UTC athletic director David BlackburnIf anyone working within a 70-foot Gee McGhee buzzer-beater of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga deserves a thank-you note this morning, it’s UTC athletic director David Blackburn.
A thank you for believing last spring’s whispers that some young assistant at Virginia Commonwealth named Will Wade just might become the next big thing in college basketball, despite having never been a head coach at any level.
Not a month on the job, Blackburn had to trust words instead of deeds, and most of those words weren’t coming from fellow ADs, but rather hoops junkies who would have zero accountability if this supposed basketball genius became a joke.
Eight months later, Wade’s Wonders have rebounded from a 4-8 start to forge a 10-game winning streak so impressive that a longtime Mocs booster called Sunday with the following nervous question: “Do you think he’s winning too big too fast?”
But the thank you’s to Blackburn shouldn’t stop there, for on some levels the men’s hire was far easier than the women’s job the new AD also had to fill during his first month of employment. To a frustrated fan base, the men Mocs had nowhere to go but up. Expectations were nil. Patience runneth over.