Chris Holtmann is the new head coach of the Ohio State men's basketball team. That is cool and good, because Holtmann seems cool and good, and if everything goes well Ohio State fans will forget that the first half of this coaching search, the one in which we spent the middle of this week furious that the decidedly uncool Greg McDermott from Creighton might become the next head coach.
Which caused us to spend several hours Wednesday night griping on Twitter about something that didn't end up happening. It was dumb and ridiculous and you would really hope that in the two months that Gene Smith had to think about this, he would've come up with a better plan than "let's wing it!" It seems to have all worked out in the end, but in more of a Wacky Races kind of way instead of a Mission: Impossible kind of way.
Which is exactly my point.
A decade ago, then-Michigan athletic director Bill Martin was chilling on a boat in the Atlantic ocean as the city of Ann Arbor was about to burn to the ground in a righteous fury because the AD of one of the most important collegiate institutions in America was seemingly unconcerned that because Lloyd Carr had recently left, he was without a head football coach for a damn month. I'll let The BIG HOUSE Blog (yes, that's how they prefer to write it) summarize:
I am deep in the middle of reading John Bacon's 3 and Out, which clearly details how Sailboat Bill completely screwed up the coaching search, which alienated pretty much every group associated with the University including; Alumni, former players, President Mary Sue Coleman, the media, and all Michigan fans. If you think about it, being able to piss off so many people was quite an accomplishment.
The Sailboat weekend pretty much went as we thought.
- Les Miles wants the job and tries to contact Bill.
- Bill doesn't return the messages and takes off for a long weekend (side note: when you are in the middle of the most important thing you do in your job, it's probably not the best time to take a long weekend)
- Bill gets a new cell phone and doesn't know how to use it. Really? How do you not know how to answer a phone?
- Herbie breaks the Miles to Michigan story
- All hell breaks loose and Bill is on his sailboat and listening to a Kansas CD.
- Bill doesn't realize what has happen until he gets home from Florida.
- Complete disaster
You can read a less bullet-pointy version of this narrative from MLive.com, but the ultimate result of this is that Les Miles was never going to become the head coach of the Michigan Wolverines. In part because there are a lot of old angry boosters who hate Les Miles for some reason, but also in part because Bill Martin completely borked one of the most important responsibilities of his career.
To commemorate Michigan screwing this up so unbelievably badly, I made a really excellent photoshop that I'm very proud of to this day. Michigan fans have commemorated it by editing Bill Martin's Wikipedia page.
The thing is though, even after all of this, (most reasonable) Michigan fans didn't think the search was a failure. After all, their eventual hire of Rich Rodriguez meant that they were bringing in one of the hottest young coaching talents in the country on to campus. Hiring Rich Rod was the equivalent of Texas going out and getting Tom Herman; the excitement was real and justified. And then, as Rodriguez failed to produce anything resembling a competent football team, it all kind of blew up in their faces.
The whole cycle then repeats itself with Brady Hoke, who has one good year followed by increasingly bad years, and then the manna that is Jim Harbaugh falls from the heavens somehow and all is okay. For now.
The schadenfreude you probably felt while watching that play out was probably pretty rewarding, but part of the reason why you, an Ohio State fan, got to be so smug about it was because the Buckeyes really hadn't had to deal with anything like that in either of the two revenue sports for some time, and certainly not in the era of FlightAware and social media.
The hiring of Urban Meyer was more of a coronation than anything, and because Matta himself finished his career in Columbus with the distinction of being the third longest tenured basketball coach in Ohio State history, his hiring was the last time anyone was wringing their hands in Columbus about Who Comes Next? Here's Jim Jackson in 2004, talking about the recently fired Jim O'Brien:
"Without knowing all of the facts, it's hard for me to give any kind of an assessment on what happened. Only coach O'Brien knows what the real situation was. I just know it puts the school in a tough spot, especially at this time of the year. They need to get a coach rather quickly and start getting ready for next season."
And then the article goes on to speculate about Bobby Knight. It's depressing, even if you know the outcome. Which, of course, was Ohio State coming out clean in this search with the hiring of Thad Matta from Xavier. Whatever you want to say about Matta, he had an incredible career with the Buckeyes, and I doubt you'd find many Buckeye fans who would do anything differently if they had a chance to roll the years back to 2004 and make the hire all over again.
But even that decision wasn't devoid of drama, mostly because Thad more or less lied about his interest in the job in the first place:
A week after denying he was interested in becoming men's basketball coach at Ohio State, Xavier's Thad Matta accepted the position Wednesday.
...
Dawn Rogers, Xavier athletic director, confirmed Matta's hiring in an e-mail to Associated Press shortly after she received a call from him early Wednesday evening.
"I always had the uneasy feeling that Thad might be the next Ohio State coach," Rogers said at a news conference. "Ultimately, he did what he needed to do to be where he wanted to be as a coach."
So will Chris Holtmann, who will be the next head men's basketball coach at Ohio State. But if you're tired and frustrated at all the drama that led him to the Buckeyes, understand that this isn't just a normal part of the process, it's expected. Free tattoos and rigged raffles and various other stupid controversies aside, Buckeye fans have been insanely, improbably lucky over the past decade and a half about how often and how much they've had to worry about the person who takes over for their favorite teams.
That changed this week, and while Gene Smith certainly shoulders a lot of responsibility and blame for my angry late night Tweets on Wednesday, it's also important to understand that this kind of really stupid drama is the general rule that colleges must follow. LSU, Michigan, Texas, Notre Dame, USC, and on and on have had their fair share of coaching drama in the past several years, and now the roulette wheel has landed on your Ohio State men's basketball team.
Chris Holtmann seems like a pretty good bet for Gene Smith and Ohio State. He's young, his career trajectory is very similar to that of Thad's, he's had success in a competitive league, and he's improved his team every season while also making some noise in the NCAA tournament. I'm confident that he's going to do very well in Columbus, based on his past success and proximity to Ohio.
It all sounds great. Just don't forget that Thad Mattas and Jim Tressels and Urban Meyers are the exceptions to the above rule, and four years could prove the Holtmann hire to be a bust with Gene Smith and the Buckeyes right back where they started, bobbing on the proverbial sailboat in the middle of the ocean and wondering what the hell to do next.
And really don't forget that you could always be a Butler fan, sitting back and wondering just what the hell just happened.
"Holtmann interviewing right now"
— Tyler Hicks (@THicksBH) June 8, 2017
"Holtmann has rejected an interview"
"Holtmann removed name from consideration"
"Holtmann next OSU coach" pic.twitter.com/3kae7y53Gl
