Mack, Mooney making waves by staying put

It hasn’t just been on the floor where college basketball’s little guys have been chalking up some victories this March.

Butler and VCU will carry the banner for programs outside of the traditional BCS alignment at the Final Four in Houston, and at least two coaches from a non-power league have made statements of their own with decisions that they reached over the weekend. Chris Mack’s stunning rejection of Tennessee and Chris Mooney’s mammoth contract extension to prevent a move to Georgia Tech left at least two major programs with coaching searches to finish and kept Xavier and Richmond firmly in their current places as regular contenders for Atlantic 10 titles and NCAA bids.

A reported eight-year deal worth $16 million was undoubtedly a difficult offer for Mack to turn down on its face, but look a little deeper. He has no prior connection to Tennessee and the Vols are staring down the barrel of potential NCAA sanctions that could cripple their program. Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton also seems to be running a house divided – how else would something like this leak out? Being turned down by Xavier? That’s not supposed to happen at an SEC school with virtually unlimited resources at its fingertips, and it’s certainly not supposed to go public.

As it stands now, the Vols’ turmoil isn’t ending soon. They were forced to fire Bruce Pearl just one year after their first Elite Eight run in program history and face the real possibility of their two best players, Scotty Hopson and Tobias Harris, jumping to the NBA. Also working against the next Tennessee coach is that men’s basketball, at best, is the school’s No. 3 sport. Football will always be king on Rocky Top (along with everywhere else in the SEC except Kentucky), and Pat Summitt’s women’s program has been drawing bigger crowds than the men for most of the past 25 years. Scooping Cuonzo Martin from Missouri State late Sunday night might be just what Tennessee needs to save itself from this sudden tailspin, but the former Purdue star isn’t walking into comfortable circumstances.

Ohio is home for Mack, and it’s looking like he has no intention of leaving. He’s a Cleveland native and a Xavier graduate, Class of 1992. He has a gleaming on-campus facility, the Cintas Center, which the Musketeers regularly pack. As recently as last year, Mack’s program was one of the top-20 most valuable in the country and one of only two non-BCS schools to make the cut (UNLV was the other). He can schedule just about any team in the country and arrive at any location via private charter. He has an excellent area to recruit – five players on the Xavier roster this year were from Ohio, including starting center Kenny Frease, and three were from nearby Indiana. He’s got a Naismith candidate in Tu Holloway. There’s no guarantee that he would find life any better at Tennessee, and Mack decided to go with what he knew.

Mooney faced the same circumstances when Georgia Tech reportedly came calling to lure the 38-year-old to the ACC. It’s a chance that he’s turned down before as recently as last season, when he said no to Boston College and left the job open for the Eagles to hire Cornell’s Steve Donahue. Mooney’s extension, his third in as many years, will carry him through the 2020-21 campaign and give him the sort of security that will make him the envy of his profession. He’s been given the necessary time to turn Richmond into a consistent winner and has delivered three straight seasons of 20 victories or more, back-to-back trips to the NCAA Tournament and a Sweet 16 run this year.

Much like Mack, Mooney doesn’t need to go far from home to recruit star players. Justin Harper, a Richmond native, is a virtual lock to be selected in the upcoming NBA Draft. Darien Brothers, another Richmond native, started all but one game for the Spiders in 2010-11. Six of Richmond’s players hail from Virginia (Harper, Brothers), Washington, D.C. (Cedrick Lindsay), or Pennsylvania (Kevin Hovde, Greg Robbins, Dan Geriot), which also happens to be Mooney’s home state. A Philadelphia native and Princeton graduate, Mooney has spent most of his life in the Mid-Atlantic region. He came back to the East Coast after one season as the head coach at Air Force and has flourished thanks to many of the the same advantages that Mack enjoys with Xavier – institutional commitment, fertile recruiting base, strong non-conference schedule and a rising national profile.

Mooney could have asked for something similar to the cushy contract that Paul Hewitt enjoyed since his run to the national championship game in 2004, but it’s hard to believe that the Yellow Jackets would have had the stomach to sink much more dead cash into a basketball program that has enjoyed just one winning season in ACC play since 2000. Five first-round picks in the NBA Draft (Chris Bosh, Jarrett Jack, Thaddeus Young, Javaris Crittenton and Derrick Favors) weren’t enough to help Hewitt get things right against the likes of Duke and North Carolina. Mooney certainly didn’t need to stomach the aggravation of rebuilding from scratch in Atlanta.

Will coaches like Brad Stevens, Shaka Smart, Josh Pastner and Sydney Johnson follow Mack’s lead? Three of the last eight Final Four berths have been earned by teams from outside of the BCS leagues. Kansas, a No. 1 seed in each of the past two tournaments and a team loaded with McDonald’s All-Americans and future NBA players, has now lost to Northern Iowa and VCU in consecutive years. The difference between the traditional powers and the former stepping stones in a given year has never been smaller. Mack clearly recognized this when he gave Tennessee his answer. It remains to be seen whether he’s started a trend that his peers outside the BCS will follow.

– Bill Koch

 

Independent Longwood Pushes Forward

Scrolling through scores from the dozens of college basketball games that were played on Wednesday night, one score stuck out to me:

Longwood 83
William & Mary 81

As one of the very few remaining Independents in all of college basketball, every victory for Longwood is a step in the right direction and makes the prospects of conference affiliation that much more attainable.  Beating an in-state opponent from the well-respected CAA makes the long road towards conference affiliation even more rewarding.

There is no question that the deck is stacked against an Independent in this day and age of Division I basketball.  Budgets are smaller, travel is tougher and the prospects of a post-season tournament are daunting. In fact according to Rivals.com, the last Independent to win a tournament game was the University of New Orleans… in 1987.

All of that doesn’t discourage eighth-year head coach Mike Gillian, the former top assistant for George Mason’s Jim Larranaga, who has built the Longwood program piece-by-piece since taking over the helm in 2003. While some would look at it as a handicap, Gillian and the Lancers relish the opportunity to play college basketball’s premier teams and to travel to some of its most famous venues.  To Longwood, that opportunity is their post-season tournament.  Since taking on a fully-loaded Division I schedule in 2004, Longwood has played at Kansas, Kentucky, Indiana, Wake Forest and Illinois, just to name a few.  They have traveled to 28 states (and Washington D.C.) since 2004 and this year alone they will trek approximately 17,832 miles for 17 games away from their hometown of Farmville, Virginia.

Despite the challenges, there have been gratifying seasons, games and moments in the program’s short Division I history.   In 2009, during just their second season as a full-fledged Division I member, the Lancers went 17-14 and posted the most program wins since 2001.  They are an impressive 33-12 at home since the start of the 2007, with signature wins over George Washington and James Madison among others.

Back in 2004 during the program’s Division I infancy while playing at top-ranked Illinois (the Deron Williams, Luther Head, Dee Brown juggernaut version of the Illini), the Lancers took a timeout after tying the score at two with 19:32 to play in the first half to save the moment for prosperity and to use it as a teachable experience.

Prior to making the leap to Division I, Longwood had established a prominent basketball program at the Division II and Division III ranks including a Division III Final Four appearance in 1980 and three other
Division II NCAA tournament berths.  Jerome Kersey was a two-time All-American for the Lancers before embarking on a 17-year NBA career that included an NBA championship.  They know that the next tournament bid hinges on their ability to find a conference home.

The goal is membership in the Big South conference, a ten-team league that lies perfectly within Longwood’s geographic footprint. There are other conference possibilities as well, including the Atlantic Sun with schools dispersed throughout the southeast.

Make no mistake: Wednesday’s two-point win over William & Mary is just one victory in a long season and an even longer journey towards conference affiliation.  But for a school still seeking a conference identity, it was another step in the right direction.

- Jon Schaeffer