It's been a bizarre couple of weeks in the ACC coaching carousel. When the ACC Tournament ended a few weeks ago, we figured were going into an offseason of little to no coaching turnover. Maybe NC State would finally wake up and realize Sidney Lowe is a terrible, but that might be a pipe dream for me. But what has happend over the last week has amazed me. Three coaches are no longer at their schools, and it leaves all of us scratching our heads and asking, "why?"
It all started March 30, when Boston College decided to fire Al Skinner after 13 seasons as coach, even though he won 60% of his games in that time, and went to the NCAA tournament seven times during that stretch, and three out of five years in the ACC. The details seem a bit sketchy to me. It seems like Skinner went to interview for the coaching vacancy at St. John's, and the next thing we know, Skinner got fired. It seems very similar to what happened to Jeff Jagodzinski when he coached Boston College. It seems to me that BC athletic director Gene DiFilippo has an insecurity issue. And while they have hired a coach in Cornell's Steve Donahue, it doesn't convince me that they have hired a better coach. Donahue had a career record of 146-138 in his decade of coaching Cornell. That doesn't scream "hot shot coach" to me.
Then, on April 6, Oliver Purnell leaves Clemson to take the head coaching job at Depaul, in another baffling move. Purnell won 61% of his games during his seven year tenure at Clemson, getting to the NCAA Tournament three years in a row. But Purnell is going from a job where he was usually in the top of the ACC to a team in Depaul that has won exactly two Big East games in the last two years, and is 17-47 over that two year span.This is an obvious step backwards for someone who had something really good going at Clemson. He probably would have been in the NCAA tournament again next year, but instead, he just got up and left town without even telling his own players, which is just despicable. Why did he not tell his players? Was he afraid to tell them? Now, he has potentially left the Clemson program in chaos, with no coach, and no answers other than betraying his team for a better pay day.
The next day, Wake Forest fires Dino Gaudio after three seasons, in which he won 66% of his games, and made the NCAA Tournament in two of his three seasons. I've never believed in getting rid of a coach before a full recruiting class goes through school (at least four years), and this is no exception. He did a great job of keeping the program afloat after the untimely death of Skip Prosser, and definitely deserved more time than this to work on the program. I don't think anyone expected this, not even Gaudio himself.
I thought one of the best ways to describe the situation was from the twitter feed of Travis McKie, who signed to go to Wake Forest, when he said, "I am usually a man of many words, but right now.............I'm not ." I certainly understand where he is coming from. I have no idea what the logic was for the firing, but I sure can't find it. If Wake Forest is going to make me a believer that the firing was a good thing, they are going to have to go out and make a big splash hiring, because I have a feeling they are going to take a big step back next season.
It will be interesting to see who ends up being the head coaches at Clemson and Wake Forest. There are a lot of rumored candidates, some logical, some are not. But no matter who they are, it will be very tough to convince me that any of these three teams will be better off in the near future with new coaches.
