Basketball coach Isaac Brown deserved more than the boot Wichita State gave him | Opinion
After a slightly winning season, Wichita State University gave its head basketball coach Isaac Brown the old heave-ho over the weekend.
Coach Brown deserved better.
A 17-15 season — 9 and 9 in conference play — isn’t great, but it was far from an unrealistic expectation in the grand scheme of things as they are today.
What is unrealistic is the delusion that a coaching change can magically return the Shockers to the pedestal on which they once sat — perennial participants in the NCAA Tournament with the occasional deep and thrilling run through the brackets.
The game has changed.
Now more than ever before, Big Money rules college basketball. The system is rigged to favor the big-time schools, and universities like Wichita State are invited to share the scraps after the beast has eaten its fill.
Brown inherited a program in disarray after the troubling tenure of Gregg Marshall.
Marshall took the program to dizzying heights, including, in 2013, the team’s first final four appearance since 1965.
But, it ultimately came out that Marshall was verbally, and even physically, abusing his players to gain the desired result. Brown, an assistant coach, was like a control rod in the fulminating nuclear reactor that was Marshall’s regime.
Brown had a good first year and the Shockers unexpectedly won the conference championship. But the last two years have been rougher as the climate of college sports changed.
There have always been ways for the big programs to game the system and shuffle money to players.
Now, that is the system.
The two biggest factors wrecking college sports are “Name, Image, Likeness” payments for players and the “transfer portal,” both calculated to make the rich richer and the powerhouses more powerful.
Historically, WSU’s success was built on recruiting overlooked players, keeping them together for several years, teaching them how to play team ball and ultimately challenging the giants.
It’s what got once-overlooked guys like Cleanthony Early and Ron Baker to the NBA and made an undersized point guard, Fred Van Vleet, into a legitimate pro all-star.
Those days are gone. Now, programs with big-money boosters can buy any player they desire.
They bid for top high school recruits with their superior NIL budgets. And if a small school finds a baller in the reject pile — which Wichita State was famous for — the big schools can just buy them though the portal, without waiting for them to sit out a season, which used to be the major hurdle to changing schools.
Possibly the most frustrating part of the Brown decision was that when WSU announced it, the university’s statement gave a passing nod to Brown’s nine years of contributions to the greatest era of Wichita basketball ever, and quickly pivoted to soliciting contributions of another kind.
Let me translate it for you — (my comments in parentheses).
“We must recapture the competitiveness, pride and unified support upon which this proud program has been built for decades (send money, pronto).
“Shocker Nation, your renewed and unwavering support is essential to restoring our program to national prominence (we need more money to buy better players).
“Please join us on this critically important and transformative new journey; a journey that will require enhanced investment to expand and align resources to expectations (we’re now paying millions in buyouts to two basketball coaches, a baseball coach and an athletic director we fired, so we’re really in a jam here).”
We lost a lot more than Coach Brown over the weekend.
What made Wichita State basketball special to all of us was that we knew and cared about the players. Today, it feels more like the future will be rooting for black and yellow laundry.
My suggestion is that as they search for their next coach WSU should take the money they’re hoping to get, look outside traditional coaching ranks, and go find somebody who used to work for Blackwater.
For all that company’s manifest flaws, they were the best in the business at recruiting mercenaries.
