IU's New Coach

Today at 4pm EST, IU will hold a press conference in Assembly Hall announcing Oklahoma's Kelvin Sampson as IU's new head basketball coach. Personally, I agree with the national commentators (aside from Gregg Doyel--that dude needs to die in horrific fashion) who have for the most part said that IU has hit a homerun with this hire. Sports writers in Indiana seem less than thrilled with the choice, but that's because, while they may not have explicitly stated it, it was pretty obvious that they wanted former IU players Steve Alford (a guy who has gone to 3 NCAA tournaments in the past 7 years) or Randy Wittman (a guy with absolutely zero college coaching experience).

Let's look at Kelvin Sampson's positives:

• He once stated something along the lines of that he would crawl across broken glass to have the opporunity to coach at IU.
• He has extensive, successful big-time coaching experience. He has been at Oklahoma for 12 years and has a .719 winning percentage there. None of the other coaching candidates (with the possible exception of Calipari) have had the kind of sustained, year-after-year success at a big program that Sampson has had at OU. Tom Crean has done very well at Marquette, but he hasn't been there as long as Sampson has been at OU. Alford has been spotty at best at Iowa. Wittman has never coached a college team. Billy Gillispie has only been at Texas A&M for 2 years. Mark Few has coached in the West Coast Conference for his entire head coaching tenure. John Beilein has only been at West Virginia for 4 seasons (he was at Richmond and Canisius before that) and has only made the NCAA tournament the past 2 years. Mark Turgeon's only head-coaching experience is at Wichita State and Jacksonville State.
• He has won at least 20 games in each of the past 9 seasons.
• He is an awesome recruiter (his incoming class at OU was ranked in the top 5, with 5 top-70 recruits). Sampson brings a nationally known name that carries the kind of respect names like Gillispie and Turgeon will take years to acquire. While Alford and Wittman are known within Indiana, they do not have the national credibility that Sampson does. Furthermore, Sampson should have no problem keeping Indiana's top recruits in state (which was a knock on Davis and a main reason many people thought an IU guy should have been hired).
• He has coached in a Final Four (2002), which is something that the other candidates (aside from Calipari and Crean) could not say.
• He is a two-time National Coach of the Year (1995, 2002).
• He won 20 games twice while coaching at Washington State. Yes, the same Washington State that hasn't been to the NCAA tournament since 1994 (Sampson's last year at WSU) or played in the postseason at all since the 1996 NIT.
• At Oklahoma, he has gone to the NCAA tournament 11 out of 12 years.
• He has international coaching experience (led 2004 USA World Championship for Young Men Qualifying Team to a gold medal; assistant coach for 2002 U.S. World Basketball Championship team; coached 1995 U.S. Junior National Team; assistant coach for 1994 Goodwill Games team).
• He is a board member and the former president of the National Association of Basketball Coaches.
• He is the Big XII's all-time winningest coach.
• He has coached Oklahoma to 3 Big XII tournament titles (IU has never won the Big Ten tournament).
• He has a hard-nosed mentality. Plus, I love the fact that he is a full-blooded member of the Lumbee tribe. I don't know why, but I just do. There's just an innate toughness that I associate with Native Americans.
• He demands the best effort from his players and his teams have notoriously hard practices.

And now let's look at the negatives:

• Oklahoma is currently under investigation by the NCAA for making phone calls to recruits during non-phone-call periods between 2000 and 2004. OU has sanctioned its program by limiting men's basketball scholarships over the past two years, limiting the number of phone calls the coaches can make, and limiting the time period in which the coaches are allowed to recruit.
• Apparently his graduation rate has been less than stellar. However, from my understanding of the NCAA's goofy rules for determining graduation rate, it doesn't take into account junior college transfers (of which Sampson has had several), even if they graduate, players who left early for the NBA draft (even if they come back and finish their degrees), or players who transfer to another school and graduate from that school (Sampson had at least one transfer). The way the graduation rate is calculated, all of those things hurt the rate.
• Sampson's Sooners lost to Mike Davis's Hoosiers in the 2002 Final Four. Apparently, to some IU fans, that means that Sampson is somehow a worse choice than Davis.
• His NCAA tournament record at OU is 11-12 and he is only 9-7 against lower-seeded teams.

Personally, I think the positives outweigh the negatives. In my mind, the biggest concern is the NCAA violations. While I can rationalize them by saying that at least he wasn't paying recruits or anything that serious, an NCAA violation is an NCAA violation. It seems as though that is in his past, and it seems doubtful that any sanctions will follow him to IU.

I'm not as worried about the graduation rate, since it's such a screwy formula and Sampson got hurt by having junior college transfers. Plus, IU has great programs and staff for helping student-athletes in the classroom, and apparently Oklahoma doesn't have nearly as good of an academic infrastructure set up for its athletes.

I just hope the fans give him a fair shot. IU doesn't need another situation like that with Davis, where there was a faction that hated him from the get-go and never gave him a shot. Then again, winning silenced many of them, and I think Sampson will be a winner at IU immediately, especially if DJ White and Robert Vaden stay.

Welcome to the IU Family, Coach Sampson!