Should Tubby try to hire Penny?
Other topics include recruiting, NIT
Welcome back to a mailbag Monday that will hopefully help you get over a somber Saturday that featured the Tigers’ worst loss in more than 70 years. Plenty of you wanted to vent following that 103-62 setback at SMU to close Coach Tubby Smith’s first regular season at Memphis, and I’m here to allay some of those fears.
There were too many questions to answer them all, but thanks as always for being such great contributors. This exercise is only as good as the readers’ submissions, and you continue to deliver.
This week’s edition addresses questions about the potential of Memphis hiring Penny Hardaway as an assistant coach, the characteristics of a great college basketball recruiter, Tubby Smith’s worst loss ever, the Tigers’ National Invitation Tournament hopes and more. Who: Memphis (19-12, 9-9) vs. Central Florida (20-10, 11-7) When, where: 1 p.m., Friday; XL Center in Hartford, Connecticut TV, radio: ESPN2; WREC-AM 600, WEGR-FM 102.7
As always, you can send me questions for the weekly mailbag any time on Twitter (@mgiannotto) or via email (mark.giannotto@commercialappeal.com). The earlier I get them, the better chance I have to provide a meaningful answer and the more likely it is to be included.
From @Anonymo97495881: “should Tubby offer Penny for an assistant coach job???
We start off this week’s mailbag with a native son of Memphis and one of the all-time great Tigers. I’ve always felt Tubby Smith’s fastest path to success here at Memphis revolved around keeping the Lawsons in the fold through next season and using Penny Hardaway’s allegiances to the school and the area’s top recruits to his advantage. East High School, the team Hardaway is currently coaching, moved up to No. 2 in the country in the MaxPreps rankings this week and features a starting lineup of four high-major Division-I prospects from the 2018 and 2019 recruiting classes. Three of them (2018 point guard Alex Lomax, 2019 forward Chandler Lawson and 2019 big man Malcolm Dandridge) already have Memphis scholarship offers and the fourth (2018 combo guard T.J. Moss) is one of the top 60 recruits in the country even if the Tigers’ interest in him doesn’t seem to be as high as other schools.
Then there’s the fact that Team Penny, Hardaway’s AAU program, is one of the top Nike-sponsored summer basketball teams in the country. On top of the Memphis East prospects listed above, he’s got a majority of the city’s top recruits in the Team Penny stable and is expected to add top 2019 prospect D.J. Jeffries of Olive Branch, Mississippi, this offseason.
So yes, it seems like a no-brainer that Memphis should try to hire Hardaway as an assistant coach. It would provide an instant jolt to the fan base and, of course, recruiting. Chances are the Tigers would clean up with the Memphis area’s top prospects and Hardaway’s name carries cache around the country given his NBA career and success on Nike’s Elite Youth Basketball League.
The only problem with this hypothetical is that I don’t get the sense Hardaway wants to be a college assistant coach. First of all, he doesn’t need the money and college assistants don’t make all that much to begin with. Sure, some booster could step in and offer him the largest assistant coach’s salary in the country, which is probably what it would take to lure him anyway. But I also don’t know if Hardaway wants to give up his current gig for the college assistant lifestyle.
From @Evan_Devould: “any chance of staff changes in the offseason?”
From @simpsontom4118: “Also, do you forsee any changes to the staff to help shore up their obvious deficiencies in recruiting?”
Unless Memphis can bring Hardaway into the fold, I don’t foresee any changes coming to the Memphis assistant-coaching staff and I’m not sure it would be justified anyway. For one, the Tigers’ three assistants aren’t just guys Smith hired when he got here. Lead assistant Pooh Williamson is one of Smith’s most beloved former players and the first player he ever recruited at Tulsa. Williamson has worked under his former coach for the past four years now. Joe Esposito has been working with Smith for 10 years. And Saul Smith is Tubby’s son. All three uprooted their lives to follow Smith to Memphis, and to push one to the curb after one season does not seem likely or reasonable to me … unless Hardaway wants to join the staff. Then, you find a way to make room for him given the immediate dividends he would provide.
Otherwise, I think this current staff deserves at least one full recruiting cycle to try to bring in a quality class of players. I realize there are doubts about how Smith fits here at Memphis, particularly since his recruiting has underwhelmed most fans thus far, but the panic I’ve heard in the days following the SMU loss is a bit much. As embarrassing as the final score was, it still only counts as one loss and it’s a loss that was expected in the grand scheme of things.
We’re still talking about a team that features a nucleus of players Smith did not recruit to Memphis. The guy has been to the NCAA tournament at every place he’s coached and deserves the benefit of the doubt for the time being. Plus, is it really going to help the Tigers to bring in new assistants that have to then build new relationships with the players Memphis is currently recruiting? Mark, With the constant talk about recruiting, I was wondering ... what are the characteristics of a “great” college basketball recruiter? What do they do (or are willing to do) that other coaches aren’t? Is it simply “salesmanship” or are there other things involved? Thanks for all your hard work! Sincerely, George Hall Great question, George. Since I’ve never recruited a basketball player before, I figure I’d ask a coach I used to cover who often used one of my favorite sayings when it came to recruiting: “Recruiting is like shaving. You miss a day and you look like a bum.”
So here’s what ESPN college basketball analyst Seth Greenberg, who reeled in the top-rated recruiting class in Virginia Tech basketball history while I covered the Hokies for The Washington Post, had to say when I posed this question to him on Monday:
“It’s about contacts and relationships because the most important thing in recruiting is who’s working for you when you’re not there,” Greenberg said. “You’ve got to have real relationships, not superficial relationships so that you can eliminate the negatives. There’s always going to be another voice in the room. Can you eliminate that voice? If you have a voice in the room, that voice is working for you and that’s all about relationships and trust and the relationship has to be real.
“You have to have like-ability. Your word has to be your bond because the second your word isn’t your bond in a recruiting scenario, you’ve lost. You’ve lost. And then you’ve got to just have an unbelievable passion and energy to deal with the day-to-day grind of recruiting because you’re going to be told ‘No’ a lot. I think the other thing is you got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. You’re going to be getting in some recruitments where, you know what, you can’t just beat your head against a wall. You just can’t do that.”
From @6_11_11: “when was the last time a Tubby team gave up or got beat by (that) many?”
After perusing through the gameby-game results of Smith’s 26-year coaching career, I can confirm Saturday’s 103-62 loss at SMU was not the worst defeat of his career. That happened a little more than two years ago when Texas Tech lost at Oklahoma, 8136, on Jan. 28, 2015. That Red Raiders team also lost to Iowa State by a 37point margin (75-38) less than two weeks later. Of course, the next season Smith took Texas Tech to the NCAA tournament and subsequently got hired by Memphis.
As for the 103 points SMU scored, they were the most a Smith-coached team had given up since eventual national champion Arkansas also racked up 103 points when it beat Tulsa in the Sweet 16 of the 1994 NCAA tournament. During Smith’s first year at Tulsa, the Golden Hurricane allowed 106 points in a loss to Southern Illinois to close the 1992-93 season.
From @AndrewDHaner: “should we still care? Team apparently doesn’t...”
Isn’t caring what being a fan is about? Nobody’s forcing you to cheer for Memphis. Even if a run through the AAC tournament and an NCAA tournament berth seem highly unlikely at this point, the Tigers’ AAC quarterfinal game against Central Florida Friday in Hartford, Connecticut, still has meaning. Two of the three NIT bracketology websites I checked Monday list Memphis as a No. 8 seed, so a win over UCF might be enough to get the Tigers into the NIT field.
Contrary to what some would have you believe, 20 wins and an NIT bid would be considered a successful season despite how sour the end of the regular season may have been. So yes, I think if you’re a Memphis fan, you should still care.
From @ChipLaw67: “Do you wish you had taken another job?”
This arrived in my Twitter feed as The Commercial Appeal limo drove back to the hotel from Saturday’s SMU loss and I burst out laughing. To put it succinctly: Heck no, I don’t regret taking this job. I love college basketball and I’m having a blast. Wins and losses don’t matter all that much to me. I just enjoy telling good stories, and the Tubby Smith era is going to be a dramatic one whether he succeeds or fails here at Memphis.