Caulton Tudor weighed-in with more of his astute commentary related to the Wolfpack’s search for a basketball coach this moring.
Additionally, I shared some comments that dovetail with the focus of Tudor’s comments earlier today.
Selected excerpts from Tudor’s, “Hire will reflect on Fowler” are included below:
Since landing the job in September 2000, Fowler hasn’t faced anything nearly as important as the task at hand.
Right or wrong, the short- and long-range performance of the next coach will become Fowler’s responsibility. That sort of accountability comes with the keys to the AD’s office at most major colleges. It’s unavoidable.
For all practical purposes, the next Wolfpack coach and Fowler will be joined at the hip — actually the wallet — for the duration of their tenures on campus.
When he was forced to look elsewhere (defined as not the obvious of Barnes and Calipari), Fowler’s situation became much more precarious.
The nature of coaching hires is that Plan B is always more complex and infinitely less predictable than Plan A.
Other than for the nation’s most successful coaches, there is a litany of pluses and minuses to be carefully weighed for each potential candidate: Academic emphasis, affordability, age, recruiting skill, big-game experience, geographic background, playing style and personality. And those are a only sampling of the factors that could make the hire a boom or a bust.
In other words, the situation gets very dicey, very risky. There are as many ways to go wrong as right.
With no apparent foolproof target left to pursue, Fowler has to carefully research each point and counterpoint of those in the Plan B-group pool.
The one thing Fowler absolutely cannot afford to do is make a mistake that could put the basketball program miles behind Duke and North Carolina for the next several years.
