Adam Gold and Joe Ovies had a great interview with Julius Hodge yesterday afternoon.
Link to interview with Julius Hodge.
Also, please read this great column from Adam Gold on NC State’s basketball team.
I have to give Gold and Ovies credit for defending NC State. A moron called in yesterday and made the same, tired, baseless argument that you can only be so good with Duke and UNC so close and that we should want to hire Herb Sendek back. Gold and Ovies called him out immediately and essentially cut him off. If that statement had any truth to it, then Sendek would have immediately started winning at a higher rate at ASU because it is a much, much further distance from Chapel Hill and Durham.
As poorly as Sidney Lowe has done at NC State in his 4.5 seasons, this is how Lowe’s and Sendek’s records compare:
Sendek – 85-62
Lowe – 82-67
Sendek’s last 5 seasons at NC State – 105-58
In Sendek’s 5th season, the Sun Devils are 9-7 and 1-3 in the Pac 10. Sidney has NC State at 11-5 and 1-1 in the ACC. It is likely that Lowe could actually have a higher overall winning percentage by the end of the season, his best single season overall and the ACC in his 5th season which would mean the program is on an upward trend while ASU is spiraling backwards since Sendek’s 3nd season, and still Sidney could be fired as the head coach at NC State. While Sendek would likely be safe for at least another year because because his real market value in the world of college basketball was judged to fit a program with lower expectations than NC State.
If being close to UNC and Duke is such an enormous obstacle for an NC State head coach, then:
a. why are Sendek’s results worse than those he achieved at NC State in his last 5 seasons now that he has escaped the mean, evil NC State fans and moved to Arizona?
and:
b. why is Sendek winning at a similar rate to Sidney Lowe who some think is one of the worst coaches in the history of NC State, maybe one of the worst coaches in the history of the ACC, and who coaches so close to Duke and UNC which to some is the most difficult obstacle in all of sports? They both had massive rebuilding jobs.
The last 4.5 years show exactly how the NC State head coaching position is actually an outstanding opportunity. The records of Sendek and Lowe show that a large part of Sendek’s success was actually the resources, fan support, financial support, facilities, location, school, conference affiliation, etc…that were at Sendek’s disposal during his 10 years in Raleigh. Sendek is the same coach today that he was 5 years ago at NC State. In fact, he is likely a better coach today because he has more experience and his reputation has grown. So what changed when he went to Arizona St. especially when you consider he is no longer facing Duke and UNC and coaching in the same area code as Coach K and Roy?
He is at Arizona St. He is working from a different platform with fewer resources. That is all that has changed.
I think Sendek is a significantly better college basketball coach than Sidney Lowe. It isn’t even close. However, NC State’s resources to win have boosted Lowe’s results to the same level as a much better basketball coach at a lessor program like Sendek and ASU respectively. If we get any ASU readers, then please don’t take this as a criticism of ASU. The comments on their message boards make similar points about the lack of upside in their basketball program. While Sendek is a solid basketball coach, he didn’t raise the ceiling of NC State basketball and eventually became unpopular because he never came close to the ceilings established by 3 different coaches in 4 different decades. Sendek has a chance to hit the ceilings of the ASU program, however it is debatable at this point whether he is the type of coach who can actually take ASU to a higher level. Isn’t that the goal afterall?
All of this proves that location relative to other top basketball programs has very little to do with your actual success as a basketball coach. If it is a factor at all(I would argue that it isn’t), then it is at best very minor. NC State’s location in one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country and one of the highest rated places to live in the entire country is actually a huge asset to an NC State basketball coach. Essentially, NC State’s location was one of the reasons Sendek made the now famous 5 straight NCAA tournaments at NC State. He had Raleigh to sell when convincing the players that made up those teams to come to NC State. Not to mention that Raleigh is drivable from almost any area on the east coast that an NC State coach would recruit. Sendek now has those factors working against him at ASU. Not that ASU isn’t in a great area, but the distances to potential recruiting territories are great.
Sendek was largely hired by ASU based on his accomplishment of making 5 straight NCAA tournaments at NC State. It makes sense from ASU’s perspective. Hire a guy who has accomplished something recently that is outstanding relative to your own recent results and hope that translates into the new coach accomplishing similar results with your program permanently raising your ceiling. The miscalculation on ASU’s part was that while 5 straight NCAAs sounds good for a program like ASU, it was in fact not that significant of an accomplishment relative to the history of the program that Sendek coached.
Hiring Sendek would have been similar to NC State hiring Steve Lavin formerly of UCLA and now at St. Johns. Lavin had a very good record relative to former NC State coaches, but it actually represented underachieving for a coach at UCLA which is one of the top jobs in all of college basketball. So why would NC State want to hire a coach who underachieved in his former job? What are the chances that a previous underachieving coach is going to overachieve and permanently raise the ceiling of your program? The only reason to have hired Lavin is because he would have likely done better than Sidney Lowe. The same questions can now be asked about the strategy of Arizona St. hiring Herb Sendek.
None of this commentary is intended as a knock on Sendek. However, I wonder if eventually someone in the media will finally make the point that just maybe Sendek should want his job back at NC State. Or at least at a program with the resources to win that exist at NC State. He is certainly available and there are certainly better jobs with bigger opportunities in better locations. Yet, nobody has even attempted to pluck Sendek from the desert.
