[NU Sports] Carmody and the Cats (was: UGHH)

[Eric West]

cherron604 at aol.com wrote:
> Do we know of another coach at a major conference school that has gone 8 years without a) NIT success and b) some NCAA tournament experience.
>   

You're asking an incomplete question. If any other coach met that 
criteria yet was still the most successful coach at his school in over 
40 years, you would have a point. As it is, such a statistic is 
irrelevant. (And it's not exactly Carmody's fault that the NIT didn't 
select Northwestern in 2002.)

> We are paying BC a lot of money, and while we are not like other schools, I am not convinced that our peer institutions (Stanford, Vanderbilt, Duke) would tolerate this slow march toward basketball progress.
>   

In regard to college basketball, these are not our "peer institutions"; 
all had had success long before their current coaches came along. If 
they have a lower "tolerance," their history justifies it. Ours does 
not. It's a depressing history, but we ignore it at our peril. To say 
that Bill Carmody's progress is slow is to sidestep the fact that it's 
faster than anything else that NU men's basketball has seen in my lifetime.

> Significantly, Camody has shown an inability to sustain progress in the past, and the defections from his program are legion.? On what basis do we assume that defections will be held to a minimum, and that this year's underclassmen will make significant progress next year ?? I know that these things 'should' happen, but what is our level of confidence that they will happen ?? And is that confidence based on Bill Carmody's history
>   

Confidence is a personal choice. I'm not assuming anything about the 
future; I'm simply noting that our most successful coach in decades is 
having a particularly successful season (so far), and I see no sense in 
trying to fire the guy just because we aren't doing even better (with 
the unspoken misguided notion that we can't possibly be doing any worse).


Eric West
e-west at northwestern.edu