I always felt GT was kind of an anomaly: football school that was also very good at basketball in a very good basketball conference.
Obviously we won the National Championship in 1990, but for a while we had the 2nd longest bowl streak in the nation until it was broken in 2015. From mid 90's until 2015 GT was a regular in the post season. 'Bama couldn't even say that during that time. We also won the conference multiple times during those years, or played for the conference championship. Multiple division championships as well.
On the basketball side, we had the Final Four in 1990 and Finals in 2004. Cremins also had 9 straight NCAA Tournament appearances from 1986-1993. Paul Hewitt came in and took us to the tourney 5 of his 11 years with the Finals appearance in 2004. Slew of NBA first rounders that littered the NBA rosters.
Basketball has been a wasteland for pretty much a decade now. There are kids going to high school now that probably don't even remember GT in an NCAA tournament. In football, GT probably still gets tagged with the "triple option" label by a lot of kids.
Both programs are transitioning right now. Pastner's job is definitely a tougher road than Collins's as football has had more recent success.
Spot On!In summary, Homer Rice took an athletic program that was in the dumpster and made it very competitive in all sports. The three successor AD's let it depreciate.
The AD position at GT seems to be more important than at other schools.
Terrible fit=terrible hire
Should have used “not a great fit” instead of “terrible”
We could’ve hired Bryce Drew though on a dumb contract... that would’ve been good, right?
I was all for the Drew hire at the time when it was possible. He immediately pulled in two very good recruits. There were some that thought his firing was due to more than just on court results.
He won under 30% of his SEC games and almost exactly 40% of his overall games. That is 7% worse in both categories than Pastner and that is despite walking into a much better position.
Drew was a complete bust of a hire. I'm amazed at how some people seem to prioritize recruiting over everything, including performance on the court.
I pulled from 247, because they're the only ones I saw with public team ratings, and Rivals for the last two years. Rivals only has the last two years. There are lots of services with individual ratings.
247 is the blue "National" line and Rivals is the gray "National" line. The ACC ranking is from 247.
The yellow trend is the 3 year rolling average. The light blue straight line is the linear forecast of our recruiting from 2007-2019.
I picked 2007 because it was there and I didn't feel like going back further.
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I was around during Cremin’s time and during the NC. Basketball was a hotter ticket from 84 until about halfway through the NC season.
I was a student at the same time as well and I CAMPED OUT for Tech v. Duke basketball tickets. What a time to be alive.