Shocking news of the day: Wake officially hires Bzdelik

Whew. It looks like Wake Forest has found its man. Good thing nobody knew about this prior to today. This coaching search was fairly laughable. Wake better hope Bzdelik wins in a hurry or things with the fan base could get ugly (or uglier I guess).

Wake gets Bzdelik to lead Deacs

Wake Forest has hired Colorado’s Jeff Bzdelik as the Demon Deacons’ new men’s basketball coach, the university announced Wednesday.

Bzdelik spent 2 1/2 seasons coaching the NBA’s Denver Nuggets and most recently went 36-58 in three seasons at Colorado.

His hiring comes a week after Wake Forest fired Dino Gaudio because of what athletic director Ron Wellman described as a pattern of late-season fades.

Wake Forest focused its search on Bzdelik for most of the week that the job was open. Over the weekend, he emerged as the only publicly known candidate, and he issued a statement Sunday acknowledging that he would speak to school officials about the opening. Bohn said he has been monitoring the Demon Deacons’ pursuit of his coach intently over the past few days.

6 Responses to Shocking news of the day: Wake officially hires Bzdelik

spanky 04/14/2010 at 12:25 PM #

With how long it took from the first rumors of Bzdelik I almost expected t his to be a smoke screen. Gotta admit I’m surprised at the hire, but I’ll withhold judgement for a while to see how he actually does. Also wonder if he’s a stop-gap at his age until Wellman gets who he really wants?
choppack1 04/14/2010 at 1:03 PM #

This is one of the more strange searches I’ve ever seen.

Essentially, Wellman is placing his hard-earned reputation as one of the best ADs on the business entirely on the line here. He’s staked it all on a man whose high water mark are 2 seasons at Air Force.

As I said on the blog, had Bzdelik gone to 2 straight NCAAs at Colorado, he would have been a hot commodity. He also has pro experience (a plus this day and age) and did have good records at Air Force (where one game he had the largest non-conference victory over Wake Forest EVER.)

However, as we all know, perception is reality. And the perception from Wake fans is that Wellman fired a marginally successful coach who was doing an OK job to replace w/ a good friend who hasn’t done anything, and on the surface, no one else would have hired.

There’s no middle ground here – the legend will either grown, or this is the beginning of the end here for an AD whose seen Wake Forest win an ACC football championship (in a post-expansion era w/ VaTech, Miami and FSU), and a national championship in soccer.
Clarksa 04/14/2010 at 1:17 PM #

N&O reporting that he will keep the assistant coaches…maybe that is why he was brought in?

Even though this is a questionable hire, he had a great response when talking about the criticism:

“Wellman said fans criticizing the hire are merely expressing their passion for the program.”
choppack1 04/14/2010 at 2:11 PM #

Clarksa – Obviously Wellman’s not up to date – those fans are the lunatic fringe. Don’t they know they should have just been happy w/ going to the NCAA’s 66.6% of the time.
PoppaJohn 04/14/2010 at 2:32 PM #

I’m surprised, I really thought Wellman was going to pull an acknowledged star out of his pocket. Just the way the whole thing happened, it seemed that Wellman was going to lose Dino fast and upgrade to someone who’d come available – like Stevens.
Some day the back story will come out and by then we’ll know if this was a stroke of genius – or just a stroke.
rtpack24 04/14/2010 at 4:05 PM #

Still can not figure this out. Very few D-1 coaches will take over a job and keep previous staff. I guess we will have to do our favorite thing and WTNY.