Wild Week

I know I have not posted since Monday but i have been working on a big undercover assignment that has been taking up a lot of my time. Details to follow. Anyway on to the big news of the week.

Undoubtedly the biggest news of the week was the hiring of Yasir Rosemond as an assistant coach for the mens basketball team. Rosemond is a interesting choice for a number of reasons.

1)His past basketball troubles- He was actually cut from the Oregon team while he was a player under Kent and was subsequently kicked off the D2 team he transferred to for behavioral problems. Traditionally those things are not on the resume of an assistant coach. Ivan Johnson better be polishing up his resume.

2) How good of a team Oregon can form from assistant coaches- Oregon now has Kenny Payne, Rosemond, and Mark Hudson as assistant coaches. Payne is still in his late 30's and was a 1st round NBA draft pick. Hudson is a better shooter than Tajuan Porter and is still young, while Rosemond was playing Div 1 basketball less than ten years ago. I have to imagine Oregon would dominate a nationwide assistant coaches 3 on 3 tourney. The only team that may be able to match up the Ducks would be Arizona since they have Miles Simon, Josh Pastner, and Matt Brase, all of whom are ex arizona players around the age of 30. The Arizona team would inevitably however play a brutal non-conference schedule, underachieve in the conference season, and then exit the tourney early despite their awesome talent. (Yes i did actually research on this topic so please email me if you can think of a better team comprised of assistant coaches)

3) Ernie Kent's strategy to hire the most passive coaches imaginable- In my years as an Oregon Basketball insider i probably attended 200 mens basketball practices and in probably 190 of those Ernie Kent was the only coach who actually paid attention to what was happening. At practice was actually the only coach who had a practice schedule. None of the other assistants did. I think that Kent hires these passive/underqualified assistants because he can exert more influence on the team and thus take more credit for the success of the program.

For example, Fred Litzenberg got a lot of the credit for improving the team during the 2001 elite 8 season after he was brought over from the womens team. He was a good defensive coach who seemed to be a natural fit with Oregon since he was the only coach with a defensive background. Kent however disliked not having control over the defense and constantly began coaching the defense in practice himself, while Litzenberg was literally told to go stand in the corner. In my opinion Kent was upset at the notion that he couldn't coach defense and in effect took over Litzenberg's job in order to show everyone that he was a good enough coach to coach all aspects of the game.

Anyway, Rosemond is certainly an interesting hire for Kent and it will be interesting to see if is able to contribute more than previous Oregon assistants have. Still you have to be happy for the man seeing as he may now get paid 80K a year to arrange the travel itinerary of the team. Not a bad deal.

I feel bad for you non-sports enthusiasts since this was a deeply basketball related post but do not worry because tomorrow i will divulge all the secrets of my big birthday bash.

BaldingReport out.