A Good Year for the Outlaw

The University of Minnesota has hired Tubby Smith from Kentucky to be their new basketball coach, and personally I’m pretty happy about it.

My favorite school is getting a darn fine coach, needed as they’ve fallen to rock bottom in the Big 10 under Dan Monson and most recently Jim “Offense is Not A Priority” Molinari. The Gophers have never been a basketball power, but they did have a good run in the 70’s under Bill Musselman (that ended with probation), again in the 80’s with Jim Dutcher (which I think ended up with some kind of probation) and then in the 90’s under Clem Haskins (that ended with probation). Anyone see a pattern here?

So Monson was hired from Gonzaga to not only win games, but clean up the program, which was – unlike MOST schools that cheat – involved in a test score scandal, not an “I’ll buy your mom a new house and a satellite dish while you get an Escalade” scandal. Monson did apparently clean up the program, but couldn’t win a game to save his butt, so he quit in December, making his assistant Molinari the interim coach. The undertalented team played hard under Jim, but eventually started scoring in the 40’s and 50’s for entire games, which of course was his hallmark and ultimate downfall at Bradley.

So Tubby is in. That’s a huge step forward for my favorite school. Basketball is now the fifth most successful WINTER sport at Minnesota now, behind the National Champion wrestling program, the soon-to-be-National Champion hockey team and the women’s basketball and hockey programs. But since most so-called “sports fans” only care about football and men’s basketball, those other accomplishments go pretty much unnoticed. So men’s basketball needs to get better. And they will. And I can throw my Minnesota basketball jersey back into my rotation of clothing that I wear.