Rand: Gophers under Pitino following similar script to Tubby -- but ending feels diff

BleedGopher

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per Rand:

Richard Pitino entered Year 6 as Gophers men’s basketball coach with zero NCAA tournament victories, a Big Ten career record well below .500 and whispers (maybe louder than that) that his job could be in jeopardy while coaching under an athletic director who didn’t hire him.

His team survived the NCAA tournament bubble and won its first-round game against a higher-seeded opponent Thursday, giving the Gophers a rare victory in the Big Dance.

If that scenario sounds familiar it’s because it is very similar to the tenure of Pitino’s predecessor at Minnesota, Tubby Smith.

Smith’s time at Minnesota ended abruptly after that sixth season in 2012-13 — when he led the 11th-seeded Gophers to an upset of UCLA in the NCAA tournament before bowing out against Florida and then fired by then-athletic director Norwood Teague.

Smith’s tourney win was the Gophers’ first official NCAA victory since 1990 and their first on the court since the (vacated) Final Four run in 1997. No matter. Teague decided he had seen enough and wanted his own guy. A winding search led to Pitino, who was 30 years old and had just one year of head coaching experience at the time.

Smith made the NCAA tournament three times in his six seasons (with that one victory), finishing with an overall record of 124-81 and a Big Ten record of 44-62.

Pitino is 112-91 with two NCAA berths counting this season (with one victory and a chance for another Saturday) and a 40-70 record in Big Ten games.

And yet there’s a sense that Pitino has his team on a greater upward trajectory at this point than Smith did. There are reasons for that, which is where the scripts for the two coaches perhaps deviate.

With Smith, there was a sense that his tenure had peaked — that winning one NCAA tournament game was about as good as it was going to get and that the energy (or talent) for more just wasn’t there.

https://www.winonadailynews.com/mic...cle_01f9f6ac-c2d8-5a41-a3ca-ecd59744a8e2.html

Go Gophers!!
 

Did Rand leave the Star Tribune? I agree with this take.
 






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