NCAA Basketball: TCU’s struggles, Maui breakdown among biggest takeaways
By Joey Loose
10. A few hot seats and how hot they really are
We’re not going to talk about hot seats every single week; we looked closely at a few of them last week, but there’s a particular focus we’re going to make today. When teams struggle, especially after recent years of struggle, it’s understandable for these kinds of hot-seat rumors to emerge, and there’s no shortage of coaches on edge on a yearly basis. Today, we’re going to be looking at two very bizarre cases of coaches whose sits might be less on fire than they seem.
Things are really, really bad at California, as the Golden Bears sit 0-5, which in itself is a terrible mark. When you consider that they’ve lost four of those games at home, and to the likes of Southern, Texas State, and UC Davis, then you can see why there’s reason for panic. Mark Fox is in his fourth year with the program and hasn’t turned any heads, but he still has more than two years remaining on his deal. Neither he nor his predecessor Wyking Jones has made much headway with this program, so why bother buying out his deal and paying a new coach millions of dollars to likely fail?
On the other side, we have the disaster unfolding at Louisville. New head coach Kenny Payne is off to an 0-5 start and with the upcoming schedule it could easily balloon as bad as 0-10 in the coming weeks. Payne is a brand new head coach who brought into turn this program around and things are off to a poor start. He didn’t do enough to rebuild this roster with transfers in the offseason, especially in the backcourt. His team is getting murdered at the Maui Invitational and might get that same treatment in the ACC, but it’s hard to give up on a coach two weeks into a bad reloading season.
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California and Louisville are both awful teams and if either wins double-digit games this season it might be considered a miracle. It’s also very true that a head coaching change is unlikely for both programs, albeit with these schools in very different positions. We don’t know if things will ever turn around for the Golden Bears. We don’t know if Payne is the guy to put Louisville basketball back on a winning track. What we do know is that this season will be painful at both schools and we’ll likely find out a lot about the mettle of these coaches and their players.