(Photo, Cornell Daily Sun)Foxsports.com's Jeff Goodman, who lives in Boston and is well-connected particularly in that area, is reporting that Steve Donahue will meet with Boston College director of athletics Gene DeFilippo today regarding the men's basketball coaching vacancy.
Donahue has not immediately returned calls and texts seeking comment. However, sources close to Cornell's program have confirmed that Goodman's report is accurate.
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My take: I think Donahue should, and has every right to, give the BC job a long look, despite the fact that it may not be a "great job" in the eyes of some.
On a conference call a week or so ago, Temple's Fran Dunphy spoke about how Steve is a terrific CEO of the small corporation, as he termed it, that is Cornell Basketball. He not only does the X's and O's and recruiting part well, but he connects with alums, parents and fans and also is excellent with the media. He is everything that DeFilippo is looking for at BC. He is a quality CEO in every sense of the term. What DeFilippo needs to assess is can Donahue recruit the type of student-athlete that will make BC successful on a continual basis in the ACC? That is a hurdle Donahue will have to overcome in any interview for a high-level job. And if DeFilippo wants Donahue as his next coach, he'll have to make a little leap of faith there.
Every Ivy coach has to overcome the knock of lacking experience in recruiting scholarship athletes. Dunphy has already proven himself in four years at Temple, but there's a key difference there. Philadelphia basketball is much, much more fertile than Boston or Massachusetts, and Dunphy has been able to draw very good local talent to North Philly. The jury is still out on Craig Robinson at Oregon State, and it looked for a moment this year like Bill Carmody was going to get over the hump at Northwestern, but his team faded in the Big Ten.
Only time will tell if this ends up being Donahue's home run job, if he realizes it's not as good as it seems, or if BC simply decides to go another direction. But if BC ends up being Donahue's next stop, it's a move everyone in the Cornell community can respect.
Donahue has not immediately returned calls and texts seeking comment. However, sources close to Cornell's program have confirmed that Goodman's report is accurate.
**
My take: I think Donahue should, and has every right to, give the BC job a long look, despite the fact that it may not be a "great job" in the eyes of some.
On a conference call a week or so ago, Temple's Fran Dunphy spoke about how Steve is a terrific CEO of the small corporation, as he termed it, that is Cornell Basketball. He not only does the X's and O's and recruiting part well, but he connects with alums, parents and fans and also is excellent with the media. He is everything that DeFilippo is looking for at BC. He is a quality CEO in every sense of the term. What DeFilippo needs to assess is can Donahue recruit the type of student-athlete that will make BC successful on a continual basis in the ACC? That is a hurdle Donahue will have to overcome in any interview for a high-level job. And if DeFilippo wants Donahue as his next coach, he'll have to make a little leap of faith there.
Every Ivy coach has to overcome the knock of lacking experience in recruiting scholarship athletes. Dunphy has already proven himself in four years at Temple, but there's a key difference there. Philadelphia basketball is much, much more fertile than Boston or Massachusetts, and Dunphy has been able to draw very good local talent to North Philly. The jury is still out on Craig Robinson at Oregon State, and it looked for a moment this year like Bill Carmody was going to get over the hump at Northwestern, but his team faded in the Big Ten.
Only time will tell if this ends up being Donahue's home run job, if he realizes it's not as good as it seems, or if BC simply decides to go another direction. But if BC ends up being Donahue's next stop, it's a move everyone in the Cornell community can respect.
3 comments:
I don't see why everybody assumes that it's more difficult to recruit scholarship players. It's easier. You try convincing a kid that his family should pay $200,000 for an education that another school is offering for free.
I think that the bigger question is CAN Steve Donahue identify and attract the great athletes that BC needs to compete in the ACC. The story is often told about how (1) Louis Dale basically recruited himself to Cornell; (2) Jeff Foote's mom recruited him to Cornell; and (3) Ryan Wittman, the best of the bunch, fell through cracks of every BCS school which SHOULD have offered him a scholarship right into the lap of Steve Donahue. Nobody else wanted him.
Those amusing anecdotes, which make for great tournament human interest back stories, would make me nervous as an AD that Steve Donahue, for all the success that he has had building Cornell up from the depths of the League, got very, very lucky in having his big three stars come together. Can he do it on a proactive, recurring basis? That's still very uncertain.
People forget that Cornell rose to second and third place finishes in the Ivy League before the Big 3 ever arrived on campus. Based on this, Kathy Orton predicted the rise of Cornell BEFORE Dale et al ever showed up, as Cornell was already exhibiting stellar recruits such as former Rookie of the Year Adam Gore.
We didn't begin when Dale, Witt, and Foote arrived, we simply moved from competitive to dominant.
Even Wittman credited the class who were seniors when he arrived as denoting the beginning of Cornell's rise, not his own arrival.
I may be wrong but Peck and Wroblewski were recruited and did not arrive miraculously. With a good new coach, should one be needed, I really don't predict the world ending anytime soon.
ANON 11:50 is absolutely correct. Cornell's 69 league W's, starting with the 2003-04 season, is the best through the last seven years.
Starting with Toppert and Taylor, through Collins, Dow, Naeve, Gore, and others who made their respective marks, it took long enough that those who call assembling the Class of 2010 "luck," need to rethink that.
Seriously, alot of us have seen the old adage "chance favors the prepared," play out all too often in our day-to-day lives. There is no question in my mind that something more than chance alone was at work here.
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