Walker did it with a 6-2 conference record, something Fitz matched in 2015. He has also had conference records better than 0.500 5 times. Something BC never did.
Bill Carmody
- Thread starter chicagocatfan24
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Sure, and that's why I think it would be a mistake to get rid of Fitz. But ECat continually insists that the standard is winning championships, not just achieving consistency. You can't have it both ways.
This is true.
I think that Camody with five years of security would have gotten NU to the dance, eventually, and could have won a game or two as a mid-seed.
I don't think he'd ever have Final Four-level recruits, which is where CCC is maybe kinda sorta possibly trending. This is what's *most* exciting about CCC.
To win in the Power Conferences in basketball or football, you need athletes and a whole lot of them if there are injuries. BC could not and did not want or did not successfully recruit Big 10 caliber athletes or enough quality basketball players to NU. He was given 13 years to succeed and he failed. No other team in the Big 10 would have allowed a coach for 13 years to stick around without making the NCAA tourney. Every Big 10 alum who has heard that NU stuck with the former coach for 13 years just shakes their head and chuckles. Now every alum does not chuckle when they hear they have to play NU. We are reaching new heights every week. As for BC's strategy, he ran the same jaded and anachronistic system that he learned from Pete Carrill. It is a 1950s and 1960s brand of basketball. He never diagrammed a play with two minutes or less that won a game which starkly contrasts with CC and his staff (see the Play - NU v. UM last year in the most meaningful game in program history) to see what a real staff does with endgame situations. All right, I will try my best to refrain from any more BC comments, but I am amazed at the profound nature of the love for BC when you are in the golden era of NU basketball right now and a coach who has achieved history in 4 seasons and has established a strong foundation of sustained success.
But prior to CCC there was no golden age of NU BB, only Silver and we were in it.
He was not the only recruit. Sina was another who opted out when C was dismissed and CCC hired
If the right guy was not available, why would you push to get BC out? When the right guy was available, he moved forward.
There were numerous examples of why without BC taking us to a level of continued respectability, there would be no CCC. Not the least of which is that in prior years, coach K told his assistants to not go to NU as it would be their graveyard. When Amaker turned his back on us, it was pretty clear. If the program was not at least respectable, CCC would not have come. WHen it was respectable it was OK to come.
I am glad we have moved on from BC but we would not have been able to without his contributions. (many of those began with the hiring of Hardy.
It's hyperbole like this that discredits the more intelligent things you write.
I would submit two things:
- based on the way his name was floated by Teddy G even the offseason prior to Carmody's last year at NU, it's clear that CCC was the choice from the start. This is to the good Doctor's credit.
- CCC was equally available the season he was actually hired, and every season before that
- that is, "the right guy" *was* available
This is all immaterial, but it really makes me think.
I strongly doubt that Bill could have taken Drew, Demps, Cobb, Sanjay, Olah and Sina to the Big Dance. I don't think that Jim was worried about that at all.
I agree that the lame-duck extension was stupid. It was almost like Jim was buying time or afraid to fire Bill. In retrospect, that lame-duck year was a big waste of everybody's time.
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Let me ask you this, though. Would you rather have Ara Parseghian, who never went to or won a bowl for NU but had us ranked #1 at one point and beat the crap out of ND every year, or Pat Fitzgerald?
That would be a very tough hypothetical. I think Pat is a better ambassador for NU than Ara was, but everything else...?
Walker Fan, please educate yourself on basketball before you say things that are just factually incorrect.
There's almost nothing new in basketball. When do you suppose that the motion offense was invented? It's been around for 75 years (some people say longer than that).
Are you going to say that Chris runs a 1940s brand of basketball?
I'm not going to defend the Princeton offense because everybody knows where that leads, but consider the 2011-12 NU team. 19-14, 8-10 in conference. Two overtime losses to top-25 Michigan, a 2-point loss to Purdue on a Robbie Hummel heartbreaker, and a 2-point loss to #10 Ohio State. Any two of those results go the other way and we would have gone to the Dance.
That's how close it was.
Again, I don't see anybody here who says, "Gee, I wish Bill Carmody were still here" or "Gosh, Bill Carmody should still be our coach."
All of this stems from the fact that most people just want to piss on Bill Carmody and a few people don't like it. Hell, I don't like it.
But it's a total straw man argument to say that anybody here thinks Carmody should still be our coach. That's not even considering what Chris has accomplished. My lead reply in this thread said that Carmody would have been gone by now no matter what.
Is this some sort of trick question? Ara hands down. Fitz is a great hometown story but Ara is 20x the head coach Pat is.
Not a trick question. Virginia cited Fitzgerald's bowl wins as evidence that Pat has achieved more than any other NU coach. I contend that bowl wins are cute, but I would take Walker's Big Ten title or Ara's in-season #1 ranking over a Gator Bowl victory or a Pinstripe Bowl win if I had to choose.
For what it's worth, the Princeton offense as played at Northwestern was designed to get two kinds of shots: open three-pointers and open layups.
This is the same philosophy used by the Golden State Warriors, the Houston Rockets, the Boston Celtics, and modern practitioners of basketball.
It only took 30 years for basketball coaches not named Mike D'antoni to understand that the three-pointer is worth 50 percent more points than the two-pointer.
Walker won a championship with Barnett's recruits. He didn't do a whole lot with his own.
Actually, it's unfair to lump Walker in with Carmody in my opinion. Walker was hard nosed and a tough coach. Our offenses truly were at their best under him (though our defences were putrid). If Wheeler hadn't tragically passed away, who knows what Walker might have accomplished.
Fitz has brought our depth to another level and we have won 10 games twice under him and finished the season ranked in the top 20. In addition, the program continues to progress and is at it's best health ever since he's been here. This said, you're right. For all of Fitz's talk about winning championships, we have none. Not even a divisional title. Personally, I'm beginning to lose my patience. Hope and believe that this is the year.
I disagree with that. He had his tournament-caliber talent with Shurna, Juice, Cobb, and Drew and couldn't make it work. If you look at our cupboard prior to the lame-duck extension, things weren't looking good. It was looking like a drought and famine, not a downpour and feast.
With that logic, imagine what our 2000 team could have done if Barnett was still coaching.
While there is some validity to what you say, what made us competitive in CCC's first year was hard nosed defense. Something that we never saw under Carmody. So, I think it's largely offset.
And performed better leaping to getting to the NCAA's is a huge stretch beyond anyone's reasonable imagination.
It doesn't matter. Plenty of poor coaches have taken a talented team and lost with it. Walker took what he had and won. You're penalizing the guy for winning, which is stupid.
Are you saying that you will call for Pat's firing if we don't win a Big Ten title this year? I'll remember that.
C'mon. Ricky Byrdsong and KON got us to the post season on the basis of Foster's recruiting. I penalize no one for winning, but I also don't credit them for something they were gifted with. Walker's 2000 team had the very best talent he ever had, and arguably that NU has ever assembled. Certainly a few of the best recruiting classes we've ever had (better than any that Fitz has brought in, and certainly better than anything Walker reeled in).
I'll have to evaluate my perspectives after I see the body of work this year. All I'm saying at this point is after 13 years of promises about competing championships, my patience is wearing thin, and at some point we have to question whether we can't do better. 13 years is a long time.
If Barnett had been coaching the 2000 NU football team, our QB would have been John Navarre or Gavin Hoffman. We would not have been running the spread, which means that Anderson would not have run for 2000 yards. It would have been a more conventional team and I doubt that we would have been better with Barney. I would guess same outcome or possibly slightly less. Defense would have been way better, offense way worse.
Sure you can. What we're saying is that Fitz is better than Carmody was for NU. Hence, a little more patience is logical.
But, it's not good enough. He has to do better. The standard IS winning championships and Fitz is not making it. But, at least he acknowledges that, and as GI Joe said, "Knowing is half the battle."
Do you think that Jim has any plans to fire Pat if we don't win a Big Ten title? I would say that the chances of that are exactly ZERO.
Oh, and Walker's 2000 team is NOT the very best talent that NU has ever assembled. We had a top-flight football team talent wise for 40 years until Agase left. We had a bunch of truly awful coaches, except Ara. Yes, that includes Pappy Waldorf, who sucked in my opinion. Bob Voigts, who wasn't a good head coach, took mostly Pappy's guys and went to the Rose Bowl. In other words, imagine what a competent coach could have done in the early 1940s with Otto Graham and the #1 HS prospect in the entire country, Bill DeCorrevont. That was all squandered.
Jon Navarre was not a bad QB, and Gavin Hoffman broke records and was Ivy League player of the year and got a sniff in the League. Hoffman was about as poor his freshman year as Thorson was, and the thought that he makes a leap the same way Thorson did his sophomore year isn't out of the question. And to the point made earlier, he wasn't recruited for Walker's system (which in year one seemed to be 3 yards and a cloud of dust). Who knows what he would have done with Barnett.
Don't forget we had a ton of transfers and decommits following Barnett's departure. The team in 2000 was a shadow of what it could have been with him staying.
We can speculate as to what would have happened had Barnett stayed just as some here can dream of what would have happened had we given Carmody more time. Let's just agree to disagree on the likely outcomes in those hypotheticals in both cases.
I'm not Jim Phillips, and you're probably right that Fitz is safe. Doesn't mean I will agree that should be the case.
Let me retract and say best talent during any of my lifetime.
It's a straw man to say that people are pissed because anyone is saying that Carmody should be our coach.
I got my dander up because people think we should have given him more time, that he deserved another year. That he would have gotten us to the dance if he was given a 5 year contract instead of 2. He was given 13 years and got us didly. It was time to move on. The Carmody years were a source a grave frustration and trauma for me. Because of them, I suffer from a sort of PTSD. Talk of it being a period of good times or that it should have extended gets a rise out of me, as you have seen. Sorta compels me to go into a wild state throwing haymakers this way and that. Sorry, but some things are left dead and buried.
Huh? CCC's first team was 14-19, hardly "competitive". They gave up 63.4 points/game and only scored 59.5 per game. Just for yucks, the last BC team scored 60.7 and gave up just 63.7, so his point differential was actually better and he got fired for it. Same guys, same performance.
Jim was in a bad situation. Based on my observations and not anything that he has said, he personally didn't get along with Bill. But it was hard to fire a guy who kept winning 19, 20 games. And the coach's contract was up. What to do, what to do. A bold move would have been to dismiss him, but I don't think that Jim had the political capital among the big donors to do that.
Then, the 2012-13 team was 12-8 (3-4 in the conference) when suddenly the entire team started to drop like flies. We lost 11 of 12 games to finish 13-19. It was frustrating knowing that we had a pretty good team and that the AD was just using an injury-riddled season to do what he had wanted to do two years earlier.
So, my personal position is that JIm shouldn't have given Bill any extension. Should have fired him coming off the 2nd NIT bid. But not even OSU could fire Matta until the Bucks missed out on everything, even the NIT.
