2021-22 College Basketball Thread

Turgeon fired at Maryland. Danny Manning is the interim HC

 

Which was it?

 

Am I missing something here? They lost to Mason. Ok. Other losses are to University-6 and the Hokies, both of which are good.
Last 3 full seasons: 36-24 in the Big Ten. Is there really a problem here?

 

It's incredible that they force out Turgeon and keep a POS like Locksley.

 

There is nothing awful about losing to this Hokie team. We’re not talking about history. This is the here and now.
Absurd. Unless there’s something we don’t know about.
Only December firing (among top programs) that I can remember off top of my head is UCLA with Alford. But he has been underachieving for years.

 

Maryland's fans have been disgruntled with Turgeon seemingly from Day One, I think in great part because he's wasn't Gary Williams, even though Turgeon's results were just about the same as Williams's post-title results.

Williams (post-title): 1 Sweet 16, four second-round NCAA losses
Turgeon at Maryland: 1 Sweet 16, three second-round NCAA losses, one first-round loss

Then again, Williams also became quite polarizing to Maryland fans late in his career there. He basically ceded the talent-rich DC recruiting area to the nation's other blue bloods and refused to associate with the recruiting world's seedier characters, and Maryland became a pretty unexceptional program as a result. The fans loved him for the title but many also thought he was becoming something of a stubborn dinosaur. Knowing all that, I think the expectations for Turgeon -- that he not only replace a Maryland legend but get the program back to where it was an annual second- and third-weekend NCAA tournament team -- were impossibly high. That Turgeon almost annually couldn't get Maryland past the second round despite a good amount of talent greatly aggrieved that fan base, especially when the school kept giving him contract extensions.

The scuttlebutt from reporters on Twitter who would know such things is that Turgeon finally had had enough with the fans' negativity toward him -- they apparently got pretty vicious during the Virginia Tech loss, which took place on a night they were honoring Len Bias -- and that he felt there wasn't much he could do to change their minds. Maryland says it will honor the terms of his buyout ($5 million) even though he's technically resigning, which suggests to me that he came to them and said: "Look, this isn't fun anymore for anyone. I'll walk away now with a paycheck, you get a huge jump on a new hire, the fans/boosters finally get their scalp, what's not to like?"

By many accounts, Turgeon is a pretty good guy, and he survived 10-plus years in that athletic department, which is one of the most dysfunctional in the country no matter who is charge. Seems as if he just had enough.

 

That sounds legit to me.

 

They just extended him through 25-26 SIX MONTHS AGO and now pay $5 million to get rid of him.

 

This is why @Hot and Rickety strikes me as being on to something. Maybe Turgeon really is fed up.

 

God forbid a SWAC team not look sharp during the annual guarantee game death march through the Top 25.