Friday, April 06, 2007

Apparently, the grass IS greener…

Billy Gillispie is moving on, leaving Texas A&M to become the latest coach to enter the pressure-cooker of Kentucky basketball.

Good luck, Billy. You’re going to need it.

Kentucky’s a great job and a great situation. It’s a rare situation: An SEC job where the basketball coach is the biggest name on campus. Unfortunately, the UK basketball coach is also one of the biggest names in the entire state. He’d probably be the biggest if it weren’t for some dude named Pitino running things over at Louisville.

All that attention can take its toll, as anyone who watched Tubby Smith’s star-crossed tenure in Lexington can attest. Tubby was a solid coach in a job that demands greatness. Most SEC fanbases would be entirely content with all those NCAA Tournament trips and the 1998 national championship (admittedly accomplished on Pitino’s coattails). But Wildcats fans expect a lot more than that.

Can Gillispie provide it?

That’s a tall order for a guy with exactly four winning seasons on his resume.

Why leave A&M in the first place? As my good friend Daniel Peck of Sportscall has pointed out, five years from now the Aggies would be naming the court after Gillispie for giving them the kind of success the program has never experienced. Instead, he’s heading to a place that won’t tolerate anything less than perfection. Being good’s not close to good enough. The guy’s been past the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament one time as a head coach…that won’t cut it at Kentucky.

I wish him luck…I just wish he’d stayed at A&M, where he had a chance to build a program in his own image, rather than chasing the spotlight to Kentucky, where he’ll toil in the shadow of Adolph Rupp and Pitino for as long as he can hang on amidst the pressure and negativity.

But for now, the honeymoon is on, full steam. In fact, if you go to Kentucky’s official site in the next few days, the first image that greets you is a full-page celebration of Gillispie’s hiring. Can’t beat that, I guess. And the press release announcing his hiring comes with—I wish I was making this up—“Billy Gillispie desktop wallpaper.“

That’s awesome.

More from me later this weekend. I’ll be following the baseball team’s series at LSU and the softball team’s three games at Alabama. Could be a rough weekend for the glove-and-bat teams.