Driscoll

I don’t envy Bob Driscoll, the Providence College athletic director.

Hiring a basketball coach these days is a loaded process, almost by definition.

Start with the fact that no one ever tells the truth, not really, for the simple fact that it’s in no one’s best interest to tell the truth. Many coaches don’t want it made public they’re looking for another job, and schools don’t like it when it becomes public knowledge when someone turns them down. So much of this all takes place in secret, a breeding ground where rumors are like a never-ending fast break.

Then there’s the ongoing dance that’s also taking place. We in the media want to know what’s going on, schools don’t really want to tell us, and so it goes, cat and mouse, over and over.

So it is with this PC search for a new basketball coach, this search where everyone seems to have an opinion, whether it’s the ardent Friar fan, or the peripheral one who couldn’t name you three players on the team but who still will tell you who the new coach should be.

Some of this is good, of course, for it shows that there is still a great deal of interest in PC basketball, a great deal of interest in the search for a new coach.

The flip side is that whoever the new coach is, there will be a sizable faction that doesn’t like the choice.

You can’t have it both ways.

This has been Driscoll’s world for the last month or so, and I don’t envy him.

It’s all intensified by the fact that this is a significant hire, for this has become a program at the crossroads, one that competes in the toughest league in the country, one in which you can be a good team and still not make the NCAA Tournament. All within the context that, in today’s college basketball world, to not make the NCAA Tournament has become a form of public failure.

It’s also within the larger context of a sport that’s become big business.

Or did you ever think you’d see a day when PC was willing to pay $1 million a year for a coach?

Say it ain’t so, Joe Mullaney.

That’s the other thing about this coaching search: We know too much.

It’s a little like the old line that no one likes to see the sausage being made. No one really wants to see the inner workings of how a coach gets hired. It simply points out the mercantile nature of contemporary big-time college basketball. It strips away the pretense that this is about anything more than winning games and the perks that come with that, and there’s something sad about that. Sports were better when no one knew what people made, and didn’t care.

This no longer is the little school trying to overcome all of the odds, the Providence College of the past, the school that always seemed to be able to beat its share of the big boys through a combination of coaching genius, luck and great players who seemed to come out of nowhere. This is business, where the dollars are huge and the expectations are huge, and there is little patience for any kind of failure.

Which is understandable in these times of seat licenses, the sense that all these athletic programs are trying to get their hands into your wallet in ways they never used to.

Is it any wonder that people want success, especially at a school where there has been great success in the past?

Is it any wonder they become restless when the team doesn’t win enough?

This is the terrain Driscoll walks on.

And it would have been easy if Jim Larranaga had said yes two weeks ago. That choice would have been well accepted here, and by all accounts it was all but done until Larranaga had a change of heart and changed his mind. Ditto for Travis Ford last week. If either one had said yes, after it appeared that both were going to, this would have been over and Driscoll would be getting plaudits now, the Friars with a new coach ready to start chasing a new future.

Instead, they both say no, got a contract extension from their schools, who want to publicly thank them for staying, and wish the Friars luck.

And Driscoll?

He’s left to pick up the pieces, complete with the perception that he’s a “hockey guy,” ill equipped to go looking for a basketball coach, as unfair as that might be.

Strange business.

I have thought from the beginning that the Friars would be better off with a young, aggressive coach, a coach on the make, if you will. It’s what they’ve always hired, and if it becomes a steppingstone to a bigger job, then so be it. In fact, you can make a case that you want someone to one day be able to go off to a bigger job, for the simple reason it means he’s been successful.

Here it is a month later and I still think so.

This is not about hiring the person who is going to make the biggest splash at the news conference, however seductive that might be. It’s not about hiring the biggest name out there, someone who is going to excite the populace. It’s about someone who can make this program better, give this long-running PC basketball story another chapter.

And Driscoll has to know how significant this hire is, both to this program and his reputation.

I don’t envy him.

breynold@projo.com