Remembering Hewitt

[AE 87]

I would like to know if the football coaching staff transition affected CJP's budget for hiring assistants. It would be pretty obnoxious to hold CJP's feet to the fire over lack of success if he were hamstrung on assistant hiring.

@kg01 since we agree that CPH really was the coach during the first 5 years or so, how do you explain the collapse in production after that? How do you keep it from seeming personal, you know like by questioning his participation in USA hoops and Black Coaches? I've come out the other side from the 5 stages of grief over the death of GT basketball under CPH. Yet I still can't make sense of it. The closest that I've come to is that maybe during his time with us he committed to a new philosophy which was just bad, and for some reason couldn't get back to his old form.

 

[lv20gt]

@kg01 since we agree that CPH really was the coach during the first 5 years or so, how do you explain the collapse in production after that? How do you keep it from seeming personal, you know like by questioning his participation in USA hoops and Black Coaches? I've come out the other side from the 5 stages of grief over the death of GT basketball under CPH. Yet I still can't make sense of it. The closest that I've come to is that maybe during his time with us he committed to a new philosophy which was just bad, and for some reason couldn't get back to his old form.

I think the biggest issue was instability at the PG spot. First 5 years he had Akins and Jack (along with Bynum). After Jack left we went after Austin Jackson who went to play baseball, so we played Zam. Zam transferred and we brought in Crit. Crit left after one year, and we brought in Miller. Miller had a solid first year and then an injury derailed him and he never seem to get back on track. Part of it was getting unlucky, but IMO he didn't recruit the quantity of PGs he needed with the way we played. There were obviously other issues, but I think there is a pretty good relation to how we played under him to how our PG situation was.

 

[tbglover]

I think the biggest issue was instability at the PG spot. First 5 years he had Akins and Jack (along with Bynum). After Jack left we went after Austin Jackson who went to play baseball, so we played Zam. Zam transferred and we brought in Crit. Crit left after one year, and we brought in Miller. Miller had a solid first year and then an injury derailed him and he never seem to get back on track. Part of it was getting unlucky, but IMO he didn't recruit the quantity of PGs he needed with the way we played. There were obviously other issues, but I think there is a pretty good relation to how we played under him to how our PG situation was.

Udofia was a highly ranked recruit and initially he looked like he would be good and then the bottom fell out. A backup would have been nice but it seemed like promising all the playing time may have been part of his recruiting strategy. And other than Will Bynum was there ever a good second PG on the team?

 

[Peacone36]

Udofia was a highly ranked recruit and initially he looked like he would be good and then the bottom fell out. A backup would have been nice but it seemed like promising all the playing time may have been part of his recruiting strategy. And other than Will Bynum was there ever a good second PG on the team?

His prep style was an obvious conflict with the GT slow down style. He ran a run and gun offense in high school and all of a sudden he’s supposed to run an offense in the halfcourt

 

[lauraee]

His prep style was an obvious conflict with the GT slow down style. He ran a run and gun offense in high school and all of a sudden he’s supposed to run an offense in the halfcourt

I miss the run & gun like lethal weapon 3. Wish we'd play that style.

 

[vadimivich]

I think the biggest issue was instability at the PG spot. First 5 years he had Akins and Jack (along with Bynum). After Jack left we went after Austin Jackson who went to play baseball, so we played Zam. Zam transferred and we brought in Crit. Crit left after one year, and we brought in Miller. Miller had a solid first year and then an injury derailed him and he never seem to get back on track. Part of it was getting unlucky, but IMO he didn't recruit the quantity of PGs he needed with the way we played. There were obviously other issues, but I think there is a pretty good relation to how we played under him to how our PG situation was.

The Austin Jackson loss really hurt, and Hewitt definitely went with the Cremins model "all eggs in a single basket" approach when it came to a few positions ... there was just nothing there are Jackson chose the Yankees, or after Crit left for the NBA. And weak guard play with the style we had at the time was a death knell in several of those poorer season.

We were also better in several years than people seem to remember. That '09-'10 season in particular was viewed strangely by the fans even as it was happening. We won 23 games, played for an ACC Championship and won an NCAAT game. It's one of the better seasons in the history of GT basketball, and even in the moment people were complaining and upset like we were going 13-23, not the opposite. Hell, we beat Duke and UNC (twice!) that year (which freaking never happens for GT).

Hewitt wasn't a great coach, but he wasn't an awful one either and he did far better here than anyone other than Cremins ever has. The fact we haven't even remotely approached the level of "success" of his final 5 seasons at GT since then is an indictment on everyone involved.

 

[vadimivich]

Like I said, the issues are much more inflicted by the administration than the coaches.
Hewitt was given the automatic rollover because GT couldn't afford to up his salary too much and they were concerned about losing him to other programs or the NBA (of course there was an out for the Knicks in the contract anyways). What they should have done is had a non rollover buyout, but included a longevity bonus. That way if he kept producing there would be a pot for him after so many additional years.

Then of course once DRad decided to fire him, Drad changed the terms of the buyout. Instead of a 5 yr, 1.4MM/per buyout is was modified to an 8 yr, 900K/per buyout. I think this was done because DRad was worried about cash flow, but the long term effect was to increase the length of purgatory for GT from 5 yrs to 8 yrs.

DRad didn't really give a damn about the basketball search and left it up to Eddie Fogler. FWIW, when Gregory was hired he almost turned down the job, because he was concerned he wouldn't have enough money for assts. That was how bad the last couple of AD's had messed up the finances. The scary thing is that among the finalists for the position, Gregory was the best choice.

When Gregory was fired because DRad changed the buyout terms instead of having Hewitt off the books, you still had 3 more years to go and $2.7MM to pay out. This impacted the search which eventually landed Pastner. Which was also flubbed to a degree by Bobinski.

in his final year if he gets the whole contract Pastner would be at $2.3MM, that would still place him in the bottom 2.

GT should just stay the course until they want to get serious about basketball. If they are planning on offering less than $2.5MM and really closer to $3MM, they shouldn't even bother.

Hewitt was much better his first five years than after that, but he at least had some success. FWIW, you can thank Cliff Warren for the guard play during that time and Dean Keener was the coach in charge of the defense at that point. Jack can tell you about how Cliff Warren made him a much better PG.

But if we're going to be cheap, then be smart about it. Being cheap and hiring the Gregory and Pastner types of the world guarantees you will suck. Be cheap and hire one of the young crazy G-League coaches who are trying insane stuff. Hire a European coach who wants to break into USA basketball. Roll the dice on an assistant off someone's bench who isn't "ready" yet, but might be in a few years. Yeah, they probably won't work out ... but at least there's a chance you strike gold.

What's the worst that could happen in those situations? Somehow worse than what we've had with the Gregory/Pastner poo-poo platter? And seriously looking at it ... the only two successful coaches GT has ever had (Cremins & Hewitt) both came from 1 bid leagues where they weren't exactly high profile names, and came for cheap (App Stat and Siena) and were very young (34 and 37). What's wrong with trying that again?

ANNNNNNYTHING would be better than whatever led us to hiring Brian Gregory. Hiring a staff completely from this message board would have been a better process.

 

[Peacone36]

Agree. I think Virginia originally hired Tony Bennett for $1.6MM

 

[RamblinRed]

The first five years vs after that are fairly easy to explain.

First you have the assts. He lost his 2 best assts - Keener and Warren within a year of the final four. We never hired assts of that quality again.
Warren spent the summer between Jack's FR and SO year going through every possession Jack was on the floor with him asking him why he made the decisions he did, was it the best decision, what could he have done differently. He helped Jack, Bynum, Elder all become much better players.

He also changed his philosophy after the first 5 years. He started recruiting more blue chip players after his first 5 years (his only 5 star his first five years was Bosh). His First five years he had good talent that played really well as a team. After that he was more interested in getting blue chip players that he could help get to the NBA, but he never had enough support around them to make it work consistently. As mentioned he also went a little more Cremins recruiting style and recruited fewer players for a spot then before.

Vad the issue with the 09-10 team for the fans was that while it was one of the more successful teams of GT history it always felt like it came up far short of its potential.
That was a team with 3 five star players on it - the most since the 1990 team as well as a number of 4 star players, yet it went only 7-9 in conference and won just one Tourney game. Even making the Tourney was no sure thing with that team until late in the season when it won 3 straight games in the ACC Tourney - it was only 19-11 heading into the ACC tourney and had lost 5 of its previous 7 games putting it firmly on the bubble. A first round ACC Tourney loss likely would have sent it to the NIT. I liked Hewitt personally but felt he should have been replaced after the previous season and the 09-10 season did nothing to change my mind as it just sort of confirmed for me we would never get close to our potential as a program. I also knew after the details came out that we likely were going to lose a decade after we fired him, hopefully we are ready to come out of this.

Virginia getting Bennett at $1.6 seems like a lifetime ago- the market has changed and you simply won't get that quality of coach at that price today.

Vad I like your outside the box thinking. I doubt many schools would be willing to think that outside the box. The Gregory hiring process was an abomination.

Here's one other question that we may or may not have to ask after the 2020 recruiting cycle. if we fail to land our top targets in 2020 is it more an indictment of the coaching staff or the school?
If we have a positive recruiting class then it isn't a question we need to ask, but if we have another failure like the 2019 class, that is a question we need to ask and get an answer to before making any coaching decisions.

Pastner has 2 more years to prove whether he belongs here or not.

 

[kg01]

I would like to know if the football coaching staff transition affected CJP's budget for hiring assistants. It would be pretty obnoxious to hold CJP's feet to the fire over lack of success if he were hamstrung on assistant hiring.

@kg01 since we agree that CPH really was the coach during the first 5 years or so, how do you explain the collapse in production after that? How do you keep it from seeming personal, you know like by questioning his participation in USA hoops and Black Coaches? I've come out the other side from the 5 stages of grief over the death of GT basketball under CPH. Yet I still can't make sense of it. The closest that I've come to is that maybe during his time with us he committed to a new philosophy which was just bad, and for some reason couldn't get back to his old form.

RR pretty much summed it up. Changed philosophy after the first couple years. Lost key assistants, didn't replace them well (sounds familiar?).

 

[kg01]

Hiring a staff completely from this message board would have been a better process.

Heh. We'd definitely have a killer 'get-bak!' coach, amirite?

Agree with all you said, btw.

 

[vadimivich]

Vad the issue with the 09-10 team for the fans was that while it was one of the more successful teams of GT history it always felt like it came up far short of its potential.
That was a team with 3 five star players on it - the most since the 1990 team as well as a number of 4 star players, yet it went only 7-9 in conference and won just one Tourney game. Even making the Tourney was no sure thing with that team until late in the season when it won 3 straight games in the ACC Tourney - it was only 19-11 heading into the ACC tourney and had lost 5 of its previous 7 games putting it firmly on the bubble. A first round ACC Tourney loss likely would have sent it to the NIT. I liked Hewitt personally but felt he should have been replaced after the previous season and the 09-10 season did nothing to change my mind as it just sort of confirmed for me we would never get close to our potential as a program. I also knew after the details came out that we likely were going to lose a decade after we fired him, hopefully we are ready to come out of this.

I get all of that, but lost in all of that was that was at it's completion one of the better seasons in GT basketball history and even now we don't remember it as such and the clouds around the program robbed us as fans (and we robbed ourselves) of just enjoying it while it was happening. We have played in a grand total of 7 ACC Championship games, it was one of them. We've won an NCAAT game in only 11 seasons, it was one of them. We've had 3 wins in a season against UNC and Duke only a couple of times and it was one of them. We've had 5 total top 5 NBA picks, that team had one of them. Etc, etc. Yes, we lost a sad game to UGa and the team stumbled at the end of the ACC season and maybe could have achieved even more ... but damn, it also had a fair number of highs we simply ignored as they were happening. I think the vast majority of fans if polled would remember the Okogie/Lammers team and the run in the N.I.T much more fondly, despite the objective fact that 09-10 was a much better team and season. The poisonous effect of expectations really can hurt us from just enjoying what we have when we have it.

Just as an example ... January 9th, 2010 we played a nationally televised game against Duke, who was ranked #5 in the country at that point and went on to win the National Championship. We beat them, and did it by out executing them down the stretch. It should really be one remembered as a great win that we still post about from time to time, but that entire year has seemingly been thrown into the trash can of history.



We have won 1 game against a top 5 team since then (the home win over Virginia in 2016 ... oddly enough another January 9th, 2pm tip-off). They don't happen often and stuff like that should be enjoyed in the moment, no matter the scenario.

 

[jbix80]

Speaking of Hewitt, the 2002 game against UVA is on ESPNU. Akins was a senior, Elder and Mohammed were Freshman.
I’m not necessarily saying this is the case, but does anyone think Wright could turn into a Muhammad type player? Muhammed’s shot was rough, but his athleticism was superior. I can’t remember how much his shot improved over the years, but his form wasn’t very good in this 2002 game. Obviously, his explosion was his gift.

 

[lv20gt]

Being cheap and hiring the Gregory and Pastner types of the world guarantees you will suck.

I agree completely with being smart about being cheap meaning you should role the dice.

I disagree on Pastner though. IMO Pastner was that outside the box type of hire. The gamble with Pastner was if you believed that his issues were more with where he was at than who he was as a coach, which as someone who lives in Memphis, is a reasonable assertion. It was still a hire made on the cheap that was probably not going to work out but had a chance to be great. And if the Bell stuff hadn't happened, along with the DLab thing, it may very well have worked out (and it still could).

Gregory was just a no upside hire with almost no chance of success. Pastner had his questions for sure, but there was at least a chance that his issues were more Memphis than him.

 

[mstranahan]

@RamblinRed as usual, very nice summary of the situation. Much appreciated

I also think Hewitt benefitted from some recruits that turned out to be better players than projected when coming in. Morrow (#91) Elder (#97), Luke, McHenry all played better than their incoming ranking, IMO. They were all key pieces to the early success. Throw in a very good transfer (Bynum) we had a really nice set of talent

Fast forward to post-2004 era... we had some pretty bad recruiting misses and bad luck with injuries. Dickey (#51), Zam (#85), Clinch (#25), Mfon (#34), Jason Morris (#77) all underperformed relative to expectations. Catastrophic injuries to Jeremis & Holsey. Overperformers were fewer & farther between (Zach Peacock stands out to me as one. Daniel Miller also played better than I thought he would as a txfr)

 

[YlJacket]

Some similarity but Muhammad's real skill set was a lock down perimeter defender. Moses is certainly not a lock down perimeter defender and hasn't really shown a consistent above average interior presence yet either. Hope he does. As for splash plays coming off the wing on offense, Moses could probably do some of what Muhammad did for highlight films - and we saw some flashes of that against Miami with him cutting from the corner and him looking down at the rim doing it. But we don't have near the cast of characters on this team to feed Moses as Muhammed did - and while I don't have the numbers, my bet is we play at a slower pace than those teams did with less highlight making fast break opportunities.

Both have a lot of explosion but different players and very different roles.

 

[YlJacket]

I agree completely with being smart about being cheap meaning you should role the dice.

I disagree on Pastner though. IMO Pastner was that outside the box type of hire. The gamble with Pastner was if you believed that his issues were more with where he was at than who he was as a coach, which as someone who lives in Memphis, is a reasonable assertion. It was still a hire made on the cheap that was probably not going to work out but had a chance to be great. And if the Bell stuff hadn't happened, along with the DLab thing, it may very well have worked out (and it still could).

Gregory was just a no upside hire with almost no chance of success. Pastner had his questions for sure, but there was at least a chance that his issues were more Memphis than him.

I wasn't thrilled with the hire but I tend to agree with your logic. He was a guy with a good to very good pedigree that was being eaten alive in a difficult "political" situation in Memphis. I think MBob thought he could be a good front man/recruiting closer with his energy and "charm" and worked hard to backfill with a strong assistant group. The first year says there was at least a decent argument for the logic.

My personal opinion, from afar and with no data or information to back it up, is that CJP still needed a lot of "adult supervision" from an AD and needed an AD to be a lot more hands on than most like or want to do. And when he lost MBob, Todd likely didn't take the same tact. So less of presence that would tell CJP to keep someone like Bell at a further arm's length than you are. And less of an adult in the room approach to the LaBarrie decision and less hands on approach to hiring the assistants to replace the hand picked ones that left (as would be expected if they were that good). I admit I don't know the financial parameters given CJP for these hires but it seems to me that we certainly missed MBob's hands on approach to the assistants.

Now what I described is above and beyond the way most ADs think and operate - and frankly most coaches would push back hard if an AD tries to be as hands on as I describe. But if you are going to go the young/out of the box/fix a career path approach that we were taking with CJP (or any other out of the box idea) then the AD has to engage and play that role. I am not sure that happened but again am just watching from afar.

 

[H-Wade]

I get all of that, but lost in all of that was that was at it's completion one of the better seasons in GT basketball history and even now we don't remember it as such and the clouds around the program robbed us as fans (and we robbed ourselves) of just enjoying it while it was happening. We have played in a grand total of 7 ACC Championship games, it was one of them. We've won an NCAAT game in only 11 seasons, it was one of them. We've had 3 wins in a season against UNC and Duke only a couple of times and it was one of them. We've had 5 total top 5 NBA picks, that team had one of them. Etc, etc. Yes, we lost a sad game to UGa and the team stumbled at the end of the ACC season and maybe could have achieved even more ... but damn, it also had a fair number of highs we simply ignored as they were happening. I think the vast majority of fans if polled would remember the Okogie/Lammers team and the run in the N.I.T much more fondly, despite the objective fact that 09-10 was a much better team and season. The poisonous effect of expectations really can hurt us from just enjoying what we have when we have it.

Just as an example ... January 9th, 2010 we played a nationally televised game against Duke, who was ranked #5 in the country at that point and went on to win the National Championship. We beat them, and did it by out executing them down the stretch. It should really be one remembered as a great win that we still post about from time to time, but that entire year has seemingly been thrown into the trash can of history.



We have won 1 game against a top 5 team since then (the home win over Virginia in 2016 ... oddly enough another January 9th, 2pm tip-off). They don't happen often and stuff like that should be enjoyed in the moment, no matter the scenario.

That team had too much talent to lose as many games as we did, we should have been top 25 all year. We certainly had top 25 talent. Lawal and Favors was the most talented frontcourt in the entire country IMO, and we wasted them.

Sure it was a good season compared to most in GT history, but that doesn't mean it can't still be disappointing. Just like 2005, that was one our best teams ever, too. And also one of the most disappointing.

 

[Peacone36]

Speaking of Hewitt, the 2002 game against UVA is on ESPNU. Akins was a senior, Elder and Mohammed were Freshman.
I’m not necessarily saying this is the case, but does anyone think Wright could turn into a Muhammad type player? Muhammed’s shot was rough, but his athleticism was superior. I can’t remember how much his shot improved over the years, but his form wasn’t very good in this 2002 game. Obviously, his explosion was his gift.

No

 

[ESPNjacket]

I get all of that, but lost in all of that was that was at it's completion one of the better seasons in GT basketball history and even now we don't remember it as such and the clouds around the program robbed us as fans (and we robbed ourselves) of just enjoying it while it was happening.

There was a portion of the fanbase who had decided by then that Hewitt was not a bad coach but a bad person. There was no way those people would support anything associated with him again. It was sad.

The dumber among them still think he was the suckiest sucker who ever sucked and anyone who disputes it is their enemy. That is beyond sad.