Moreover, the success he has enjoyed at UMass and Memphis has not come with Virginia likes to think of as “Virginia kids,” not that Virginia has always recruited Virginia kids.
I don’t know of any Virginia interest in Calipari and I don’t know of any conversations he has had with the Joneses, but, with a resume that includes two full seasons with the New Jersey Nets, he probably meets the description of a “wow” candidate that some have been seeking.
RESPONSE TO A roanoke.com poll was much more substantial in the second week, with 515 readers taking part, favoring Kentucky coach Tubby Smith by more than a 2-to-1 margin over the next-most popular choice, West Virginia coach John Beilein.
I’m not sure that Virginia could get any of the three coaches at the top of the list – Smith (42 percent), Beilein (17 percent) and Rick Carlisle (11 percent). Phoenix Suns assistant Marc Iavaroni was third on the list at 6 percent and was a player of some distinction for the Cavaliers during the 1970s, but he has never been a head coach and does not have an extensive recruiting background.
After kicking this thing around in my head for months, I’m still not convinced that South Carolina coach Dave Odom wouldn’t be the best choice.
Odom, by the way, got 3 percent of the vote in the roanoke.com poll. But, one thing keeps coming back to me. In each of his last two coaching moves, his teams at Wake Forest and South Carolina enjoyed relatively quick turnarounds.
At Wake Forest, he took over a team that was 12-16 in 1989 and, within two years, had the Deacons in the NCAA Tournament. He was named ACC Coach of the Year that year and two other times, including 1995, when he was national coach of the year.
(Nobody from UVa has been named ACC men’s basketball coach of the year since 1982, when Terry Holland was recognized for the second year in a row.)
Odom was 22-15 in his first year at South Carolina in 2001-2002 and, in his third year, was named SEC coach of the year in 2003-2004. At South Carolina, Odom has a 76-55 record going into tonight’s National Invitation Tournament final against Saint Joseph’s.
The knock against Odom is his age, 63 in November, and his connection to Holland. The feeling is UVa already has gone the Holland disciple route once, with Jeff Jones, but I didn’t hear people talking about what a bad hire Jones had been when he took the Cavaliers to the final eight of the NCAA Tournament in 1994-95.
Nobody knows more about the culture of UVa basketball than Odom, a Cavalier assistant from 1982-89, and like football coach Al Groh before him, this is the job he’s always wanted. He has recruited against Duke and North Carolina while at UVa and Wake Forest and has a tendency to think outside the box in recruiting, witness Tim Duncan and a host of Lithuanians, including Darius Songaila and Vytas Danelius at Wake Forest.
Sometimes you can be at one place too long and maybe that was the case with Odom at Wake Forest, where some revisionist historians see things in successor Skip Prosser that they didn’t see in Odom. But, even Prosser credited Odom for the talent he left behind, including Danelius, Taron Downey and Jamaal Levy in the current Wake senior class.
THE LATEST RUMOR I’ve heard is that ACC associate commissioner Fred Barakat is headed to the Final Four in St. Louis, where he is expected to make a pitch on Virginia’s behalf to Texas coach Rick Barnes. Barakat would be familiar with Barnes from Barnes’ time in the ACC at Clemson (1995-98).
Doug Doughty remains on vacation and will resume his Notebook Plus column April 8.
