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Football and Basketball Turnarounds


BillySee58

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21 minutes ago, UNTFan23 said:

From what I have heard, RVs involvement was the announcement of Littrell to fanbase and that's about it.

Yup. RV was let go as soon as the school year ended. Smatresk knew he wouldn’t be retaining RV at that point, so there was no way he was letting a lame duck AD make the hire of the highest paid employee of the university. Smatresk has already admitted that RV wanted Meacham but it wasn’t his hire to make.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.star-telegram.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/mac-engel/article218537150.html

Also, the Jalie hire fell right into RV’s lap. The school’s all-time leading scorer, who was brought in by a coach he didn’t hire, was ready to be a Division I head coach and wanted to come back while we had an opening. It wasn’t some under-the-radar hire that took huge amounts of research and diligence to uncover. 

Edited by BillySee58
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15 minutes ago, BillySee58 said:

Yup. RV was let go as soon as the school year ended. Smatresk knew he wouldn’t be retaining RV at that point, so there was no way he was letting a lame duck AD make the hire of the highest paid employee of the university. Smatresk has already admitted that RV wanted Meacham but it wasn’t his hire to make.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.star-telegram.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/mac-engel/article218537150.html

Also, the Jalie hire fell right into RV’s lap. The school’s all-time leading scorer, who was brought in by a coach he didn’t hire, was ready to be a Division I head coach and wanted to come back while we had an opening. It wasn’t some under-the-radar hire that took huge amounts of research and diligence to uncover. 

I've said it before, I'll say it again:
Littrell was RV's idea.  Littrell was on RV's short list ever since he was an OC at Arizona.   He was RVs hire.

I'm not a fan of how Smatresk painted that picture in that article (or, at least how Engel took his words to print).  What the heck would an Academic President know about Football X/Os to trump an Athletics guy for a hire of a football coach?

I have no doubt he advocated for Littrell.  He's made that known.   But the idea of a power struggle between two people with their heels dug in between Meacham/Littrell just did not happen.  There were many other players in the saga, and many of them were ones that needed a little extra "convincing".

And he absolutely deserves credit for Jalie's hire too, no matter how easy it may have seemed to be...   just like he deserves to be bagged-on for Dodge, Stephens, Benford, et al.

 

Make no mistake though... it always seems like when I bring this up, people think I'm adovcating for RV to still be here, when I'm ABSOLUTELY NOT.   He made some catastrophic mistakes while here & it was past time to move on.

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18 hours ago, greenminer said:

Fastest coach to 50 wins.

All time scoring leader as a player.
4-time all-conference
Winningest senior class in school history
back-to-back WNIT appearances.

...gotta dig pretty deep to find an individual that has contributed more to this university.

And this is why I am so happy for her success.

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18 hours ago, MeanGreenTexan said:

I've said it before, I'll say it again:
Littrell was RV's idea.  Littrell was on RV's short list ever since he was an OC at Arizona.   He was RVs hire.

I'm not a fan of how Smatresk painted that picture in that article (or, at least how Engel took his words to print).  What the heck would an Academic President know about Football X/Os to trump an Athletics guy for a hire of a football coach?

I have no doubt he advocated for Littrell.  He's made that known.   But the idea of a power struggle between two people with their heels dug in between Meacham/Littrell just did not happen.  There were many other players in the saga, and many of them were ones that needed a little extra "convincing".

And he absolutely deserves credit for Jalie's hire too, no matter how easy it may have seemed to be...   just like he deserves to be bagged-on for Dodge, Stephens, Benford, et al.

 

Make no mistake though... it always seems like when I bring this up, people think I'm adovcating for RV to still be here, when I'm ABSOLUTELY NOT.   He made some catastrophic mistakes while here & it was past time to move on.

Man, I’m glad Smatresk knew what he was doing

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