Alkiadt said:
calumnus said:
Alkiadt said:
Cal88 said:
bearsandgiants said:
Saw this coming the moment we extended Madsen. We're ****ed.
Smith has one NCAA tourney appearance and one NCAA win in 5 years at WSU. His record there in 5 years is 94-71 overall and 49-48 in the P12. His first two years he was 13-24 in the P12, so Madsen is well ahead of him in his first year.
Smith had a career year at WSU and is a solid coach. But he never won a league championship. He never finished higher than 4th in the WCC. And until this year, never been to the NCAA's. And by the way, let's please not forget the fact that Madsen and Cal beat him at home this year.
What has changed to coincide with his best year ever was that he was going to be going back to the WCC (a two team NCAA bid conference) if he stayed at WSU, with Gonzaga right up the road in Spokane. Good luck with that, although it looks to be a potentially great rivalry in the Palouse for the next two years.
Time that with the Stanford opening, a great job with a housing allowance in Menlo Park/Palo Alto (maybe even live on campus?), and joining the ACC, which is likely an 8 or 9 team NCAA bid conference. Stanford holds on to coaches and he'll have plenty of patience to get it turned around . But it's not like they hired Coach K.
To say Cal was a better job than WSU was 5 years
ago would be wrong. At the time, he wanted the WSU job and was not interested in the Cal **** show job. It will be interesting to see if Stanford will adjust their transfer policies in this age of the portal.
WSU beat Arizona twice.
Like I said, he had a great year.
And Oregon State, USC and Oregon also beat Arizona.
Not twice. WSU was the only team that also beat Arizona at McHale. Arizona's only home loss.
Before he took over at Columbia they had only 2 winning seasons (and barely) in the previous 25 years.
Smith took them to 25 wins, the most in over 124 years of Columbia basketball history. They did not win the Ivy that year, but Yale went on to beat #21 Baylor and then bow out in a close loss to #19 Duke. Columbia won the CIT, beating 28-9 Big West Champ UC Irvine in the Finals.
He then took over a USF team that went 15-15 the previous year and had mostly losing seasons this century and won 20, 21and 22 games, before taking the WSU job.
WSU had had 7 straight losing seasons when Smith took the job. A handful of winning seasons in the prior 25 years (mostly the 3 years Tony Bennett was there). Smith went 25-10, nearly won the PAC-12 Championship. Statistically it is the second best team in over 124 years of WSU history.
Kyle Smith is a good coach. He is a program builder in 3 straight jobs.
Mark Madsen took over a Utah Valley program that went 25-10 the year before under Mark Pope and went 11-19, before building back to 28-9 three years later.
Madsen is nicer. Smith is smarter. They are both good coaches.
I am happy enough with Madsen given it was Knowlton doing the hiring and hopefully he has a winning record next year and improves from there.