Mississippi State expected to finalize deal to make Ben Howland coach

[VegasWarrior77]

He was supposedly very interested in UNLV but the administration decided to give Dave Rice another year to make the NCAA tournament....

http://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball/eye-on-college-basketball/25119372/mississippi-state-expected-to-finalize-deal-to-make-ben-howland-coach

Mississippi State and former UCLA head coach Ben Howland are putting the finishing touches on a deal that would make the 57-year old the Bulldogs' next head basketball coach, multiple sources told CBSSports.com.

The deal is expected to be officially completed by Monday barring any last-minute snags. Terms have yet to be disclosed.

One source called the deal "imminent."

Howland has been out of coaching the past two seasons, but led the Bruins to the Pac-12 regular-season title during his last season in Westwood in 2013. He took the Bruins to three consecutive Final Fours from 2006-08 and has taken three different schools to the NCAA Tournament during his coaching career. Howland coached at Pitt and Northern Arizona before taking the UCLA post in 2003.

Mississippi State's decision to hire Howland would have a similar impact in the SEC to Auburn's hiring of Bruce Pearl a year ago. Like Pearl, Howland is a proven winner who immediately gives the Bulldogs' program credibility after failing to make the NCAA Tournament since 2009.

Howland was selective in his decision to return to coaching over the past two seasons and passed on several offers to return, but Mississippi State gives him an opportunity to return to a power conference in a league that is relatively wide open on annual basis except for Kentucky.

The Bulldogs fired Rick Ray on Saturday after three seasons in which Ray went 37-60 overall and 13-41 in SEC play.

Gary Parrish reported interest between the two sides on Sunday.

[WarriorPride68]

Malik Newman?

[muarmy81]

"Selective in his decision"?

It sounds like Howland was throwing himself at every job opening that came up over the past 12 months...

[chapman]

Marquette Wake Forest Tennessee Missouri Cal Oregon State UNLV Mississippi State

Guess he finally found a place that could take some old man smell.

[GGGG]

Jeez...he's only 57.  Not *that* old.

[chapman]

Jeez...he's only 57.  Not *that* old.

Zip it, gramps.   

[VegasWarrior77]

Gary Parrish ‏@GaryParrishCBS  1h1 hour ago
Alabama planning to make big run at Gregg Marshall when Wichita State’s season ends, sources told @CBSSports. Story: http://cbsprt.co/1BIGvej

[4everwarriors]

#donedeals, hey?

[dgies9156]

Jeez...he's only 57.  Not *that* old.

Thank you, Sultan!!!!

[4everwarriors]

Gary Parrish ‏@GaryParrishCBS  1h1 hour ago
Alabama planning to make big run at Gregg Marshall when Wichita State’s season ends, sources told @CBSSports. Story: http://cbsprt.co/1BIGvej

Thought they were all in for Tommy Boy, ai na?

[GGGG]

Gary Parrish ‏@GaryParrishCBS  1h1 hour ago
Alabama planning to make big run at Gregg Marshall when Wichita State’s season ends, sources told @CBSSports. Story: http://cbsprt.co/1BIGvej

After seeing what that move did to Anthony Grant, I don't think I would have any interest in that.  

[Windyplayer]

Gary Parrish ‏@GaryParrishCBS  1h1 hour ago
Alabama planning to make big run at Gregg Marshall when Wichita State’s season ends, sources told @CBSSports. Story: http://cbsprt.co/1BIGvej

The allure of a HC gig in Tuscaloosa is on equal footing with HC gig in Starkville. No thank you to both. Sure, you're coaching in a power conference, but you're probably not going to parlay that into something bigger. Much better off going to a small school where you can make some noise and then generate interest form some decent to good basketball programs. I guess if you've run your course as a coach and people know your true colors then you're just happy to be coaching against perennial powers every year.

[GGGG]

The allure of a HC gig in Tuscaloosa is on equal footing with HC gig in Starkville. No thank you to both. Sure, you're coaching in a power conference, but you're probably not going to parlay that into something bigger. Much better off going to a small school where you can make some noise and then generate interest form some decent to good basketball programs. I guess if you've run your course as a coach and people know your true colors then you're just happy to be coaching against perennial powers every year.

Or simply cash some checks.  Marshall is making $2 million.  Wichita is a decent city.  He is running the alpha program in the MVC, which will get him in the tournament more often than not.

Like Few, why would he leave to run a middling program like Alabama?

[onepost]

Let me preface by saying I'm happy with the guy we ended up getting in Wojo.  I think he'll be a total stud here.
Great man, fantastic recruiter, and someone who endorses a culture we can all get behind.

But.......

Part of me wonders what would've happened had we gotten Gregg Marshall last year.
We know he was interested in the job and he's without a doubt a top 10 coach in the entire country.  I think he would've been an incredible coach here.  My short list at the time was Smart, Marshall, Miller (remember we didn't even know Wojo was considered until the night before he was hired).  Anyway, just wondering what if.  Wherever Marshall goes is getting a great coach.

[D'Lo Brown]

Howland was selective in his decision to return to coaching over the past two seasons and passed on several offers to return

It's Mississippi State... It's Mississippi State.

[TAMU, Knower of Ball]

Let me preface by saying I'm happy with the guy we ended up getting in Wojo.  I think he'll be a total stud here.
Great man, fantastic recruiter, and someone who endorses a culture we can all get behind.

But.......

Part of me wonders what would've happened had we gotten Gregg Marshall last year.
We know he was interested in the job and he's without a doubt a top 10 coach in the entire country.  I think he would've been an incredible coach here.  My short list at the time was Smart, Marshall, Miller (remember we didn't even know Wojo was considered until the night before he was hired).  Anyway, just wondering what if.  Wherever Marshall goes is getting a great coach.

He doesn't fail the sniff test as badly as Howland does...but he doesn't do well on it either

[MU82]

Squirmy.

[dbwarriors]

Ditka

[VegasWarrior77]

Ben Howland's long journey back shows game has changed even for talented coach
Mike DeCourcy's headshot
Mike DeCourcy  @TSNMike Email RSS
March 24, 2015 1:03pm EDT

http://www.sportingnews.com/ncaa-basketball/story/2015-03-24/howlands-long-journey-back-shows-game-has-changed-even-for-talented-coaches-tom-crean-rick-barnes-ncaa-basketball?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Ben Howland spent the winter talking about basketball on television. It is impossible to genuinely measure such things, but it could be he is the best pure college coaching tactician of the past two decades. Ask the people who’ve worked for him, worked around him, and they will tell you they’ve never seen anyone who can surpass him at watching opponent on film and seeing into that team’s soul and who’ll spend as many hours necessary to find it.

Mississippi State AD Scott Stricklin became the first in his business, at least the first in a while, to realize Howland’s degree of brilliance is not often available on the college coaching market. So Howland no longer is an ex-coach who built two programs almost from scratch and reenergized one of the game’s greatest brands.

He will continue to stand, however, as an example to everyone in college basketball that the game at its highest end is more hazardous than ever. The message that must be understood: The margin for error is not what it used to be. Anywhere.

Even a coach with Howland’s talent selling the UCLA tradition, Southern California weather, one of the most attractive campuses in America and an extraordinary public education — even that guy can be caught by a few recruiting mistakes, assistants leaving for better jobs, some negative PR and just the wrong one-and-done player and wind up talking about the game on television after being forced out in 2013.

It does not matter how prestigious your position is, how much your fans care, how beautiful your arena is or how great the conference is in which your school competes.

You can be Tom Crean at Indiana, with a rich in-state base of well-coached high school players and still find yourself imperiled after missing the NCAA Tournament one year and losing a round of 64 game the next.

You can be Rick Barnes at Texas, with even more great high school talent in your state, first-rate facilities, an athletic department that all but prints its own money and a fan base that rarely second-guesses strategic choices, and you can find yourself fighting for your job for the third season in a row.

What all these gentlemen have in common is they experienced great success a decade ago. Howland rescued Pitt from abject irrelevance and turned it into a Big East power, then took UCLA to the Final Four each year from 2006-08. Crean took over a Marquette program that longed for its glory years and reached the Final Four by his fourth year, then maintained the Golden Eagles’ strength after they took a step up into the Big East. Then he moved to Indiana and took the ashes of that program and won a Big Ten title in his fifth year. Barnes recruited T.J. Ford to Texas, coached him to the Final Four and then got to the Elite Eight with successors Daniel Gibson and D.J. Augustin.

What has changed since?

Well, it isn’t that these guys got dumb.

Really, now: all of them, all at once?

What changed, essentially, is everything. It would be convenient to say it merely is the one-and-done issue. Certainly that had an enormous impact on each of these coaches. Howland’s UCLA program never fully recovered from losing guard Jrue Holiday after a single season averaging 8.5 points. Texas was crippled by the one-year cameos of Avery Bradley and Cory Joseph, neither of which seemed likely during their recruitment. Indiana probably had an idea about Noah Vonleh but did not put together enough of a team around him to accomplish anything of note, then was left with a vacant frontcourt when he departed.

The difficulty of managing the one-and-done player has affected coaches with far more job security than these three ever enjoyed. Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke teams lost twice this decade to back-of-the-field teams in the NCAA Tournament when fronted by freshmen who played a single season.

Kansas lost in the second round of the 2010 tournament with Xavier Henry as a focal point, then again in 2014 with Andrew Wiggins, and just this year with Kelly Oubre and (until it mattered most, anyway) Cliff Alexander. All three of those teams No. 2 seeds or better. All three won Big 12 regular-season titles.

It would be foolish, though, to confine the early entry contagion to the single-season freshman. Players of all classifications are moving through more rapidly, departing not simply to become lottery picks or first-rounders but merely because they become convinced it’s time.

Arizona junior center Kaleb Tarczewski is averaging 9.2 points and 5.1 rebounds and has been an essential member of back-to-back Pac-12 regular-season champions. DraftExpress analyst Jonathan Givony projects he would be the 57th player taken in the 2015 draft. He is a successful student in the Eller College of Management. But he nonetheless told Sporting News he pondered during the season whether to return for his final year.

“I think that’s one of the things that I’ve gotten over,” Tarczewski said “If I have fun and enjoy myself … if it’s meant to be, it will happen.”

Last season, 10 Division I players filed for early entry and went undrafted, along with nine who were drafted in the second round. Ten years earlier, one player left to be chosen in the second round. Two went undrafted.

Whether that’s a product of changing attitudes among college players and their families or the NCAA’s inane April draft deadline — advocated by coaches earlier this decade for the purpose of roster management — is hard to say.

Either way, the game has changed and coaches have found their jobs more challenging as a result. It might be partly their own fault, but that doesn’t make it easier.

[Loose Cannon]

 I'm pasting this from the Duke Board.   Food for Thought!




Slightly (or maybe majorly) off-topic here, but I've always found it interesting to see the often unforseen results of the over-bloating of the power conferences due to the greedy expansion to survive the arms race of college football. College basketball fans of these schools on all the various bulletin boards I'd frequent in the past few years took the opportunity to salivate over the various schools they could raid from other conferences and fatten their own. "We can grab Louisville! Maybe even Texas! How great will we be then!?!"

 There's another side to that, though. Once you have 12, 15, 16 teams in your conference instead of 8 or 10, there's still only room at the top for one despite the larger membership, and an awful lot more room in the dark nether regions of despondency and irrelevance down at or near the bottom for increasing numbers of teams who still spend millions per year to be successful. The pieces of the pie of success are slimmer and fewer in number while the price of it keeps going up. Your numbers of appearances on ESPN go down as three and four more teams join your conference. Rutgers shoves Purdue further into shadow. And keeping your fans happy with your coach becomes more difficult after numerous bleak seasons in 13th place, as is finding a top-flight replacement coach willing to take on such an increasingly daunting position. Miss. State seems to be lucky that there's a good one, but with damaged reputation, willing to go to bleak Starkville and re-invent himself. Same with Texas Tech last year (not that Tubby got them out of last place). Wake fans, who seemed delighted to have Notre Dame and Pitt and Louisville join now find themselves facing not 12th place anymore, but 15th, an even deeper hole ever to dig out of, making Danny Manning's job there far harder than Dave Odom's ever was.

 I suspect schools' fans will be less and less patient with new coaches in this new environment. And for established good programs, how can Pitino, Boeheim, K, Ole Roy, Mike Brey, Jamie Dixon, even Tony Bennett's fans be satisfied with 4th or 5th place when they're used to thinking 1st or 2nd every year? How many years can these schools not win the ACC tournament and their fans still not start to complain a little bit? But they can't all win it every couple of years - there are 15 schools now, not 9 (or the happier 8). How long can Buzz's VT fans be satisfied in 15th place? Can he really jump a dozen other programs to reach an expected level of success? In the past, it was only 5 or 6 spots to daylight and a feeling of well-being. Teams' fans can't even get as many of their stars on conference all-star teams anymore. There's a bigger monster to feed now, just when supporter's expectations are rising and the % of their all being successful falling.

 Perhaps luckily for Miss. State, the fans there don't really care much about basketball. But how long will Missouri's coach (when they get a new one) last if he can't beat most of those SEC laggards? How tolerant will Illinois' fans be now that Maryland has added another rung of talent over their heads and who just took 'their' spot away in the tournament field of 68, dooming them instead to the NIT in Alabama? How many more schools' fans in general will lose interest in their teams' season when more and more of them are out of the conference running by February? Football fans aren't the only ones contributing heavily to athletic department coffers, and there has to be lots more dissillusion among many bball supporters these days. I'm sure none of these things mattered that much when conference ADs scrambled for 'a place at the table' of the big conference bowl situation, but I suspect the consequences for college basketball make for a somewhat nastier environment in the Darwinian survival of the fittest. I'm surprised so few college coaches have been fired this year - but my guess is the survival rate of coaches, and the level of contentment of the fans, will diminish in coming seasons.

 Just a lunchtime ramble which may or may not make sense...


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[Groin_pull]

Squirmy.

No more so than Buzz.

[Dawson Rental]

I'm pasting this from the Duke Board.   Food for Thought!

Very interesting.  He makes good points. 

[chapman]

Well, I'd venture to guess that had Tennessee hired Howland, they might not have had to fire him after one season.

http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/12567695/tennessee-volunteers-fire-basketball-coach-donnie-tyndall

[DegenerateDish]

I got invited to be at Mississippi State's practice facility today, and met Howland for a bit. Not trying to be coy, but I'll say this...after talking to him, I'm shocked he didn't wind up at MU. Not a knock on Wojo (love the guy), but the conversation Howland & I had about MU was interesting. Really nice guy too.

[Chicos' Buzz Scandal Countdown]

I got invited to be at Mississippi State's practice facility today, and met Howland for a bit. Not trying to be coy, but I'll say this...after talking to him, I'm shocked he didn't wind up at MU. Not a knock on Wojo (love the guy), but the conversation Howland & I had about MU was interesting. Really nice guy too.

Howland didn't end up at MU because Marquette is an undesirable job with questionable facilities, a poor track record of attracting/developing players, and little institutional support. He, like every other top coach, was simply holding out on case Wisconsin's job opened up.

[Chicos' Buzz Scandal Countdown]

(Accidentally reposted)

[ChicosBailBonds]

I got invited to be at Mississippi State's practice facility today, and met Howland for a bit. Not trying to be coy, but I'll say this...after talking to him, I'm shocked he didn't wind up at MU. Not a knock on Wojo (love the guy), but the conversation Howland & I had about MU was interesting. Really nice guy too.

I worked with Ben for two years as a spokesman for our March Madness campaigns at Directv.  I'm not sure I would call him a nice guy, though maybe he has loosened up some now that he's had time away from the game.  Perhaps a new energy.  He was pretty worn down by the expectations back in the day and that was at height of his career at UCLA.

[DegenerateDish]

I worked with Ben for two years as a spokesman for our March Madness campaigns at Directv.  I'm not sure I would call him a nice guy, though maybe he has loosened up some now that he's had time away from the game.  Perhaps a new energy.  He was pretty worn down by the expectations back in the day and that was at height of his career at UCLA.

He was very genuine today, his daughter is an oncology nurse at Mattel in LA. Made sure my kids had a nice experience in Starkville, I came away impressed with him.

[ChicosBailBonds]

He was very genuine today, his daughter is an oncology nurse at Mattel in LA. Made sure my kids had a nice experience in Starkville, I came away impressed with him.

Good to hear.  Hopefully the new surroundings are good to him, his health, his outlook on life. Mattel Children's Hospital is a good place to be. 

[TAMU, Knower of Ball]

I got invited to be at Mississippi State's practice facility today, and met Howland for a bit. Not trying to be coy, but I'll say this...after talking to him, I'm shocked he didn't wind up at MU. Not a knock on Wojo (love the guy), but the conversation Howland & I had about MU was interesting. Really nice guy too.

Didn't pass the sniff test

[Windyplayer]

I worked with Ben for two years as a spokesman for our March Madness campaigns at Directv.  I'm not sure I would call him a nice guy, though maybe he has loosened up some now that he's had time away from the game.  Perhaps a new energy.  He was pretty worn down by the expectations back in the day and that was at height of his career at UCLA.

You had me at I worked with Ben.

[ChicosBailBonds]

You had me at I worked with Ben.

I wrote two big checks to him over two years as our spokesman.  Got to know the man.  Feel free to ignore if you wish, merely sharing real experiences just as MU Dish was sharing a real experience.

[JamilJaeJamailJrJuan]

I wrote two big checks to him over two years as our spokesman.  Got to know the man.  Feel free to ignore if you wish, merely sharing real experiences just as MU Dish was sharing a real experience.

LOLZ