Speed was of the essence.
University of Maryland President Darryll J. Pines said so Sunday in his first comments after men’s basketball coach Kevin Willard dumped the Terps in favor of Villanova.
Pines understood how important it was to assert the “urgency and thoroughness” of the university’s national coaching search after Willard had held Maryland hostage in a will-he-won’t-he-drama throughout the NCAA Tournament.
He made good on his language Tuesday, announcing Buzz Williams as Willard’s successor.
There’s no disputing what Pines described as Williams’ “exemplary record of competitive success.” He built rugged winners in the Big East, ACC and SEC, often not under the easiest circumstances. There wasn’t a more ready-made top coach on a market that had already been picked bare by the time Maryland started searching.
But this choice has to be understood in terms of the urgency Pines expressed two days before it was made.
Maryland found itself knee-deep in a public mess, with no athletic director and an ex-coach who had used his bully pulpit to lambast the university’s spending priorities until he danced off with another suitor. Its team, which just made the Sweet 16 for the first time in none years, had already begun scattering to the four winds.
The Terps needed a coach who could credibly begin leading the climb out of that morass in days, not weeks.
Williams isn’t a young coach covered in stardust. He doesn’t have deep ties to Maryland.
He is, however, a hardened battler who knows how to elevate a program amid the chaotic tides of modern college basketball. That’s what Maryland needed right now.
There were those around the program enchanted by the notion of hiring a younger coach who might fully come into his own in College Park, as Dusty May did at Michigan this year. George Mason’s Tony Skinn, who interviewed for the job, according to a source, would have fit that bill.
Former Maryland greats Len Elmore and Tom McMillen made a push to keep the job in the family, saying the university should stop hiring “mercenary coaches” in the wake of Willard’s stormy departure.
“We’ve tried it one way, and we could almost say that it’s the definition of insanity because we keep doing the same thing over and over again with the same results,” Elmore said Monday. “Our position now is the University of Maryland needs to have University of Maryland people running the program and leading the basketball program. I think that’s not out of the question. I know fans listen to big names, and a lot of these names are planted by agents and a lot of other people, and we understand that. But administration insiders shouldn’t get sucked into that.”
That put a spotlight on former Terps point guard Duane Simpkins, who just led American to the NCAA Tournament.
But the next Gary Williams — an alumnus who also happened to be an established winner in the Big East and Big Ten — was not walking through the door.
Faced with an existential crisis whipped up by Willard’s highly public criticisms of the athletic department, Pines opted for a steady hand.
It would be an upset if Williams does not win consistently at Maryland. He took Marquette to five straight NCAA Tournaments, Virginia Tech and Texas A&M to three straight.
In none of those cases did he take over the most powerful ...
