Ourland
Heisman
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RE: In hindsight – was it a mistake to have fired Willis Wilson?
(04-10-2020 04:37 PM)mebehutchi Wrote: (04-10-2020 10:31 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: (04-10-2020 10:19 AM)mebehutchi Wrote: (04-09-2020 05:04 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: I was one of the people who pushed Willis for the job, using what little influence I had. I can say that I am responsible for the phone call to Willis, before Scott made it official, telling him that Scott was leaving and he needed to get his resume in ASAP.
I have two gripes about Willis's tenure, neither of which I expected:
1) I would have thought that as a Rice alumnus, and having been there to see just how much the student body got behind the team in Scott's years, Willis would have made a huge effort to get and keep the student body fully engaged in basketball. He didn't, the first thing that I noticed falling off was student enthusiasm, and I never understood that. Unless, of course he was ordered not to.
2) I always thought Scott tried to slow things down too much. I don't think he realized how good a group of athletes he had. When they were forced to run against Texas, and pretty well blew them out doing it, I would have thought that would have made an impression, but apparently it didn't. Anyway, my understanding of the staff dynamics under Scott were that Willis wanted to increase the tempo, but Grey Giovanine wanted to play slowdown, and Scott went with Grey, which played into Willis's decision to go to Stanford. Based on that history, I though Willis would play very up-tempo basketball, and I seem to recall that during pre-season each year he would pledge to up the tempo, but then we'd go out and play 55-50 games. I mentioned this to a friend who was a sportscaster in Dallas. Some time later, he ran into ex-Longhorn Travis Mays in a bar in Dallas. They had a long conversation, and at some point my friend said, "I've got a good friend who is a Rice alum, and he thinks that Willis should run more." Mays replied, "There are times when I feel like going over to Willis and saying, hey, bro, you need to run. Penders never wanted us to run with Rice, because he was very afraid of their athleticism." I tend to agree, and if the Runnin' Horns don't want to run with you, nobody does.
As for 1) they moved a bunch of the home games to the Summit one of Willis' first years and that really ended up hurting student attendance continuity.
IIRC they moved TexasU, aTm, TT, and Baylor, the four schools that wee headed to the XII.
I think we played Virginia there too - and it was dead empty. We moved up to courtside seats. I remember specifically thinking is it too late to move the other games back to Autry because this isn't gonna work.
In '93 we gave Michigan a really good game at The Summit. By that time, the biggest games were played off-campus. It might have been a recruiting tool to help attract athletes to the program.
I remember a sellout crowd sometime in the mid 90's against UCONN at Autry. They were ranked in the top 5, but we gave them a good game. They had an incredible player at the time who played Center, but I forget his name. He was one of the best players in the nation at the time. It's the only sellout at Autry that I've attended.
More to the subject, I've always felt that Wilson should have been given a couple years to coach in, and recruit to, Tudor. By that time, things really had grown stale, but the refurbished arena may have been all he really needed to get the program over the hump. Ultimately, the divide between the G5 and power conferences has widened since his time, and the NCAA has taken a hands-off approach to how that effects scheduling. They've made it more difficult to access their basketball tournament. Times have changed.
(This post was last modified: 04-13-2020 04:12 PM by Ourland.)
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In hindsight – was it a mistake to have fired Willis Wilson?
