So MU hires Jim Calhoun in '86. He quickly wins at MU. Then when Larry Brown leaves KU in '88, he jumps and we start all over.
Just another version of the multiverse....
Perhaps, but at that point, we were not a "stepping stone" program.
Al retired, Hank was phased out, Rick had to go. Nobody left to go to a "better" college coaching job because there weren't many considered better. (Al did famously try to go to the Bucks.)
We became a stepping stone program the day K.O. got the job. I love K.O., but he has always been about chasing his career ambitions. I do not say that negatively -- lots of folks in lots of industries feel that way, good people who are good at their jobs. Just simply saying that's when it started.
Oh, and UConn was hardly some kind of beacon of basketball when Calhoun took over in 1986. They had never been to a FF, gotten to the S16 only once since 1960 and hadn't made the tournament in 7 straight years. Marquette was considered a much better basketball school then. Calhoun built UConn into a power and stayed there until he retired a quarter-century later. There is no reason to believe he couldn't/wouldn't have done the same at MU.
Heck, IMHO it's more likely that Scoopers would have grumbled about how stoopid Calhoun became in his occasional underperforming seasons than that Calhoun would have left.
