I don't know if Frank Haith is a good coach.
I don't know if Frank Haith is a bad coach.
I do know that sports fans are irrational and impulsive.
And Haith's resume at Missouri warrants nothing remotely close to justify him losing his job. Yet, I've seen that topic on message boards and received multiple texts from friends 15 games into his third season, a season in which the team is 13-2, by the way.
To be clear, I am in no way the president of the Frank Haith Fan Club. I was extremely critical of the hire back in 2011. So much so that I recall phoning my brother the next morning, and even after allowing myself a night to calm down, I was still irately screaming as if Breaking Bad had been cancelled midway through Season 5.
Haith is 66-18 at Missouri with two NCAA Tournament appearances and the team has a shot at a third straight appearance this season. If the Tigers do make it to the dance it will be the sixth straight year they have done so. That would be the longest consecutive streak of tourney births IN PROGRAM HISTORY. Mizzou has also never made a Final Four appearance.
So to recap, there is an actual continuity among some in the fan base to fire a head coach who has almost an .800 winning percentage at a program who historically struggles to consistently make the NCAA Tournament and has never put a team past the Elite Eight.
Missouri is a very good job. It has very good facilities, a fertile recruiting ground in state and good, not great, fan support. But it is certainly in no position for its fans to be calling for the the AD to axe a coach whose record through 84 games is better than any of his predecessors. And I'm honestly not sure where it comes from.
Although, I have an idea.
(And spare me the "x's and o's argument." He is a superior coach in that regard to his predecessor Mike Anderson, who I'm still not convinced teaches' set plays on offense and his defensive strategy is to press and trap and then sit back and play lazy-reach in defense in hopes of creating a turnover or quick shot and scoring in transition..yet I never heard anyone calling for his job. In fact, he kept leveraging raises after his one magic season in 2008-09 without even coming close to duplicating the same on-court product. But there was "interest" from other programs. Damn those stupid other programs. And damn MA's agent is gooood. Also, that's actually my main gripe with Haith, is his in-game coaching, so 1) I'll get to that later and 2) Shut up)
There is this incredibly unfair and contradictory case that Haith's detractors point to in order to belittle his record. And it happened in two short years. Which is quite remarkable. You see, he won with "Mike Anderson's guys" in year one. That's how they went 14-4 in the Big 12 and 30-4 overall — the best regular season in school history. Nevermind Anderson went 23-11 and 8-8 in conference the year before despite having virtually the exact same team as well as a healthy Laurence Bowers, who sat out in Haith's first year with a knee injury. But, poor Haith, it seemed that on March 16 it suddenly was in fact his team, and he failed to get them past little old 15-seed Norfolk St. in the first round of the tournament.
Thus the storyline became: "Anderson gifted him an amazingly talented, experienced squad and he couldn't even get them out of the first round of the NCAA Tournament! Against a No. 15 seed, no less."
The real story was: "Frank Haith took over a team that was a hot mess a year earlier. A team who couldn't win on the road if there closest family member's life was at stake and looked as if it had given up on their coach and season before getting blasted in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. And he turned them into one of the best teams in the country and the best regular-season team in Mizzou history. But the team's biggest flaw, its defensive efficiency, was exposed by an underrated Norfolk St. team that shot the ever-living shit out of the ball and played the best game of their lives to knock the Tigers off by two points. Heartbreak."
That's where Haith's pigeon hole began. And irrational fans are by their very nature, well, irrational. And so no one wants to take notice of the fact Haith, while taking over a very talented and experienced team, he took over a VERY EXPERIENCED team. Seven seniors. And Anderson wasn't so kind as to even have one commitment for the 2011 class when he packed his bags for Arkansas. And the 2011 class in the state of Missouri was, coincidentally, quite possibly the greatest in the state's history. BJ Young, and All-SEC player at Arkansas, who left for the NBA after his sophomore season, was the fourth-best player in the state that year. Bradley Beal (Florida), Otto Porter (Georgetown) and Ben McLemore (Kansas) all went elsewhere and all became NBA Lottery picks within two years.
So Haith, who was hired in May, about a month from signing day, cobbled together a last-minute class of two transfers: Earnest Ross (Auburn) and Keion Bell (Pepperdine). Leftovers from the year before included: Phil Pressey, Laurence Bowers and Michael Dixon Jr. That's it.
Haith was tasked with filling out the rest of the roster with his first actual recruiting class in 2012 and a crap-load of transfers. And he got some very, very good transfers. Former 5-star recruits Alex Oriakhi (UCONN) and Jabari Brown (Oregon), UAB transfer Tony Criswell and Tulsa transfer Jordan Clarkson. The freshman class was four 3-star recruits: Domonique Bull, Stefan Jankovic, Negus Webster-Chan and St. Louis product Ryan Rosburg. Sadly, Rosburg is all who remains.
Nothing flashy, but he successfully constructed a roster that had exactly three players returning from the year before into a somewhat deep and talented team for his second season. Clarkson wasn't eligible until this season and Brown wasn't eligible until the second semester of last season. It was billed as an SEC Title contender and legitimate Final Four threat due to all the talent, despite that fact it was a lot of spare parts. And then, one of the three remaining returning players, one of "Anderson's guys," Dixon was involved in an alleged sexual assault and was unofficially dismissed from the team and transferred to Memphis. That would prove to be a killer on the 2012 season. It forced uber-talented point guard Phil Pressey to essentially run an offense full of guys he had just met and started playing with, other than Bowers and AAU friend Oriakhi. And in a game like basketball, that is very much a rhythm and chemistry-oriented game, the results that followed should have been predictable.
The team showed flashes of brilliance all season, but never fully put it together. They went 23-10 in the regular season and 11-7 in the SEC, finishing sixth in a conference that wasn't very good. And they were bounced by a very good, senior-laden Colorado State team in a game that looked like one team had been playing together for the last four years and the other the last four months.
First-round exit. Again. Oh, and Haith's old team Miami, they went 27-6 and won the ACC regular-season and tournament title, and advanced to the Sweet 16 under new coach Jim Larranaga.
Thus, predictably, the new storyline surfaced: "Further proof Frank Haith can't coach. Look what Larranaga did in just his second year at Miami! He took that program from middle of the road to a national power, and got them farther than Haith ever did in his tenure there! And that was his excuse! That you couldn't win at Miami, because the school wasn't dedicated to basketball success and their facilities were crap and blah, blah, blah!"
Jim Larranaga is a very good coach. Hell, he took George freaking Mason to a Final Four. But didn't he kind of just win with Frank Haith's guys kind of like Haith just won with Anderson's guys?
Shane Larkin is a filthy sophomore point guard, who led a very talented and experienced Miami squad to a great season. Sound familiar? Kind of like a very talented sophomore Phil Pressey led a polished and experienced Mizzou team to a magical season? So to get it straight, Frank Haith won more with Mike Anderson's guys, so it's not indicative of him being a good coach. And Laranaga won more with Haith's guys, so it's an indictment on him as a coach.
It's like I'm taking crazy pills. You can't use both arguments. Pick one. If you choose both you are contradicting yourself and you are an irrational moron. Repeat, you are an irrational moron.
So then came last Wednesday. When Mizzou lost at home to a woeful 6-6 Georgia team. Easily the worst loss in Haith's tenure. And it dropped the Tigers to 12-2. They are 13-2 and 1-1 in the SEC with his first real recruiting class in the fold and a completely new roster from his first year on the job. That's madness. There's not a single player leftover from the Anderson era. Mizzou's 2013 recruiting class was a top-25 class by most outlets and top-20 according to ESPN with 4-star power forward Jonathan Williams III and 4-star point guard Wes Clark headlining the class. Both have contributed this season and look promising.
Haith has added Baylor transfer Deuce Bello and Notre Dame transfer Cameron Biescheid — both former top-100 recruits signed for next season — as well as two highly touted 4-star recruits, Jakeenan Grant and Namon Wright, in the 2014 class, which should be higher rated than the 2013 class when all is said and done. Meanwhile, the coaching god among men, Larranaga has Miami sitting at 9-7 with losses to St. Francis (NY), UCF, Nebraska and George Washington. Most of Haith's players are gone. So, yeah make of that what you will. And Anderson is in year three at Arkansas and has yet to make the NCAA Tournament and will need a great run in conference in order to avoid missing the dance again this season.
Look, I'm not trying to say Frank Haith is a brilliant coach. I've never been a believer in his ability to coach defense, although it's been better this season. And I question some of his late-game coaching decisions as well as the 10-minute offensive lulls in games he allows where his team to pass the ball a total of five times in 15 possessions and coincidentally ends up with no buckets during that stretch. The offensive end has been too dribble heavy and at often times discombobulated with no real appearance of a team concept that teams like Iowa State and Wisconsin portray so well.
But Haith is in year three. And if he's able to get this year's team to the tourney, it would be an admirable coaching job in my honest opinion. If you plan on giving a college basketball coach less than four years to put a championship-level product on the court at a school not named Kansas, Kentucky, UCLA, North Carolina or Duke, then plan on firing a lot of coaches and experiencing very little success. He needs time. Time to prove he knows what he's doing or time to prove he doesn't. But that takes patience. And that's something Haith has unquestionably earned 2 1/2 years in. (I mean seriously, Mizzou fans, we've waited our whole lives to make a Final Four, and we're worried about waiting another year or two? This is a program that hired Quin Snyder over Bill Self. Things could and have been a lot worse.)
Year four will shed much more accurate light on Haith as a coach, I believe. He'll have "his team." And that should include a freshman and sophomore class that is full of talent, to go along with several seniors and juniors who have played together for at least one year. Comraaderie and chemistry won't be an excuse and the talent level absolutely won't be one.
So what will the result be? That's up to Haith and the players. But until the dust settles on next season, Mizzou fans would be well served well to dim the torches.
Edit: Mizzou lost at Vandberbilt 78-75 hours after writing this post. They are now 13-3 and 1-2 in a crappy SEC. That ain't good, but all above sentiments stand.
