Or have they.
What are we to make of former Notre Dame and North Carolina coach Matt Doherty being pegged as the front-runner for the vacant Florida Atlantic job? It’s hard to say who’s more desperate — Doherty or the administration at Florida Atlantic.
The only reason Doherty is willing to take this job is that he’s proven himself to be such an awful coach and to have an enormously outsized ego, that no other school would hire him. Consider all the D-I coaching jobs out there — Coastal Carolina, UMass, St. Francis, Loyola Marymount, and the list goes on an — and only the Florida Atlantic Owls, coming off a 10-17 season that saw them finish 9th in the 11-team Atlantic Sun, which isn’t exactly the ACC, are willing to hire Doherty. How the mighty and their hair have fallen.
If Doherty does turn the Owls around, expect him to flee Florida quicker than a frat boy heading to a wet t-shirt contest during Spring Break. That’s why hiring Doherty looks like an act of desperation. To be honest, it is.
Florida Atlantic, a mostly commuter school of 25,000 students spread across five different campuses, is jonesing in a big way to make a splash in the world of big-time college athletics. They hired one of college football’s mad geniuses, Howard Schnellenberger, who previously coached at Louisville and is the man largely responsible for building the Miami (Fl) football factory, to shape the Owls program. When it came to time to hire a hoops coach, FAU president Frank Brogan and athletic director Craig Angelos looked for a similarly big name.
Unfortunately, the best they could do is Doherty, who simply put, can’t coach and likely has no intention of sticking around to build the Owls basketball program. FAU would’ve been much better off hiring an assistant from a more established program or a coach from a D-II or D-III team. What FAU needs is a coach that’s committed to building a program, not one looking for a quick fix to put on his resume so that he can move on to the next job.
And that’s what Doherty’s going to do if he starts winning at FAU, which means that Doherty may not be the most desperate party in this case since he’s using this job as a steppingstone to his next gig. The same can’t be said of Brogan and Angelos, who, if Doherty’s successful, can expect to see the Owls make a minor stir much like A-SUN mates Georgia State did under Lefty Driessell, and then fade to low-major obscurity after Doherty leaves.
Some trade-off, huh?
Sphere: Related Content
on Apr 21st, 2005 at 12:05 am
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