Right For The Job?

NC State hired Mark Gottfried, former Alabama head coach and ESPN analyst, to lead their basketball team. But is he truly right for the job? Did Yow want someone else and just settled for Gottfried? I, for one, think so. I really didn't see this coming especially after AD Yow sent out a letter yesterday basically saying they were back at square one.

This is, in my opinion, not a good hire. Everyone keeps saying how great Gottfried is because he was an assistant on the 1995 UCLA Championship team and he took Alabama to a #1 ranking. This is true, but he was only an assistant on the team and that #1 ranking was reached during the '02-'03 season; not to mention they lost and did not win a national championship. They didn't even get into the Final Four. That stuff happened a long time ago. Not to bash Sidney Lowe but he was on a national championship team as a player and look what happened.

I'm also not very happy because Gottfried is, well, kind of old. State, in my opinion, needed a young coach with energy like Shaka Smart to lead. In additon, everyone seems to have forgotten the fact that Gottfried left Alabama under a "controversy" that he seemed to not want to come clean about during his press conference yesterday. In my opinion, if a coach has experienced "controversy" in their career, they should talk about it.

Now on to the way the search was conducted. I believe they should have kept the students in the loop of what was going on, especially when AD Yow sent out the letter. She sent it to all Wolfpack Club members but not to students? That was not professional at all. I even think that, given the situation they were in before this happened, they should have even surveyed students about what they wanted in a coach. It wouldn't have been hard to do that. The school sends out tons of surveys over the course of the year, what's one more? I'm not one to immediately bash something but this I can't help. I'm in complete disagreement with this hire. I personally don't think he has the "it" factor and is definitely not an A-list coach. As a commenter said on WRALSportsFan.com, " We certainly didn't hit the home run. We may have even hit a foul ball."