Pastner stated publicly within the past few weeks that he's gotten tremendous support from Stansbury over the past few seasons. He didn't mention it, but there are a lot of ADs who would have cut him loose during the Ron Bell snafu.
Well, yeah. He's going to say that regardless, and he probably has gotten a lot of support. I expect him to keep getting that support and that will include a sizeable extension/rework of a contract. I think TStan like Pastner and wants to keep continuity in the basketball program right now, so I doubt he would play hardball too much.
As far as the Ron Bell thing, you might be right. But without rehashing that entire saga, by now it's pretty obvious that Pastner was guilty of being naïve and trying to be a good person, while primarily being the victim of a con artist who tried to black mail, ruin his career, and frame him for rape. I'm not sure if I would view not firing him as some sort of charitable act. Seems to me basic decency would dictate that. Unfortunately at the time we had fans in our fanbase who wanted him gone so bad that they tried to distort the situation. Even more unfortunately those fans are still probably around waiting for a mess up just to pop back up.
It's a horrible time to negotiate, because virtually every program has been hit hard over the last 18 months. Very few athletic departments are flush, and the ones that are will probably have an entrenched and successful coaching staff.
It depends on what you are negotiating for. It's probably a horrible time if you're trying to get a flat raise. However, if you are trying to get job security it's probably a great time. Not only can you use the reluctance to give a raise to leverage more clauses that make early termination less appealing, but without the money it is harder to make an early termination to begin with so those clauses will be even more secure than they might normally.
Pastner's timing is good in that this is the most optimism this program has had for a while, but a coach who took 5 years to get to the tourney (I expect we do this year) and had the Uh Ohs he did during that run is not going to be the prime contender for another P5 job - certainly not a "better" P5 job than GT so I don't think there is much risk that we are negotiating against anyone.
I'm not sure if ADs would view it the same way. Pastner in year 1 won ACC CoY severely overperforming expectations. Year 2 and year 3 were regressions from that, but they seem so bad in large part because of the success in year 1. Had Pastner gone 0-18 year one, then 6-12, 6-12, 11-9, and now 10-6 it's a very clear building of a program from a terrible place. And logically, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to see it that sequence, with a worse year 1, as better than the sequence we got. Obviously with the benefit of retrospect we are less likely to view that year 1 success as a fluke now than we were 2 years ago but yeah, we have that advantage now. I also don't think taking 5 years is really that long. It obviously depends on the situation. When we fired Hewitt we did so because he didn't get enough out of the talent that was there. It shouldn't take 5 years in that situation. When we fired Gregory it was in large part due to the bad roster building that left us in a situation where we were projected to win 0 games. We've seen similar situations at a couple places in the ACC recently. Most of those times those projections are accurate for a reason. In that situation taking 5 years is understandable, especially when year 4 might have been a tourney year except for an untimely injury to our star PG.
Overall, I doubt he'd be the top choice for a top opening this year, but even top openings don't always get their top choice. Mike White at UF is a pretty good example. Arizona is the obvious biggest threat that would have reasons to be interested in him, but I wouldn't underestimate the appeal of a young coach who has 5 years of experience in a P5 conference and looks to have done a good job of building a program from a very low place. I also think that changes if he overperforms next year similar to year 1 when the program lost a lot of pieces. I think he would be a very hot commodity then especially if we do a small punt the decision type of move.
