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Don't feel bad today for Tubby Smith, who woke up Thursday as the coach at Kentucky but will wake up Friday at Minnesota. That's a ghastly career arc, but Tubby did this to himself. Kentucky fans didn't help the situation, but they aren't the losers here. Tubby is.
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| There wasn't much applause for Tubby Smith this past season. (Getty Images) |
Tubby couldn't figure out how to fix it, so now Tubby is gone to Minnesota, and I've got news for the good folks at Minnesota who clearly haven't been paying attention to the details at Kentucky: Unless Tubby changes his ways, he'll flop at Minnesota. I mean, he'll be a complete and total failure. If he couldn't attract marquee players at Kentucky -- Kentucky for God's sake -- how is he all of a sudden going to bring them to maudlin Minnesota?
Kentucky is one of the top three coaching jobs in college basketball, right up there with North Carolina and Duke. And Tubby recruited like he was at, well, Minnesota.
Now he is at Minnesota, which isn't one of the top three coaching jobs in the Big Ten. Or one of the top six. In the Big Ten alone, the Minnesota job is behind Ohio State, Michigan State, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan, and probably on par with Iowa. If I'm right about that -- and I'm right -- that means Minnesota is seventh or eighth among the basketball programs in its conference, ahead only of Purdue, Penn State and Northwestern.
So who here believes uninspiring Tubby Smith is going to do at Minnesota what he couldn't do at Kentucky -- which is to say, overachieve?
At Kentucky, Tubby underachieved. There's not a lot of debate about that one. In the smaller sense he overachieved with this team, because his 2006-07 squad didn't have blatant NCAA Tournament talent and yet Tubby got the Wildcats there with ease. But he's at Kentucky, not Toledo. With so much wind in his sails at Kentucky, he should have had Duke-like talent. UNC-like talent. Not the dreck he was starting at point guard and power forward.
Tubby was a victim of himself, of his own confidence. He's so good at X's and O's -- and he is really, really good with a clipboard -- that he thought he could hire whoever he wanted for his staff and be able to get it done. And the evidence is overwhelming that he could not.
Look at Tubby's resume. There have been times in his career when he has won big, but those times almost always were with someone else's players. He was at Tulsa for only four years, which means he was winning for most of that time with someone else's recruits. He was at Georgia for just two years, which means he won completely with someone else's players.
At Kentucky he won his national championship in his first year, with Rick Pitino's roster. In the last two years, stuck with players that were signed solely by Tubby's staff, Kentucky lost a total of 25 games. That's not Kentucky. That's Kennesaw State.
Tubby has turned his coaching staff into an old boys' club, hiring only cronies. Tubby worked with David Hobbs at VCU in the mid-1980s. He worked with Scott Rigot at South Carolina in the late-80s. He coached Reggie Hanson (as an assistant) at Kentucky in the early 90s.
Clearly the key to working for Tubby isn't your ability. It's having worked with Tubby before. That's the kind of myopic world-view that can get you fired, which is what would have happened at Kentucky as soon as the inevitable NIT season happened, possibly as soon as next season.
Meantime, Kentucky fans were going nuts. Around the country they have been perceived -- and they will be perceived in the coming days, mark my words -- as out of control, ungrateful, cruel. Inside the state borders, though, UK fans saw what Tubby was doing to this gem of a basketball program. He was turning it into cubic zirconium.
Now he's Minnesota's problem. And Tubby will have problems at Minnesota, believe me. I'll hang him with his own words, because a few years back Tubby said something to the Dallas Morning News that should scare the absolute hell out of the state of Minnesota:
"All we promise (potential recruits) is an education and the opportunity to be part of the winningest college basketball program in America," Smith said in March 2005.
At Minnesota, he'll promise recruits an education and the opportunity to be part of one of the worst college basketball programs in the Big Ten.
He'll be fired by 2012.
