The Sunshine And Lollipops Will Be Back Tomorrow

They're taking this post off.

-- Mike DeCourcy grades the coaching hires. He says that Oklahoma took the biggest gamble this offseason, but he also says that Sidney Lowe's chances for failure are high:

Sidney Lowe's history as a member of N.C. State's 1983 national championship team was a big reason he was hired away from his assistant job with the Detroit Pistons to become the Wolfpack's next head coach.

Now, N.C. State has to hope history doesn't matter.

There is a clear precedent that coaches who arrive from the NBA with no recent college experience do not succeed in Division I. Lowe hasn't had to deal with recruiting, NCAA rules compliance, encouraging players to achieve academically and making sure they behave well.

DeCourcy has a list of coaches who have set this precedent, and in a few more years, he will be able to add Sidney Lowe to it. I'm feeling a little pessimistic today, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. I certainly hope I'm wrong. But even on my sun-shinin'-birds-singin' days, I can't shake the feeling that this hire is going to end up a huge disaster.

-- Gregg Doyel is slinging mud again, this time in his list of the ten toughest coaching jobs in college hoops.

4. N.C. State: We've been over this, but it bears repeating. The Wolfpack is to college basketball what Clemson is to college football -- an overrated program built to unrealistic heights by coaches who cheated, with an overbearing fan base too biased to see that reality. Herb Sendek went to five straight NCAA Tournaments and was averaging 20 wins per year, and it wasn't enough for Wolfpack Nation. Wow. Throw in the presence of Duke and North Carolina 30 miles away, and this job is a killer.

"Poor Clemson," Doyel says in the Tigers' entry on this list, pointing out his dissing of both the football and basketball programs. Poor us, I say. NC State apparently is a tougher job than Clemson. And Penn State. And Colorado.

Even though he made the list, I can't imagine Gregg really believes that.

He retreads the obvious points--the "overbearing fan base," the proximity to Duke/UNC--but doesn't touch on probably the most difficult aspect of the NC State job: those dastardly UNC System requirements. Dave Glenn has written extensively on the requirements issue. We didn't miss on Barnes and Calipari because of the fan base, and the empires to our west didn't matter nearly as much as some in the national media have suggested. Those academic requirements were the real culprit.

-- Man, are we having some fun today!

In a nice little bit of poetic justice, Herb Sendek lifted a former McDonalds All-American from right under Mike Krzyzewski… and in the process, shot a middle finger to all the NC State fans and administration who said he couldn’t recruit.

I don't recall anyone questioning his ability to recruit, even during the down recruiting years.

It's generally safe to assume that Herb was criticized for [insert a thing]; MJD just missed on this one.