Worth reading again: Gregg Doyel's '07 Tubby column which predicted this outcome

BleedGopher

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per Doyel in 2007:

Tubby couldn't figure out how to fix it, so now Tubby is gone to Minnesota, and I've got news for the good folks at Minnesota who clearly haven't been paying attention to the details at Kentucky: Unless Tubby changes his ways, he'll flop at Minnesota. I mean, he'll be a complete and total failure.

Tubby was a victim of himself, of his own confidence. He's so good at X's and O's -- and he is really, really good with a clipboard -- that he thought he could hire whoever he wanted for his staff and be able to get it done. And the evidence is overwhelming that he could not.

Tubby has turned his coaching staff into an old boys' club, hiring only cronies. Tubby worked with David Hobbs at VCU in the mid-1980s. He worked with Scott Rigot at South Carolina in the late-80s. He coached Reggie Hanson (as an assistant) at Kentucky in the early 90s.

Clearly the key to working for Tubby isn't your ability. It's having worked with Tubby before. That's the kind of myopic world-view that can get you fired, which is what would have happened at Kentucky as soon as the inevitable NIT season happened, possibly as soon as next season.

Now he's Minnesota's problem. And Tubby will have problems at Minnesota, believe me. I'll hang him with his own words, because a few years back Tubby said something to the Dallas Morning News that should scare the absolute hell out of the state of Minnesota:

"All we promise (potential recruits) is an education and the opportunity to be part of the winningest college basketball program in America," Smith said in March 2005.

At Minnesota, he'll promise recruits an education and the opportunity to be part of one of the worst college basketball programs in the Big Ten.

He'll be fired by 2012.

http://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball/story/10080776

Go Gophers!!
 


In fairness, he hasn't been a complete and total failure. There have been some high points and successes.
 


Whatever happened to FriendOfTubby? He was adamant that everything that Tubby touched at Kentucky turned to gold.
 



per Doyel in 2007:

Tubby couldn't figure out how to fix it, so now Tubby is gone to Minnesota, and I've got news for the good folks at Minnesota who clearly haven't been paying attention to the details at Kentucky: Unless Tubby changes his ways, he'll flop at Minnesota. I mean, he'll be a complete and total failure.

Tubby was a victim of himself, of his own confidence. He's so good at X's and O's -- and he is really, really good with a clipboard -- that he thought he could hire whoever he wanted for his staff and be able to get it done. And the evidence is overwhelming that he could not.

Tubby has turned his coaching staff into an old boys' club, hiring only cronies. Tubby worked with David Hobbs at VCU in the mid-1980s. He worked with Scott Rigot at South Carolina in the late-80s. He coached Reggie Hanson (as an assistant) at Kentucky in the early 90s.

Clearly the key to working for Tubby isn't your ability. It's having worked with Tubby before. That's the kind of myopic world-view that can get you fired, which is what would have happened at Kentucky as soon as the inevitable NIT season happened, possibly as soon as next season.

Now he's Minnesota's problem. And Tubby will have problems at Minnesota, believe me. I'll hang him with his own words, because a few years back Tubby said something to the Dallas Morning News that should scare the absolute hell out of the state of Minnesota:

"All we promise (potential recruits) is an education and the opportunity to be part of the winningest college basketball program in America," Smith said in March 2005.

At Minnesota, he'll promise recruits an education and the opportunity to be part of one of the worst college basketball programs in the Big Ten.

He'll be fired by 2012.

http://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball/story/10080776

Go Gophers!!

proof this writer is not all there
 

You know it's going down hill when: @glen_perkins: count me in for a couples g's RT @ZanattaMike: #TubbyBuyoutFund is at $300 of $2,500,000
 

Nothing by Gregg Doyel is ever worth reading, regardless of the truth in it. Can't stand that guy.
 



You know it's going down hill when: @glen_perkins: count me in for a couples g's RT @ZanattaMike: #TubbyBuyoutFund is at $300 of $2,500,000

Thanks for pouring salt in the wound Glen. I wish I was lefthanded...
 

It goes to show you how wrong Greg Doyel's predictions really were: Tubby didn't get fired in 2012, he got extended.
 


"a complete and total failure"


What would that be? Here at Minnesota I mean?!


What coach since 1948 has led their team to more than One EOS Top 25 ranking every six years? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?!

How many coaches have gone without garnering a single win in the NCAA tournament?!

Dan Monson? Bill Musselman? Dutchie?

Who has led their team to a win in the NCAA tourney?! Clem? Is he the only one?! Or does winning a consolation game count? Then Dutch might have one, or was that Musselman?



So how bad would a coach have to be to be a "complete and total failure"????



possibly 3 trips to the NCAA tourney? More than any other Gopher coach before him that didn't cheat, and in only 6 years?!



And its 2013.


So he was off just a little bit.
 







"a complete and total failure"


What would that be? Here at Minnesota I mean?!


What coach since 1948 has led their team to more than One EOS Top 25 ranking every six years? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?!

How many coaches have gone without garnering a single win in the NCAA tournament?!

Dan Monson? Bill Musselman? Dutchie?

Who has led their team to a win in the NCAA tourney?! Clem? Is he the only one?! Or does winning a consolation game count? Then Dutch might have one, or was that Musselman?



So how bad would a coach have to be to be a "complete and total failure"????



possibly 3 trips to the NCAA tourney? More than any other Gopher coach before him that didn't cheat, and in only 6 years?!



And its 2013.


So he was off just a little bit.

You just cannot compare NCAA performance between coaches of years ago and today. Dutcher had a championship year (that's novel) and I think 4 other upper divisions finishes in his 11 years in the Big Ten. Musselman was here 4 years and had a championship and 2 other upper division finishes. Tubby has not cracked the upper division and would have NEVER been in the NCAA by the standards Dutcher and Mussleman has to go against.
 

"a complete and total failure"


What would that be? Here at Minnesota I mean?!


What coach since 1948 has led their team to more than One EOS Top 25 ranking every six years? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?!

How many coaches have gone without garnering a single win in the NCAA tournament?!

Dan Monson? Bill Musselman? Dutchie?

Who has led their team to a win in the NCAA tourney?! Clem? Is he the only one?! Or does winning a consolation game count? Then Dutch might have one, or was that Musselman?



So how bad would a coach have to be to be a "complete and total failure"????



possibly 3 trips to the NCAA tourney? More than any other Gopher coach before him that didn't cheat, and in only 6 years?!



And its 2013.


So he was off just a little bit.

Tiresome excuse. How many NCAA tournaments was Wisconsin in prior to 1994? How many have they been to beginning with 1994?
 


The Star Tribune picked up on this column and thread:

http://www.startribune.com/sports/blogs/192187481.html

Go Gophers!!

THE GOOD(from the article):

"Time out to give credit where credit is due: Upload doesn't have the kind of memory that can pull out this sort of thing on a moment's notice. However, a senior member at the wonderful blog GopherHole.com who posts under the name BleedGopher posted the Doyel column after Wednesday night's embarrassment at Ohio State.
"Worth reading again," BleedGopher headlined. "Gregg Doyel's '07 Tubby column which predicted this outcome."


THE BAD(from the comment section):

pantherhawka
Feb 21, 13
6:43 am
Ole Panther said the exact same thing as he did about brewster and kill...flop, flop, flop!
 

You just cannot compare NCAA performance between coaches of years ago and today. Dutcher had a championship year (that's novel) and I think 4 other upper divisions finishes in his 11 years in the Big Ten. Musselman was here 4 years and had a championship and 2 other upper division finishes. Tubby has not cracked the upper division and would have NEVER been in the NCAA by the standards Dutcher and Mussleman has to go against.

Basically all you have to do is play .500 ball in a power conference to get in. Dutcher would have wiped up with that kind of ease of entry. It's a very low bar and Tubby still can't hop over it.
 


With all of the $hitty luck I have had in my life, at least I have the good fortune of having BleedGopher on my side.

Kudos for your work, Bleed. You deserve the credit that the Strib article attributed to you. Well done.
 

Very nice of him to recognize GopherHole - not all reporters and news outlets would have done that.

Go Gophers!!

I always knew we were a wonderful blog.

Thanks for being our ambassador, Bleed.
 

jamiche --

Is that so?! All you have to do is get to .500 in a power conference and your in?!

I'm not sure how accurate that statement is. I'll have to do some checking, my guess is that some teams above .500 in the SEC, ACC, Pac-10 might not be getting invites this year.

Unless by power conference you mean Big Ten or Big East and those 2 conferences only?!



And Dutch's teams made the EOS rankings only twice in his 11 years, one of those times was the season that doesn't count, where we officially went 0-27. Only 5 of those other 10 years did he get to .500 in conf play. Two of those 5 years were only 9-9 seasons which meant a lot less back then that it does now. Of the other 10 seasons, Dutch's teams placed, on average, in conference, in 5.7th place. Out of only 10 teams remember. BOTTOM HALF.

He got one team to a Big Ten Title, the 1982 team. This team lost to an unranked Kansas St team in the ooc. They swept both games vs #16 Iowa, but yet lost 4 games to Unranked Conf opponents. Got a bye in the NCAA tournament and so was automatically in the 2nd round, the round of 32, where they beat unranked Tenn-Chattanooga by 1 pt, and then lost in the Sweet 16 to #20 ranked Louisville. Minnesota was ranked #7/6 going into the tourney. Iowa, the only other ranked Big Ten team that year, also lost in the Sweet 16. The Big Ten's 3rd and 4th place teams got beat in the 1st and 2nd rounds of the NCAA tournament by a #9 seed and a team ranked in the AP but not in the UPI poll.


I know we all love to look back at the supposedly glorious gopher past with fondness, but the truth is that the Big Ten was not all that powerful of a conference back during the Musselman/Dutcher years. The 2 years Minnesota won the Big Ten title, they weren't even able to get past the Sweet 16 either year. In 82, only 2 teams were in the rankings, and in 72 only 1 or 3 teams were even in the Rankings depending on which ranking you looked at, with Indiana in the AP but not the UPI and Ohio St was only barely in the AP poll, but was left off of the UPI poll. 2nd Place Indiana went to the NIT and lost in the first round to unranked Princeton.

We won the Conf Title in 1972 after losing 2 games to unranked opponents in the ooc part of the schedule and they also lost to #6 Marquette by 15 pts. Their opponent in the Sweet 16, FSU, was a higher ranked opponent, they were #10, we were #11, but the game wasn't even close, as we lost by 14.


Those were 2 of Minnesota's 3 most glorious seasons in the modern era, and they were disappointing in terms of how we did against teams outside of our conference, both in the ooc part of the season and in the Big Dance. Big Ten Champs and couldn't even get to the Elite 8, much less the FF?! And we almost didn't get to the Sweet 16 the one year, winning by 1 pt over Tenn-Chattanooga?! Never knew them to be a cbb jaugernaut?! And the other year we got the bye because we were Big Ten Champs, or who knows if we would have made the Sweet 16 or not?! Our 2nd place conf team didn't prove much in the 1st round of the NIT tourney that year and we didn't prove much in the Big Dance.



There are a lot of ways in which you can rip on Tubby, comparing his teams to Dutcher's, is simply not the best way.
 

Greg Doyle article dated 03/2007

Sorry if this had been posted before...

http://www.cbssports.com/collegebas
ketball/story/10080776

Tubby blew it with Wildcats; what chance do Gophers have?


Tubby Smith woke up Thursday as the coach at Kentucky but will wake up Friday at Minnesota. That's a ghastly career arc, but Tubby did this to himself. Kentucky fans didn't help the situation, but they aren't the losers here. Tubby is.


There wasn't much applause for Tubby Smith this past season. (Getty Images)
Tubby had one of the best jobs in college basketball and drove it right up to the side of the cliff. He didn't drive Kentucky over that cliff -- that would have come next year, assuming junior center Randolph Morris turns pro -- but he had this monster of a basketball program creeping right up to the edge.

Tubby couldn't figure out how to fix it, so now Tubby is gone to Minnesota, and I've got news for the good folks at Minnesota who clearly haven't been paying attention to the details at Kentucky: Unless Tubby changes his ways, he'll flop at Minnesota. I mean, he'll be a complete and total failure. If he couldn't attract marquee players at Kentucky -- Kentucky for God's sake -- how is he all of a sudden going to bring them to maudlin Minnesota?

Kentucky is one of the top three coaching jobs in college basketball, right up there with North Carolina and Duke. And Tubby recruited like he was at, well, Minnesota.

Now he is at Minnesota, which isn't one of the top three coaching jobs in the Big Ten. Or one of the top six. In the Big Ten alone, the Minnesota job is behind Ohio State, Michigan State, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan, and probably on par with Iowa. If I'm right about that -- and I'm right -- that means Minnesota is seventh or eighth among the basketball programs in its conference, ahead only of Purdue, Penn State and Northwestern.

So who here believes uninspiring Tubby Smith is going to do at Minnesota what he couldn't do at Kentucky -- which is to say, overachieve?

At Kentucky, Tubby underachieved. There's not a lot of debate about that one. In the smaller sense he overachieved with this team, because his 2006-07 squad didn't have blatant NCAA Tournament talent and yet Tubby got the Wildcats there with ease. But he's at Kentucky, not Toledo. With so much wind in his sails at Kentucky, he should have had Duke-like talent. UNC-like talent. Not the dreck he was starting at point guard and power forward.

Tubby was a victim of himself, of his own confidence. He's so good at X's and O's -- and he is really, really good with a clipboard -- that he thought he could hire whoever he wanted for his staff and be able to get it done. And the evidence is overwhelming that he could not.

Look at Tubby's resume. There have been times in his career when he has won big, but those times almost always were with someone else's players. He was at Tulsa for only four years, which means he was winning for most of that time with someone else's recruits. He was at Georgia for just two years, which means he won completely with someone else's players.

At Kentucky he won his national championship in his first year, with Rick Pitino's roster. In the last two years, stuck with players that were signed solely by Tubby's staff, Kentucky lost a total of 25 games. That's not Kentucky. That's Kennesaw State.

Tubby has turned his coaching staff into an old boys' club, hiring only cronies. Tubby worked with David Hobbs at VCU in the mid-1980s. He worked with Scott Rigot at South Carolina in the late-80s. He coached Reggie Hanson (as an assistant) at Kentucky in the early 90s.

Clearly the key to working for Tubby isn't your ability. It's having worked with Tubby before. That's the kind of myopic world-view that can get you fired, which is what would have happened at Kentucky as soon as the inevitable NIT season happened, possibly as soon as next season.

Meantime, Kentucky fans were going nuts. Around the country they have been perceived -- and they will be perceived in the coming days, mark my words -- as out of control, ungrateful, cruel. Inside the state borders, though, UK fans saw what Tubby was doing to this gem of a basketball program. He was turning it into cubic zirconium.

Now he's Minnesota's problem. And Tubby will have problems at Minnesota, believe me. I'll hang him with his own words, because a few years back Tubby said something to the Dallas Morning News that should scare the absolute hell out of the state of Minnesota:

"All we promise (potential recruits) is an education and the opportunity to be part of the winningest college basketball program in America," Smith said in March 2005.

At Minnesota, he'll promise recruits an education and the opportunity to be part of one of the worst college basketball programs in the Big Ten.

He'll be fired by 2012.
 


"the truth is that the Big Ten was not all that powerful of a conference back during the Musselman/Dutcher years."

I'm not so sure you'll find universal agreement on this assertion.

1973 - IU in Final Four
1975 - IU goes unbeaten until losing in a regional final after Scott May, one of its top players, breaks his arm
1976 - IU wins national title, beats Michigan in final
1979 - MSU wins national title
1980 - Purdue and Iowa make Final Four after finishing 3-4 in conference behind IU and OSU
1981 - IU wins national title

These things go in cycles, obviously, but the late 70s - early 80s was a fairly high cycle for the Big Ten.
 

DO YOUR EYES WORK PEOPLE?!?!


That was bad, not sure how I missed that. I remember that article at the time as well. I remember thinking Doyle was as dumb as the UK fans...

I still think it was a good hire at the time. Unfortunately, it's not working out.
 




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