Friday, March 23, 2007

Coaching Turnover

It's that time of year folks...it's time for coaching turnover. There are usually a number of firings and openings in any given year but whenever there is a vacancy at the top of a major high-level program, you can always expect the dominoes to really start falling.

That's the case now that Tubby Smith has left Kentucky to coach at Minnesota (By the way, Minny is paying Tubby $2.5M per year. Combine that with the fact that I think they had to buy out Monson's contract and I wonder where they got their loan from?)

I always find watching the coaching turnover fascinating but this year I will be a little bit more nervous than usual since so many of the Big Ten openings will directly impact Illinois.

To that end, Andy Katz was on Mike & Mike this morning and gave his take on the vacancies and who might fill them:

Kentucky: Says they will go after Billy Donovan (Florida) and Rick Barnes (Texas) but both will probably stay put. Thinks Tom Crean (Marquette), Jay Wright (Villanova) and Mark Few (Gonazaga) are the top candidates.

Michigan: Thinks they'll go after Kevin Stallings (Vanderbilt) or Lon Kruger (most recently of UNLV but also a former Illinois, Florida and Hawks coach). (A Kruger hire to Michigan scares me the most because we know he can recruit pretty well, which would put even more pressure on Weber.) Katz says Michigan will want someone with a very clean background. Gee, I wonder why?

Iowa: Had the least amount of info for this one but did mention Dana Altman of Creighton.

Stay tuned....

Labels: , , , , , , , ,


# posted by Chief : 8:23 AM


<< Home |

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?