This smells like a Pastner hire. It's hard to pan it under the circumstances. But it's hard to feel very good if you're doing a sober analysis of the competition and track record.

(04-08-2019 01:47 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  This smells like a Pastner hire. It's hard to pan it under the circumstances. But it's hard to feel very good if you're doing a sober analysis of the competition and track record.

Hard disagree. The warning signs about Josh Pastner were there when he couldn't finish better than middle of the pack respective to the talent in his league after the formation of the AAC. He beat up on a weak and dying CUSA. And that's at a school with the biggest basketball budget in its conference. Wofford is middle of the pack in spending of the SoCon.

Mike Young's overall record may not seem that great when you just look at his Wikipedia page, but people should realize that Wofford has been in the top 30 non-con SOS in 6 of the last 10 years. 8 of those 10 they were in the top 100, and just barely outside in another (101). They schedule that way because they are one of the 5 smallest D-1 schools by enrollment in the country, so buy games are likely very important for their program's finances.

Since people have been comparing Ryan Odom to Mike Young, let's compare the non-conference SOS per Kenpom for Wofford & UMBC over the last 3 years (during Odom's tenure):

2016-17: Wofford (26), UMBC (256)
2017-18: Wofford (101), UMBC (277)
2018-19: Wofford (5), UMBC (291)

Yes, Ryan Odom has three straight 20-win seasons at UMBC, but a bunch of those wins are coming in the non-conference against lower-level competition. Wofford has played at least 5 power conference teams every season in the last three years, while UMBC has played 5 TOTAL (and that number includes Marquette & SMU).

How his Wofford teams play against their relative competition is much more important in my opinion. In the last 10 years, he's only had one season below .500 in the SoCon. Over that 10 year stretch, he's made 5 NCAA tournament appearances and had the best conference record 4 seasons.

For the record - that's one more tourney appearance than Pastner over the same time period. And Mike Young may only have one tournament win, but Pastner only has 2.

I watched Mike Young teams play in person a few times when Cremins was HC at CofC and they played @Wofford. Meh. I did get to sit like 2 rows behind the CofC bench though. I could hear verbatim the exact plays Cremins was calling in each huddle ... it was wild. The only people closer than me were player family. I thought I'd stick out wearing GT gold but there's enough white and gold in Wofford's colors it blends in better than you'd think.