Buzz Williams coaches the Virginia Tech men's basketball team in its NCAA tournament game against overall No. 1 seed Duke on March 29 in Washington. Williams is now the head coach at Texas A&M.
Mark WiedmerThe Texas Tech and Texas A&M men's basketball programs may soon have far more in common than the fact they both compete in Power Five athletic conferences and call the Lone Star State home.
With the Aggies' hiring of former Virginia Tech coach Buzz Williams this past week, A&M could soon join Tech's Red Raiders as finally being able to add "NCAA tournament Final Four" to its accomplishments.
That's how good a coach Williams would appear to be from his previous stops at Marquette and Virginia Tech. Throw in A&M's vast financial resources, the Southeastern Conference's growing commitment to men's basketball and the obscene amount of talent being produced in Texas these days, and it's almost impossible to see how the Aggies won't become a top-10 program under Williams over the next three or four years.
As for that other hire within the SEC this past week - former North Carolina star Jerry Stackhouse will run the show at Vanderbilt - it has a Dave-Kingman-swinging-for-the-fences feel. It might be a home run, or it might be a strikeout leading to a .236 batting average.
Of course, even winning 25 percent of his SEC games would make Stackhouse a good deal more successful than canned Commodores coach Bryce Drew was this past season, because Vandy was vanquished in all 19 of its conference games, including its one-night stay at the SEC tourney.
But Williams is all but certain to almost instantly be a good deal better than that. His Virginia Tech worksheet was even better, given the mess he inherited. After going 2-16 in the Atlantic Coast Conference during his first season with the Hokies, he never failed to win fewer than 10 conference games in his final four seasons in Blacksburg, finishing 12-6 in a brutally tough ACC this season before falling by two tiny points to Duke in the NCAA tournament's Sweet 16 a little more than a week ago.
If he could turn in those performances at schools whose resources are dwarfed by those at A&M - which possesses one of the nation's top 10 endowments in the country at $10.8 billion (that's right, b-b-billion) - imagine what he could create in Aggieland.
Nor is this merely a bigger payday for Williams, though yearly bonuses could swiftly push his annual salary north of $4 million. This is personal, or as the Texas native said in his introductory news conference, "I'm coming home."
He soon added: "I think it's bigger than any dream I had. I can't even believe this happened."
And this from a guy who was once an A&M assistant under defensive wizard Billy Gillispie, who left the Aggies for Kentucky, where his personal demons and a 24/7 spotlight got the best of him.
How determined is Williams to turn around the Aggies, who went 14-18 this season under former coach Billy Kennedy after reaching the Sweet 16 a year ago by blasting 2017 national champ North Carolina? After being introduced at a Wednesday news conference in College Station, he called for a 6 a.m. workout with his new team the following day.
"It was intense," sophomore guard TJ Sparks told the Roanoke (Virginia) Times. "He just came with a lot of energy. He wanted to make a statement, let it be known that he wanted to make a change for the Aggie culture. He just implied that it's going to be his way or the highway."
As for Vanderbilt and Stackhouse, athletic director Malcolm Turner, barely two months on the job, deserves much praise for thinking outside the box in bringing in someone who's never previously been a college coach at any level or position, though Stackhouse did win a title in the G League, the NBA's developmental arm.
And from an Xs-and-Os standpoint, Stackhouse may be fine, especially if he can hire a couple of assistants with Power Five conference experience. There is also this quote from former Chicago Bulls coach and Bradley University coach Stan Albeck, who once said of the difference in the NBA and college: "You do more coaching in the final two minutes of an NBA game than you do over 40 minutes in college."
But coaching in the SEC requires so much more than mastering a greaseboard. There are myriad recruiting rules, media obligations, booster obligations, academic issues.
Yes, Stackhouse delivered a wonderful and well-crafted opening statement when he said of his new job: "I look forward to furthering Vanderbilt's unique approach to athletics - blending a powerhouse competitive spirit with elite academics to holistically develop talented student-athletes and celebrate victories on and off the court."
If he can deliver on that goal, Turner will swiftly move to the penthouse of visionary athletic directors. But if Stackhouse comes up short, the VU AD may quite fairly be criticized for needlessly attempting to make a splash with a high-risk hire that winds up in the trash.
It is often said you never stay the same. You either get better or worse. With A&M's hiring of Williams, the SEC just got better regarding college basketball.
And with the Arkansas job still open and LSU likely to open soon thanks to former University of Tennessee at Chattanooga coach Will Wade's college corruption troubles with the Bayou Bengals, it could become even stronger in the very near future.
If that happens, Williams' dream job might not be the only one to create a nightmare matchup for the rest of the league.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.