RE: Columbus Dispatch Story

[Dan Marshall]

Amen!!!! 

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian McCann [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Wednesday, June 30, 2004 10:17 AM
To: address@hidden
Subject: [UC Basketball] Columbus Dispatch Story

Interesting column in the Dispatch today.

COMMENTARY
Start off right with a coach who schedules Ohio rivals Wednesday, June
30, 2004

BOB HUNTER

Without knowing the details of Ohio State's basketball coaching search,
it sounds as if Andy Geiger may end up offering the job to some guy who
teaches English lit, builds computers from scratch, plays the violin and
finds the Thirty Years' War simply fascinating. 
Chances are, Geiger's "ideal" candidate shoots a little hoops on his
garage when he's not reading Milton or Chaucer.

Human nature being what it is, this should not be considered surprising.
When you've spent as much time as Geiger has explaining academic
scandals, recruiting violations and the embarrassing acts of some of the
school's athletes, you've got to figure he occasionally closes the door
to his office and slips on one of his old Stanford jackets. Then, when
no one's looking, he pretends he's back in Palo Alto, running a program
where high-profile athletes covet straight A's in chemical engineering
or computer science rather than a C in speech.

There's nothing wrong with making academics your top priority in the
hiring of a basketball coach, of course. As we all know, academics are
the No. 1 reason people buy tickets to sports events and the big reason
60-year-old corporate chairmen wear scarlet-andgray football jerseys in
public and write giant checks to the university.

OK, so maybe it's not. But there's still nothing wrong with taking the
high road when it comes to athletics and trying to raise your program's
academic standards. Having an occasional academic all-American on the
basketball team is certainly a reasonable goal, and one that Ohio State
could do a little better job achieving. OSU has had one academic
all-American (Bill Hosket) in men's basketball , not exactly the kind of
record professors brag about when they run into their Michigan and
Northwestern comrades at the Shakespeare festival.

If this really is Geiger's emphasis and he isn't going to hire a Bob
Knight- or Bob Hugginstype who will sell tickets on basketball
reputation alone, one suggestion seems in order:

Geiger should insist that prospective candidates agree to schedule a
certain number of games against Ohio opponents every season, including
homeand-homes with the state's traditional basketball powers - Xavier,
Dayton and Cincinnati.

Under normal circumstances, it might seem a tad unreasonable for an AD
to tell a coach which teams he has to line up on his nonconference
schedule; these circumstances, however, are anything but.

Ohio State has a 19,000-seat arena it still has to pay for and thousands
of empty seats to fill. Seven years, a Final Four appearance and a
couple of Big Ten championships into his contract, Jim O'Brien probably
isn't going to welcome an AD's suggestion that he schedule games against
strong Ohio teams that would fill the building with fans; a coach trying
to land the job has no choice. You want the job, you give us a schedule
that the fans care about. To me, this is a nobrainer.

Unfortunately, this tired, old plea might fall upon deaf ears. A guy who
should know says the OSU athletics director told him he's not really
concerned about filling the Value City Arena seats, that that isn't an
important prerequisite in trying to find the right guy for the job.

If that's true, it will represent an incredible missed opportunity. 
Two or three years from now when Geiger is retired, the new coach will
be established. Taking care of himself, not the fans, will be his top
priority. That means scheduling a lot of guaranteed wins that nobody
wants to pay to see.

It will be too late then for the AD to suggest that a home-andhome
series with Xavier or UC would be good for the program. If he does,
he'll hear more of the same old dung about how Ohio State "can't
schedule every Ohio team" and has "too much to lose" as the state's lone
Big Ten school to schedule games with teams that might pull an upset.

The truth is much, much different. In basketball, OSU has never been
more than first among equals, and a loss to Xavier, Dayton or UC is no
upset. If any recruiting advantage is lost in these games (and to me
this is nothing more than coaching paranoia), it would be more than
offset by the added energy those games give to the program.

Ohio State needs a coach who isn't afraid to play the opponents that the
fans care about. Either that or a coach who has no choice.

Bob Hunter is a sports colum nist for The Dispatch address@hidden 


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