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Mike Moser Class and dignity take
The majority of colleges in the United States
who play NCAA basketball would crave a coach like Jerry Green.
All he did was display dignity during the worst of times, run
a class program, graduate all but one of his basketball players
and take his team to the NCAA tournament back-to-back years. His reward ... he was ingloriously cast out
from Doug Dickey's kingdom. I have lived in Tennessee for nearly two decades
now and this is the second time I have witnessed Dickey firing
a successful basketball coach and quite frankly, I don't get
it. Don DeVoe was sent away in much the same fashion
and after this most recent bloodletting, I stand confused as
to what the priorities are in Dickey's athletic department. Both men operated programs with class, insisted
on classroom success and enjoyed measures of success on the court.
And both were basically sent away as if they had done something
wrong. Today DeVoe is teaching basketball basics
to midshipmen at Navy where his talent for instilling fundamentals
in young ballplayers is appreciated. Jerry Green? Well, don't worry about him ...
UT is rapidly getting quite a reputation around the NCAA for
the way it treats its basketball coaches and for paying men NOT
to coach. He has plenty of time to enjoy UT's million-plus dollars
while he weighs options. Consider this: Green was 89-36 in four years
at Tennessee and made four consecutive trips to the NCAA tournament.
He never shamed the university, never was accused of running
a crooked program, never embarrassed Tennessee. What he did have this year was the worst chemistry
among ballplayers on the same team that any coach has been challenged
to deal with. Neither the Pope nor Doug Dickey could have done
any better with this year's basketball team. In the college ranks it takes more than raw
talent for a team to win. It takes chemistry among the players
and unfortunately for Green, he had four or five teams on the
court instead of one team. Maybe he should have acted differently
to instill a team concept but with the personalities he had to
deal with, I just doubt anyone could have done much better. It would not have hurt Tennessee to allow
Green another year. We'll never know if this year was a fluke
or the best Jerry Green can do. I will wager that Green will
land somewhere coaching and I pray this time it will be where
he is appreciated for being the man he is. Kansas coach Roy Williams probably summed
it up best when he told the Associated Press: "I was stunned,
appalled. It's almost as if you don't make the Final Four, you're
not successful. For seven years that program did not win 20 games
and was not in the tournament. In four years, he won 20 games
every year and was in the tournament every year. "He won. His players did the job in the
classroom. That's not enough for some reason. He did not win
enough, apparently." Added Purdue's Gene Keady about Green's dismissal,
"If you fill seats and graduate players and win games, what
is the criteria? That you don't make the Final Four? A missed
free throw, an injury, a bad call, things you have no accountability
over and you get fired." I wonder if Dickey has ever considered the
fact that he was responsible for hiring the recent parade of
basketball coaches at Tennessee, the same men that he later labeled
failures and sent away in shame? Now comes Buzz Peterson, another coach who
seems to be a class act and quality person. At first I wondered
why anyone would want to come to Tennessee to coach basketball
with the university's reputation for how it treats its coaches.
One can only hope that Peterson has a lucrative buyout contract
and doesn't rush to buy a house. |