The coach who brought Charles Jenkins, Greg Washington and Brad Kelleher to Hofstra will be a couple dozen miles west of Hofstra Arena this afternoon, when the trio of seniors are honored and Jenkins’ jersey is retired in Senior Day festivities prior to the Flying Dutchmen’s game against Delaware.
But even as Tom Pecora strolls the Fordham sideline at the Meadowlands Arena (hey, I can call it what I want!), he’ll still be thinking about Jenkins, Washington and Kelleher and hoping their final home game is one to remember.
“Those guys are a special bunch of kids, I’m thrilled for them—I rooted for them throughout the season,” Pecora said Friday afternoon. “They’re quality kids. They’ve always taken care of things academically. They were good leaders and in good times or bad, they were always there for us. They’ve been great.”
Pecora will always be linked with Jenkins, who became the latest symbol of Pecora’s ability to uncover under-recruited gems, but Pecora went through plenty as well with Washington and Kelleher, each of whom endured a season (or more) on the bench thanks to the unpredictable shenanigans of the NCAA.
“You think about the nonsense that Greg Washington goes through his first year—he never wavered in his love for Hofstra, he was always there, he never backed down and always wanted to be a part of what we were doing,” Pecora said. “And he won a lot of ballgames for us in very quiet, subtle ways. He blocked a lot of shots, he’s the all-time shot blocker.
“Kelleher I think the bad thing is just the residue of having to sit and not play for a year-and-a-half caught up to him and I think that’s why, to this point, he hasn’t had the kind of great seasons we thought he could have. But that’s life and I have no doubt that he’s going to go on and have a great pro career in Australia or in Europe.”
With Fordham taking on Rhode Island at the exact same time Hofstra is facing Delaware today, Pecora’s staff won’t be represented for Jenkins’ jersey retirement like it was Jan. 29, when Fordham’s game against St. Bonaventure ended in time for David Duke and Mike Kelly to get to the Arena and see Jenkins break Antoine Agudio’s career scoring record. Kelly said that afternoon he might never again coach a player who had Jenkins’ combination of ability, work ethic, humility and personality, and Pecora agreed Friday Jenkins was a rare talent.
“I think we’ve had similar personalities, but not in an elite player, you know what I mean?” Pecora said. “I think it’s a special blend, to be that personable and that approachable and that genuinely concerned about other people and still be an elite athlete, because everyone’s kissing your tail all the time. I think one of the reasons for that is Charles wasn’t a kid who had been getting his butt kissed since he was in ninth grade. He came up under the radar—when he was at Springfield Gardens, a lot of people still didn’t believe in his game. I think by [attention] coming later to him a little bit later, it allowed him to develop more as a person and not just be Charles Jenkins the basketball player.”
Is that really Mo Cassara uttering those words? Or is it TOM PECORA?!
Mo Cassara’s first appearance in the post-game interview room sounded so familiar, one had to wonder if it wasn’t part of an elaborate ruse. Here’s the new coach talking about how he vocally expressed his displeasure at halftime…and how the Flying Dutchmen had to perform better on defense and on the boards…and how taking care of the basketball is the most important job for a point guard…and how the Hofstra squad that takes the court after New Year’s Day will be better than the one we see beforehand.
Haven’t we heard this all before? This doesn’t sound like the new guy. It sounds like—oh my God IT’S TOM PECORA AND HE’S JUST RIPPED OFF HIS MO CASSARA MASK!!! I NEVER SAW THIS COMING!!!
As it turns out, that was really Cassara speaking, and he wasn’t channeling Pecora to pay homage to his predecessor but to indicate how much room the Dutchmen have for improvement after an inconsistent 76-62 win Sunday over Division II Molloy College in front of a CBI-sized crowd at the Arena.
The Dutchmen took the lead for good less than three minutes into the game but didn’t take a double digit lead for good until there were less than seven minutes to play as the Dutchmen often struggled to find a rhythm against Molloy’s zone defense.
“We got a little tentative,” Cassara said. “Credit goes to Molloy, their coaching staff and their team. They did a good job of slowing the tempo down and making us get a little tight.”
More notably, Molloy outrebounded the Dutchmen 37-34 even though the Lions received just 38 minutes from players taller than 6-foot-5. The Dutchmen had just two offensive rebounds in the first half, when Molloy not only stayed close by outscoring the Dutchmen 22-12 in the paint but also provided the fodder for Cassara’s halftime speech, which, you can be certain, had nothing to do with old school rap.
“We gave up some easy shots,” Cassara said. “My big concern, where we have to get better, is defense. We have to become a more defense-oriented team.”
The Dutchmen responded to Cassara’s scolding with 11 offensive rebounds in the second half. “Phenomenal halftime speech by me,” Cassara said with a grin. “I got after a couple of our front court guys—mainly Mike [Moore], David [Imes] and Greg [Washington] because they just simply weren’t going to the offensive glass.”
Still, Cassara was concerned that the Dutchmen’s leading rebounder was freshman Stephen Nwaukoni, who had eight boards in just 12 minutes. Washington had six rebounds, three blocks and three steals, but didn’t take a single free throw. Sophomore David Imes scored 12 points and showed flashes of filling the offensive void left by the departure of Halil Kanacevic in going to the line a team-high six times but he had just four rebounds—two on each end of the floor.
“I thought Steven Nwaukoni did a terrific job, and what he does well, he did tonight,” Cassara said. “He’s a strong body, he rebounds. He really was a presence in here and I think he ultimately got in there and gave us a little bit of a lift and challenged our more veteran front court guys to really start playing harder.”
There were bursts of impressive efficiency on offense, particularly from Charles Jenkins and point guard Dwan McMillan. Jenkins had his usual overflowing stat line—a game-high 24 points as well as five steals, four rebounds and four assists—and McMillan had eight assists, including seven in the first half, and just one turnover. McMillan didn’t score from the field until there was 5:03 left but capped three fast breaks with layups in a span of 101 seconds to highlight a 14-3 run that ended any hopes of a Molloy upset.
“The number I look at and my big challenge to Dwan is value the basketball,” Cassara said. “I’ve told our team from day one that if we value the basketball and get a good shot every time down the court, we’re going to win our share of games.
“Eight assists and one turnover, that’s the kind of numbers that we need from him consistently. There don’t have to be that many assists, but the lower number of turnovers is what’s really important for me.”
Mike Moore finished with 14 points and provided his own bit of nostalgic channeling in Cornelius Vines’ old no. 23: He opened the game by scoring the Dutchmen’s first six points, but he missed his next eight shots—including six from 3-point land—and went scoreless from the field for more than 30 minutes.
Brad Kelleher, freed momentarily from the NCAA gulag, scored eight points and was 2-of-5 from 3-point land before the Clearinghouse ordered him off the court for having a fantasy football team. (I made that up. Or did I?)
Kelleher played 17 minutes, most among the non-starters, and Moore was the only starter to play less than 30 minutes due to some early foul trouble. Getting such an extended look at the Dutchmen, getting his starters ready for a big workload—no easy task considering Imes saw limited duty as a freshman, Moore sat out last year as a transfer and McMillan was in junior college—and identifying strengths and weaknesses in a game setting was the real goal for Cassara.
“We’ve got some good tape to show them tomorrow that we’ve got a long way to go,” Cassara said. “We’re still a work in progress. We’ve got a lot of new faces, a whole new coaching staff, so we’re not going to be great at some things right now My big thing for this team is to get better every day, and I think this is going to be a very different team come late December and January and moving into the real CAA season, where I think we’re going to get better and better.”
Hmm. That really sounds familiar. Even if it doesn’t rhyme.
Missing the Shirts/Skins, err, Blue/White Scrimmage isn't going to stop me from the annual posting of this still from the best movie ever made, Just One Of The Guys!
A quick and rare Saturday post to apologize for the lack of posts this week as well as for my absence at today’s Fanfest/Blue-White Scrimmage. A crazy few days at the day job coupled with a wicked cold (as the Boston Bias fans say) knocked me for a loop. I’ll be back Monday with the long-awaited debut of the Running Tally of preseason predictions.
I’ll be out of state this afternoon (if you’re in northwestern Connecticut, come to my book signing!) and will miss the festivities at the Arena. I hate to miss it, but on the bright side, I found a way to use the annual Just One Of The Guys photo! Fortunately, those of you looking for updates and posts on the Blue/White Scrimmage will be in good hands with Gary Moore, my bitter blogging rival. Check him out at Twitter at @gmoore21566. And don't forget Mo Cassara at @Coach_Cassara.
Lastly, here are a couple interesting links. If you’re fortunate enough to be a Cablevision subscriber (snort, hey, does anyone know who is winning the National League Championship Series?) Newsday’s Steve Marcus wrote about the upbeat prospects for the men’s and women’s basketball teams here (and he didn’t even declare how Hofstra made a horrendous mistake joining the CAA!).
And our old friend Tom Pecora chatted it up at the Atlantic 10 media day at Chelsea Piers (a media day in which he doesn’t have to get on a plane—he’s already a happier man!) Thursday. In addition to promising a unique preseason bonfire for Fordham, he also picked at the festering wound that is the 2006 snub. And you wonder why we got along so well. Have a good weekend, catch you Monday!
Can Mo Cassara bust a move as well as Jay Wright? Hopefully we'll find out Oct. 15!
You’ve probably already read this, but that big ol’ meanie Mike Litos proved once again how much he hates Hofstra by picking the Flying Dutchmen fifth in his pre-pre-preseason preview. FIFTH!!! I was going to tell him he sucks, but then he said anyone who uses the word sucks falls below his Stupidity Mendoza Line and I realized anyone that uses the phrase Mendoza Line in a basketball story can’t be all bad. So you’re back in my good graces, Litos—for now.
In all seriousness, he makes a real interesting point about how it matters this season that the Dutchmen have fun under new coach Mo Cassara. Mike and I have debated this, and it’s something I’ll continue to ponder and discuss here over the next couple months, but I don’t think the Dutchmen were a joyless (my word, not Mike’s) bunch under Tom Pecora.
I think Pecora just tended to recruit stoic guys. He got max effort kids who were overlooked, kids who just put their heads down and went to work. I don’t think we’ll see Loren Stokes, Carlos Rivera or Antoine Agudio jumping on stage for Live at the Improv, but I never got the idea they weren’t having fun.
Don’t overestimate, either, the language barrier for the European players Pecora recruited and how that may or may not manifest itself in terms of on-court comportment. Miklos Szabo poignantly described last year how difficult it was to fit in as a foreign-born player who happened to be much older than many of his teammates.
Lately, I’d say Charles Jenkins is a grinder like his superstar predecessors, but a little more personable on the court. And there was plenty of personality on last year’s team displayed by Our Man Corny in addition to the dearly departed Halil Kanacevic and Chaz Williams.
Still, I can see how someone would look at the Flying Dutchmen under Pecora and wonder if they were having fun winning those rock fights. The style of play was gritty and never all that aesthetically pleasing. I’m sure teams that are running and gunning look like they’re having more fun than the Pecora-era Dutchmen.
Plus, there was certainly more of a generation gap between Pecora and his players, and who knows how that translated on to the interaction between the two sides? While Pecora impressed me with his knowledge of current movies, I don’t picture him listening to rap and R&B with Jenkins, Nathaniel Lester and Greg Washington, a la Cassara.
And remember that the new coach coming in—and being the good cop to the old coach’s bad cop—is as timeless as the sound of squeaking sneakers on the hardwood. There’s no doubt that Pecora was a hard-ass who demanded a lot, and that his softer, more compassionate side might have been tougher to see from October through March.
Remember this, too: Cassara is the same age Pecora was when Pecora arrived at Hofstra. A 36-year-old has a lot more in common with an 18- or 21-year-old than a 52-year-old. (Says the 36-year-old who goes to Night Ranger shows) And Pecora and Jay Wright came in and seemed at least as hip and happening—in comparison to the deliciously demanding, gruff and old-school Butch van Breda Kolff—as Cassara does to Pecora today.
I’ll never forget the first Midnight Madness (speaking of Night Ranger!) at Hofstra, when a student dared Wright—who was standing on stage at Hofstra USA—to join his group on the dance floor. Wright, who was just 32 at the time, jumped down and shamed the kid by showing off moves that could have gotten him a tryout as a backup dancer with (scanning Wikipedia here to see which popular concert draws in 1994 are still recognizable today) Janet Jackson.
I’m not sure if Cassara can Bust A Move—though I am sure he knows the words to it!—but just like 16 years ago, circumstances dictate he display a more easy-going approach than his predecessor. Doubly so, in fact, because of the unprecedented way in which Cassara landed the job. As I noted in July, the returning Dutchmen needed a friend as much as they needed a coach. Cassara had to save this season as well as lay the foundation for future ones, and the way to do that was to bond with the veterans.
If Cassara sticks around long enough, my guess is he, too, will eventually be replaced by the good cop. And it’d be a pretty darn good sign for the Hofstra men’s basketball program if history repeats itself and a bunch of us end up sitting here in 2026 and discussing whether or not the Flying Dutchmen are going to have more fun under the new coach than they did under the recently departed Cassara.
I'm not saying I've spent the last month wailing my own version of Hall & Oates' first big hit. I'm not saying I haven't, either.
Twenty-five days ago, Fordham held a press conference introducing Tom Pecora as the new head men’s basketball coach at Fordham. When he stepped to the podium, he didn’t announce his resignation as the HC of FU.
Eighteen days ago, Hofstra held a press conference introducing Tim Welsh as its new head men’s basketball coach. It was April Fools Day, but Pecora didn’t come busting through the gohofstra.com backdrop, a la the Kool-Aid Man.
Pecora’s entire staff from Hofstra has joined him at Fordham. Former Boston College assistant Mo Cassarra has already joined Welsh’s staff, with more announcements expected this week. When Pecora appeared on AOL Fanhouse TV’s online coverage of the Final Four (yes, apparently, EVERYONE is getting jobs in sports journalism except me), he was identified as Fordham’s head coach.
So I guess it’s time to come to grips with reality: Pecora is gone, and he ain’t coming back.
I am asked three questions by people who stumble upon this blog: Why do you hate George Mason so much? Do you ever shut up? And why do you like Tom Pecora so much?
For the Cliffs Notes answer to question no. 1, click here. The answer to no. 2 should be found in there (and here!) as well.
As for my fondness for Pecora—I’m being a little over the top here, like with everything else, but I will authentically miss Pecora. Part of it is he was just about the last link to my college days. Now, if I want to remember what it’s like to be 21, I have to root for Brett Favre, who entering his second full season as the Packers’ starting quarterback when our fantasy football league began in 1994. No thanks.
But becoming re-acquainted with Pecora and covering him have been among the few highlights of the last two eminently crappy years. Writing is in my blood, but my last gig was so dehumanizing, from a management perspective, that it began to feel like a job for the first time ever. I started this blog in the summer of 2008 to stay sharp as I pursued another job (snicker snicker snort snort) and enjoy the purity of writing for myself and not a soulless, faceless corporation that viewed me as an unnecessary evil.
I never expected it to reignite my passion like it has, and much of the credit for that has to go to Pecora. His openness and accessibility made this year’s coverage, in particular, possible, and represented a welcome change from what I’d grown accustomed to in the world of professional athletics. There was no secrecy, no paranoia, no passive-aggressive games in which he spent hours making me jump through hoops for a few minutes of his time.
Nor did he spend a chunk of his time trying to control the message. Last fall, I wanted to do a story on seniors Miklos Szabo and Our Man Corny, but the two were struggling and all-world SID Jeremy Kniffin gently suggested that Pecora might not think it was the best time to interview the two. A few minutes later, he informed me the interview was a go because Pecora said it didn’t make sense to hide the players.
Unlike so many players and coaches who are unwilling to offer anything more than mind-numbing clichés, Pecora’s press conferences were can’t-miss affairs. He was brutally, blissfully honest and didn’t have it in him to BS people. A lot of people got tired of his CAA bashing, but, again: Why should he get over the fact that the screw job that left his best team ever out of the NCAA Tournament was perpetuated by and benefited a team within his own conference?
It was also refreshing to deal with someone who viewed a reporter as a fellow human being, and not a form of life lower than a meter maid. Last spring, we spent some time in his office and discussed the pain of losing a parent.
And after the Bracket Buster game against Rider Feb. 20, Pecora walked out of the media room and asked if I was OK. I’d been diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy almost two weeks earlier and Pecora noticed, even from the front of the room, that my face was swollen and my speech mildly affected. I thought that was really nice of him, especially since I can think of at least one baseball executive who wouldn’t break stride if I dropped dead of a heart attack right in front of him.
Believe it or not, though, my appreciation for Pecora has much less to do with how he treated me than it does with the program he built and the philosophies he espoused. Pecora, as well as Jay Wright before him, made sure the Flying Dutchmen would remain a program a fan could be proud of, regardless of how the team fared on the court. My favorite part of my exchanges with the paste-eaters in Mason Nation was how they had to go back five or seven years to find an example of a Hofstra player with attitude and disciplinary issues.
Pecora is as much about teaching his players about life as basketball, just like Butch van Breda Kolff. I remember conducting an interview with van Breda Kolff after Wright was hired in which van Breda Kolff said he hoped he instilled important lessons in his players such as how to dress for a job interview or the value of arriving a few minutes early for appointments.
Pecora didn’t use the same verbiage, but the message was generally the same. He wanted to prepare his players for the world beyond the suspended animation of college, to remind them that whatever obstacles and adversity they faced on the court would alternately steel them for and pale in comparison to the harsh realities outside a tree- and tulip-adorned campus.
As interesting as it was to listen to Pecora talks Xs and Os, I enjoyed much more listening to him deliver these lessons. Maybe I would have felt differently two years ago, when I would have been nodding out of politeness instead of agreement. But after what I’ve experienced lately, a dose of perspective in a head coach is a wonderful thing.
“I’m not into feeling sorry for myself, I’m not into feeling sorry for them,” Pecora said after the infamous loss to Mason Jan. 19. “They’ve got scholarships here. It’s $50,000 a year to come be a college basketball player. It’s a wonderful life. And you’re asked to play hard when you get on the floor, work hard in the classroom and behave like a gentleman when you’re off the court. It’s not that much to do. There’s guys who would give their left arm to do that.
“So if they think this is tough—what are they going to do when they get into the real world and you lose a job like so many people have done already, or things happen to you in your life that send you for a tailspin? These guys can’t handle losing some close basketball games? When adversity strikes, the true man comes out.”
Pecora also delivered some life lessons in how he handled his departure, particularly how to go about a job even when you may not plan to be there much longer. As I wrote three weeks ago, the rapidity with which Fordham hired Pecora suggests the groundwork had been laid over the preceding weeks and months, but Pecora’s effort remained honest all season. He coached the final few weeks as if his legacy was at stake and presided over the greatest second half turnaround in CAA history. Earlier in the season, he fought for Brad Kelleher as if his job depended on it.
There’s a lot to be learned, too, from Pecora’s exit. The timing is not always right to take a new job, and there will be wounded feelings left behind both inside and outside the program.
Wright got to leave Hofstra after seven seniors led the Flying Dutchmen to a second straight NCAA Tournament and a near-upset of UCLA. Pecora’s last game was in something called a CBI that was played in front of “952” people—more people turned out to Wright’s first game in 1994—and he leaves behind a squad that features the CAA’s reigning player of the year and two members of the all-rookie team.
Not everybody gets the clean and happy ending. But sometimes, the money is too good to turn down, and a coach is too old to wait for another opportunity to jump to a bigger and better league.
Contrary to what you might believe after reading the preceding 1,500 or so words, I’m not declaring Pecora can walk on water. (Though I’ve never seen him NOT walk on water) I’m sure he’s demanding behind the scenes, and I’m sure he has an ego, too. I also know he knew it could only help him to embrace anyone who wanted to give his overlooked program some publicity.
I know 16 years is a long time to be in one place and that it was probably time for a change of scenery for everyone. And as both a fan and a dude with a digital recorder in his hand, Tim Welsh seems to be the perfect successor to Pecora. Still, I think I’ll keep the WELCOME BACK TOM banner in the trunk. You know, just in case.
Will the foundation of his new house be in place for Tim Welsh, or will he face unexpected structural issues over the next five years?
It’s officially official: Hofstra issued a press release announcing a press conference for tomorrow at 11 a.m. introducing Tim Welsh as the Flying Dutchmen’s new head basketball coach. But since it’s April 1, I can still hold out hope that Tom Pecora is going to step out from behind the curtain to the sound of thunderous applause and the thud of one guy fainting with joy, right?
While my first choice would have been Van Macon—mostly because of the stability and continuity he would have represented as well as the belief he has earned this opportunity, partially because it would have been cool if this hire was part of the Jay Wright tree—I can’t argue too much with hiring of Welsh, who has agreed to a five-year deal worth a reported $3 million (more on that eye-popping figure in a bit).
Welsh led Iona to one NCAA Tournament and two NITs in three years in New Rochelle and recruited the players that went to the NCAA under Jeff Ruland in 2000 and 2001. Welsh then spent 10 years at Providence, where he reached the NCAA Tournament twice and the NIT three times while compiling a 160-142 record. He was fired following the 2008 season and Providence attempted to replace him with, we kid you not, beloved George Mason coach Jim Larranaga.
Speaking of Larranaga: In a remarkable bit of coincidence, he just signed another contract extension today. Nope, not trying to remind everyone who he almost succeeded, or who the big dog is in the CAA, not at all. Maybe Mason is just going to ink Larranaga to an extension every time he has to suspend a player, in which case he’ll coach long enough to become the Connie Mack of the CAA.
Anyway, landing Welsh—who should be familiar to the local high school and AAU coaches and shouldn’t need much of a reintroduction to the scene—in such swift fashion is a feather in the cap of athletic director Jack Hayes. This was the first high-profile coaching search conducted by Hayes, and his ability to file through his rolodex (Hayes graduated from Providence and worked at Big East rivals UConn and St. John’s), quickly close a deal while multiple other local schools are all seeking coaches and get the approval—financial and otherwise—of Hofstra president Stuart Rabinowitz was impressive.
This is a potentially perfect fit for Welsh, who heads into what very well could be his legacy job (yes, I am overusing that term this year, sue me). Hofstra is a great spot for someone who still has the hunger but no longer wants to deal with the constant pressure and scrutiny of a BCS gig.
Welsh could be Hofstra’s version of American’s Jeff Jones—someone who was once the hip and hot coach at a big six school but who, after being discarded despite a successful track record, is content to finish his career at a lower profile school where he is appreciated and expectations are more reasonable.
Hofstra has had just three coaches in the last 20 years. Coaches don’t work under a great deal of pressure here. Just remain competitive (the second Butch van Breda Kolff era gets a bad rap because of the rough final two seasons in which the Dutchmen had no real conference affiliation, but he was eight games over .500 with a regular season ECC championship in his first four seasons), play by the rules, play well with others and you can stay as long as you want—even now, with Hofstra making a historic commitment to men’s basketball.
For that, Rabinowitz—the target of this morning’s blog—should be commended, albeit in measured, reserved and skeptical tones.
Some people will wonder if I’m just being cynical and contrarian just for the sake of being skeptical and contrarian. Who, me? Never! But as impressed as I am with the lucrative contract awarded to Welsh, I’m also wondering if the deal is more reactive than proactive—instinctual jabs aimed at Pecora for bolting for a lesser program for a lot more money as well as those who have criticized Hofstra’s since it extinguished football.
Giving Welsh $600,000—a 50 percent raise over what Pecora made in his most lucrative year—allows Hayes and Rabinowitz to effectively end any conversation about the future of Hofstra athletics. It also indicates the school thinks far higher of Welsh than it ever did of Pecora. And if you happen to think Pecora is really greedy and foolish because he ended up at a 2-26 school that only pays him $50,000 more than Hofstra is paying his replacement, well, my guess is Hofstra wouldn’t mind that at all.
But it must be asked: Why wasn’t Hofstra willing to pay its head men’s basketball coach $600,000 last week? If Hofstra is going to offer $600,000 to a coach, shouldn’t it reward the guy who turned this INTO a $600,000 a year job? Most importantly, after giving the head coach a dramatic raise, is Hofstra ready to make a commensurate re-investment in the program? If Hofstra is spending almost as much on its head coach as Fordham, is it ready to spend almost as much on the entire program as Fordham?
Yes, I know, Pecora never led Hofstra to the NCAA Tournament, and I understand it would have been difficult to spin a 50 percent raise for Pecora after nine straight years without a conference championship. But c’mon. This is Hofstra, where nobody ever knows about a “two-year study” to determine the future of the football program. If the school wanted to hike Pecora’s salary and redouble its investment in men’s basketball, it could have very easily done so behind the scenes.
And if Pecora thought Hofstra would be, at some point soon, ready to make a Fordham-type investment in men’s basketball, would he really have left a nice situation for a monstrous rebuilding job?
And hey, maybe Pecora was gone no matter what. Maybe he had stars in his eyes and didn’t want to wait any longer for the A-10 to invite Hofstra, or for Hofstra to join an entirely new conference that is on par with the A-10. Maybe he wanted the royal welcome he got at Fordham. Maybe he likes maroon. Maybe it was just time for a divorce. Pecora was inherited by both Rabinowitz and Hayes. Maybe they were saving the big payday for their guy.
But still, today, this feels a lot like the Mets responding to the criticism generated by the 2002 firing of Bobby Valentine by overpaying for Art Howe. After signing Howe to a four-year, $9 million contract—a longer and more lucrative deal than Valentine ever had—the Mets spun a yarn about how they got a guy who “lit up the room” during his interview. No offense to Howe, one of the nicest men to ever occupy a manager’s office, but the night light in a bathroom has more wattage than Howe.
That is not to compare Welsh to Howe, AT ALL, or to declare Welsh will be a disastrous hiring. Just saying it feels like Hofstra is consumed with winning the press conference and quieting critics.
Paying a head coach a sky-high salary is the equivalent of slapping some sharp-looking siding on a house. It’s no good unless the foundation is in place. Is Hofstra willing to make the investment necessary to make this hire worth it? The school will win the press conference tomorrow, no doubt about that. But is it ready to win the next 1,826 days, as well?
Is the sun finally ready to shine through over Hofstra athletics, or are the storm clouds just beginning to gather?
One of the bleakest days in the history of Hofstra athletics wasn’t without a shred of optimism.
“The last thing I want to say to you is that this in no way diminishes the fact that we believe a robust athletic program is extremely important to Hofstra University,” Hofstra president Stuart Rabinowitz said as he announced his decision to eliminate football Dec. 3. “In fact, we want to play at the highest national level. So we are keeping and have no plans to drop any other sports. We are keeping our 17 teams which don’t play in a low Division I-A, as football does.”
Nothing would ever make up for the clandestine way football was executed after a “two-year study,” especially for the hundreds of alumni who donned the helmets and shoulder pads for the Flying Dutchmen. But the truth was that through nearly a decade of organized organizational neglect, football had become a shell of its former self at Hofstra. As much as we’d rather see non-scholarship football at Hofstra than nothing at all, if dropping the sport encouraged Hofstra to concentrate its resources and attention on other sports, well, at least we wouldn’t have to worry about those other sports ever suffering a similar fate.
This was the belief I parroted for months, even as other observers of the Flying Dutchmen warned the death of football was just the first domino to fall in the demise of Hofstra sports. I shrugged off the Tom Pecora to Fordham rumors, feeling confident that men’s basketball was now the centerpiece sport at Hofstra and reminding myself that Rabinowitz expressed his high hopes and expectations for the program by declaring “George Mason should have been us” in 2006.
With that kind of support, why would Pecora—who often spoke of how it would take a unique opportunity for him to consider leaving Hofstra—bolt an imperfect yet reasonably thriving program he’d spent 16 years building for the mother of all rebuilding jobs in the Bronx? Except the whispers got louder and louder, peaking, of course, last week, when Pecora met with Fordham officials and agreed to a six-year contract with the school in a whirlwind 24-hour span.
Now, with Pecora plying his trade in the shadow of the Bronx Zoo, I’m no longer sure that those who were the loudest and angriest following the execution of football were so crazy after all. If I’m not ducking for cover from a falling sky, I am gazing tentatively upward, wondering what’s next.
The only person who can soothe the nerves of the Flying Dutchmen faithful—all seven of us!—is the same person who uttered the words that had us optimistic that the death of football was an isolated thing and not the beginning of the end of athletics as we know them at Hofstra.
Rabinowitz can let his athletic director do his job, and approve whomever Jack Hayes recommends as Pecora’s replacement, and sit in between Hayes and the new coach at a press conference and declare that this hire—whether it’s an established Division I coach, a highly touted assistant from a BCS conference or a hot up-and-comer in the Jay Wright vein—is proof Hofstra is not beginning its descent to the fringe of Division I, where it resided before Wright took over, or worse.
Because right now, it’s hard to believe Pecora's departure wasn't a link in a chain of events that began with the execution of football.
Hey, maybe it’s just a coincidence. Maybe this was a matter of perfect timing, of Pecora growing increasingly frustrated with the CAA and getting an offer he couldn’t refuse to go join the Atlantic 10, the conference he has long believed is the perfect home for Hofstra. Pecora will pull down a reported $650,000 a year at Fordham, a salary that is well beyond the means of a program that plays in obscurity. Maybe, as I wrote last week, this was destined to happen—Pecora parlaying his success at Hofstra into a higher-profile opportunity.
Or maybe Pecora knew something we don’t, knew that the events of Dec. 3 doomed Hofstra to an indefinite stay in conference purgatory. Dropping football ruined any negotiating power the school possessed. With football in the fold, Hofstra would have looked like a better fit with the CAA—nowhere near perfect, but at least still a school with similar aspirations as the league in which it resides—as it tried to negotiate its way into the A-10 or maybe even the MAAC via backroom dealings.
But getting rid of football declared, in very public and irreversible fashion, "GET US OUT OF HERE!!" And no conference is going to rush to make room for a school that is so desperate to leave its current league—especially the A-10, which has seven schools playing or planning to play I-AA football and another, Temple, in I-A.
If more than half the league can play football, why can’t Hofstra? Even if there was a vacancy and/or the A-10 was willing to expand, why would it rush to invite a school that isn’t wholly committed to all sports?
And, honestly, don’t you think it’s just a little too convenient that Fordham fired Dereck Whittenberg mere hours after Hofstra dropped football? Perhaps Fordham was sending Pecora a message that afternoon. And maybe, 112 days later, Pecora was sending a message to his former employer when he said that the job of the men’s basketball team and the athletic department is “…to be the front porch of the university.”
Rabinowitz’ actions, almost from the day he arrived in 2001, indicate he considers athletics the back yard trees, or maybe even the fort behind the trees, of the university. He’s never gone to the CAA tournament in Richmond, not even when the Flying Dutchmen made the championship game in 2006. He rarely appears at the Arena, and when he does, it’s usually for some kind of grip-and-grin ceremony before the game or at halftime. Nor, reportedly, did he show up to either of the last two open Pride Club meetings.
Rabinowitz fancies Hofstra as a premier academic institution, which is pretty funny to those of us who have actually attended class there. To paraphrase Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction: “Just because you charge like you are Yale doesn’t mean you are Yale.”
There are those on campus who think the only sport Rabinowitz really likes is lacrosse, which fits in with the elitist air he tries to project, and that every other sport is flotsam and/or jetsam. There are also people who are authentically worried about the long-term future of ALL sports at the University. Nothing even close to imminent, mind you, but there are perfectly lucid folks in the 11550 who wonder if there will come a day when Hofstra either de-emphasizes athletics or drops them entirely.
Sounds inconceivable, doesn’t it? But at some point in the last year, so did the idea that football would no longer be played at Hofstra and that Pecora would leave the Flying Dutchmen for a program that went 2-26 this season and has recorded one winning record in the last 15 years.
We’ll get a good idea of where Hofstra is headed as an athletic department with this hire. And the rumors of an imminent agreement between Hofstra and former Iona and Providence coach Tim Welsh are an encouraging sign. While I think Pecora’s longtime top assistant, Van Macon, should get a shot at the top job, Welsh would bring to the sidelines plenty of credibility as well as an experienced tri-state recruiter.
But you’ll have to pardon me if I’m not jump-starting the welcome wagon quite yet. While I have plenty of faith in Hayes’ ability to find a good replacement for Pecora, I’m also quite curious to see what happens when he goes to the office of the president for final approval. After all, Hayes ended up at Hofstra only after Rabinowitz declined the choice of the search committee he hired to find a new athletic director in 2004.
And we won’t really know if the commitment to men’s basketball was the same post-Pecora as it was pre-Pecora for years. Don’t forget Rabinowitz spoke of winning national championships in I-AA when Dave Cohen was hired to replace Joe Gardi following the 2005 season.
It’ll take a while to know if this next hire was the next step in maintaining and building what Wright and Pecora constructed, or a cosmetic move intended to delay or hasten the inevitable. But in the meantime, Rabinowitz can make us feel a whole lot better about the future by getting out of the way and allowing Hayes to do his job—and then by exiting his ivory tower and showing up for the press conference.
Tom Pecora’s last day at Hofstra was a lot like his first. There were movements shrouded in secrecy, and usually loose lips sealed tight, as the school tried to keep some explosive news under wraps.
The difference, of course, was this time Pecora was walking into the University Club Wednesday night to say goodbye instead of hello, unlike the sun-splashed Thursday morning he and Jay Wright were introduced Apr. 14, 1994. There were also two schools trying to keep a lid on a pot of boiling hot news, and mostly failing thanks to the instant news cycle that didn’t exist back when Al Gore had just invented the Internet.
It can’t be a coincidence that Pecora and his wife, Mary Beth, walked into the University Club for the men’s basketball banquet at 6:19, a mere eight minutes after Fordham sent out an email announcing the Thursday afternoon press conference introducing Pecora as its new head coach. The end was here for Pecora, and unlike at the beginning, there was no pomp and circumstance—no television cameras, no overflow crowd squeezing into the U-Club, no school president beaming at the front of the room.
Yet what could have been an awkward and somber evening instead turned equal parts frank, festive and familial, an appropriate coda to a remarkable 16-year run and, particularly, a season that defined a man and his tenure as head coach.
The Dutchmen’s season was much more compelling than their 19-15 record would indicate, with the high hopes of November and a red-hot stretch run in February bookending a brutal stretch in which they seemed ready to fall apart.
At the banquet, Pecora lauded seniors Miklos Szabo and Cornelius Vines—both of whom lost their starting jobs earlier in the season and spent much of the year in Pecora’s doghouse—for not quitting on the team, even though the end of their careers were on the horizon and there didn’t seem to be much chance of turning their senior seasons around.
Yet Pecora, even more so than Szabo or Vines, could have just as easily mailed in the rest of the season once the Dutchmen suffered that five-game losing streak in January to fall to 9-12. Given the swiftness with which Fordham hired Pecora—and the fact the school didn’t interview any other outside candidates, not even Fordham alum and red-hot Robert Morris coach Mike Rice—it’s naïve to think Pecora didn’t have an inkling for weeks or months that a job offer from the Rams could be forthcoming.
The Dutchmen finishing the season on a 10-3 tear sure didn’t hurt Pecora’s career. But, again, Fordham was so high on Pecora that he’d probably be in the Bronx right now as long as he didn’t steer the 2009-10 Dutchmen into an iceberg. Finishing 15-18 would have been enough to punch his ticket to the Atlantic 10.
He worked with Szabo and Vines to salvage their seasons, even though it would have been easy to bench them in favor of freshmen and spin the Dutchmen’s poor finish as a matter of looking towards the future. He rebuilt the psyche of a shattered team and coaxed out of it an unprecedented second half run. He fought, angrily and passionately, on behalf of Brad Kelleher.
“We always said ‘Just give yourself up to the program and believe that we’re going to do everything right for you,’” Pecora said after the Senior Day win over Georgia State.
Even in the waning hours of his tenure, Pecora was still doing right by the Dutchmen and providing his players the type of commitment and investment he asked of them. After meeting with Fordham officials and accepting the job offer Wednesday afternoon, Pecora called Hofstra athletic director Jack Hayes.
“I said ‘Jack, I can’t do it,’ and he knew I didn’t mean the banquet,” Pecora said at Fordham Thursday. “I couldn’t go in and lie to them and say nothing’s happened yet and then bring them into an 8 o’clock meeting [Thursday]. I’ve never lied to them before. One of the expressions I use all the time [is] ‘The greatest gift I can give you is the truth.’
“We talk all the time about the responsibilities that come with being a legitimate man, being an adult. And I had to make some hard decision, but for me and my family at this time, it was a no-brainer, and for that reason I was moving on. We all embraced, we went over and we had a pretty nice banquet.”
The banquet served as a testament to the bonds created by the program. Pecora often spoke of how Hofstra basketball is a family. Such quotes make for great sound bites, and supporting images are easy to produce when there are thousands (OK, fine, hundreds) of people watching.
The truth is revealed when only a few dozen people are watching, like Wednesday, when those in attendance at the University Club heard Pecora relate his morning conversations with Terry Ryan, the director of the Hofstra summer basketball camps. Actually, these weren’t conversations at all: Ryan would walk into Pecora’s office upon arriving on campus, sit down, have a cup of coffee, never exchange a word with Pecora, get up and leave. Yet it would still be, for Pecora, his most productive and enjoyable meeting of the day.
Pecora also spoke of long-time basketball secretary Clarice Smith, who seemed to be laughing through the tears as Pecora told of how Smith could, with a single withering look or a stern word, bring to a screeching halt the office shenanigans of the coaching staff.
The true feelings between players and coaches—and teammates—were obvious, as well, in the sound of David Duke’s voice cracking just a bit as the assistant coach presented the Butch van Breda Kolff award for team play to Kelleher and the sight of the Dutchmen rising and giving Kelleher a standing ovation.
And at the end of the night, when Pecora broke down in tears in delivering his closing comments, the first player to step forward and hug the coach was Our Man Corny.
As inspiring as Wednesday night was, it’s still weird, and a little bit of a bummer, to see the words “Ex-Hofstra coach Pecora” in a headline. The idea of walking into the Arena and not seeing Pecora will take some getting used to. He was on the sidelines through 16 years and two buildings and served as the head coach here for nine seasons, one year shy of tying Paul Lynner—whom he surpassed on the all-time win list in February—for the longest continuous tenure at the helm. I’ll always wish he could have achieved his goal of reaching the NCAA Tournament with the Dutchmen, and that he could have been to Hofstra what his mentor Bob McKillop is to Davidson.
Yet maybe it SHOULD be this way. There was something inspiringly cyclical about what happened Wednesday and Thursday—the penning of a new chapter equal parts familiar and unknown and the next step in timeless evolutionary process that began 16 years earlier.
This is what coaches do: They proceed from hip, hot young assistant coaches to hip, hot head coaches to experienced mainstays who move on to bigger and more visible jobs. Along the way, they develop the next generation of hip, hot young assistants and prepare them for the opportunity to take over a program.
There was something natural about Wright leaving for Villanova on March 27, 2001 and Pecora becoming the Hofstra head coach the next day. The Wright coaching tree is one of the most fruitful in college basketball and Pecora’s tree has branches, too, with Tom Parrotta at Canisius.
And now Pecora moves on to Fordham, where he got the type of reception at a packed Duane Library that Wright received at the University Club a mere 5,823 days earlier. When Wright was hired, then-Hofstra president James Shuart spoke of how he expected the school to win in the North Atlantic Conference, which accepted it as a member the same day Wright was hired. On Thursday, Fordham president Father Joseph McShane said he looked forward to Pecora lifting the Rams “…to frightening glory—and I do mean frightening.”
Pecora called Fordham a “sleeping giant,” the exact phrase Wright used to describe Hofstra in 1994. Like Wright, Pecora immediately put on the charm with reporters—especially the ones from the student newspaper, from whom he promptly requested help and assistance.
“You guys gonna get students to the games this year?” Pecora said. “Tell me what dorms I have to visit.”
At 3 p.m., two hours after the press conference began, Pecora finally exited Duane Library, surrounded by family and Fordham staffers. Pecora was headed to a meeting with his new players, where he’d begin the process of building a foundation and relationships and delivering his core messages to a new audience. But I imagine, as the sights and sounds of a college campus filled the air—with students sunning themselves on an expansive green lawn and the ping of aluminum bats in the distance—it all felt invigoratingly familiar to Pecora.
Yeah I remember the good times and the bad times too. These last 11 days of holding on, the days were dull but the CBI game was long, guess it would have been better to say goodbye to you...
The good news about last night is there’s no need for the Flying Dutchmen and their fans to worry about how to celebrate a College Basketball Invitational championship. Rush the court or not? Raise a CBI banner or not? Buy a championship T-shirt or not? Brag about it or not?
Beats us. Those are IUPUI’s problems now, after the Jaguars of Alphabet Soup University ended the Dutchmen’s season (unless I can drum up funding for the Defiantly Dutch Invitational, to be held in front of my house on the 7-foot hoop that is used by the neighborhood kids and was blown over during the torrential downpours last weekend) with a thorough 74-60 victory supposedly witnessed by 952 people.
A brief tangent about the CBI and the lack of interest in it: I was going to rant and rave about fan apathy at Hofstra, until I realized that I’d also have to rant about fan apathy at Oregon State, Morehead State, Princeton, Saint Louis, Akron, George Washington and Eastern Kentucky.
Those eight schools hosted a first round CBI game and drew a combined 13,694 fans—just shy of 25 percent of the combined capacity of 56,400. Half the games were played in front of less than 1,000 people, with Hofstra drawing the most of the triple digit bunch. Here’s the ugly truth—the announced crowds with the capacity of the gym/arena in parenthesis.
Saint Louis: 3,542 (10,600)
Oregon State: 2,913 (10,400
Morehead State: 2,202 (6,500)
Eastern Kentucky: 1,750 (6,500)
Hofstra: 952 (5,046)
Akron: 877 (5,500)
George Washington: 793 (5,000)
Princeton: 665 (6,854)
I don’t know if it’s the economy, a lack of knowledge about the CBI (at some point, I’ll run the CIT numbers too), an oversaturation of postseason tournaments or some combination thereof. I’m rooting for these tournaments to succeed, because as my fondness for the 1994 East Coast Conference tournament proves, I’ve got a soft spot for things played in obscurity.
I also want the CBI and/or CIT to succeed because I believe most mid-majors will have no postseason tournament at all to participate in once the NCAA folds the NIT and expands to 96. But if you were there last night, I’d save your ticket as a future conversation piece, because no matter what it does or does not charge a school to host a game, there is no way the CBI can survive these types of numbers and this type of disinterest.
That said, if there is a CBI next year, and if the Dutchmen fall short of the NCAA or NIT and I’m unwilling to let go of the season, remind me of last night and tell me to shut the you-know-what-up when I start waxing poetic about how the Dutchmen should accept an opportunity to keep playing. Because last night was a depressing way to end what was a fun and fascinating season. (Of course, I realize that my friend Michael Hadley probably feels a whole lot differently, hope you enjoy that Billy Joel CD, you bum!)
It was so empty and so silent in the Arena for the opening tip last night that it actually felt awkward to be there. This is no exaggeration: Before Sully Ray’s parents arrived right at 7, I was completely alone in my section.
It was weird to carry on a conversation, because there was a pretty good chance the players would hear it. The shouting of the coaches was easily audible, as was one referee warning IUPUI star Robert Glenn he was going to get a technical foul if he kept chirping.
And the Dutchmen were as flat as the arena, coming out with no fire or passion—neither of which was lacking even during the worst of the January funk—and failing to find those necessary traits until it was way too late.
“The expression we use all the time is ’50 by 94,’” Tom Pecora said. “It doesn’t matter how many people are in the gym. It doesn’t matter if there’s a lot of people hanging off the rafters or if there’s no one in the gym It’s 50 by 94. You’re playing for pride [editor’s note: Boooo! Bad pun!], you’re playing for the name on the front of your shirt and you’ve got to go out and give a great effort. And we didn’t give a good enough effort tonight.”
IUPUI, meanwhile, looked right at home in the barren Arena. The Jaguars recorded just two sellouts this season at their home gym, which is dubbed “The Jungle” and holds a mere 1,215 people. And three “home” games at Conseco Fieldhouse—the 18,345-capacity arena whose main occupant is the NBA’s Pacers—drew an average of just 2,137 people.
So to see dust bunnies disguised as 952 people was routine for the Jaguars, who jumped out to leads of 13-0 and 21-2 and never came close to trailing. The Dutchmen, who trailed wire-to-wire just twice during the regular season—but not 126 days earlier during the opener at top-ranked Kansas—got within six late in the first half, but IUPUI went into the locker room on an 8-1 run and led by at least nine throughout the final 20 minutes.
“When you go into the postseason, if it’s not the big dance, you’ve got to hope that guys are focused and locked in,” Pecora said. “And we came out flat. We’ve never come out that flat. I don’t know if we’ve ever come out that flat in all my time here. So we just dug ourselves a big hole.”
In addition, while it’s pretty easy for the Dutchmen to play the no respect card during the CAA season, it was the Jaguars who had all the ammunition Wednesday. IUPUI finished the regular season with an RPI of 83, finished second in the Summit League with a 15-3 mark and went a gaudy 24-10 overall. Yet the Jaguars were never in the NIT discussion and had to travel halfway across the country to take on the Dutchmen, who were knocked out of the CAA Tournament in the quarterfinals and entered Wednesday with an RPI of 145.
“I think they were hungry, obviously, I think they were upset they lost in their championship game to Oakland and I think they felt like they had something to prove,” Pecora said. “I thought they came in right from the get-go and they played with great energy at the beginning of the game. You can’t let that happen anywhere, but especially at home.”
Nor did it help that this was a terrible matchup for the Dutchmen with Greg Washington out due to a sprained ankle. The beastly 6-foot-7 Glenn abused the Dutchmen for 32 points on 9-of-18 shooting and a 14-of-17 performance from the free throw line.
Nathaniel Lester drew the start—his first since Jan. 23—in place of Washington but was back on the bench after Glenn scored two easy baskets on him in the first 94 seconds. Lester finished with eight points, half of which he scored in the final minute, as the Dutchmen fell to 1-8 in his last nine starts.
“Not having Greg Washington—not making excuses, but he’s the perfect guy to guard Glenn, because he’s mobile and he can chase him around,” Pecora said. “We tried Nat Lester a little bit, but then we had to guard him with a bigger person and that was a tough matchup for us. But hey, good teams make adjustments and guys who come off the bench take advantage of being starters when those situations arise.”
The idea of playing in the CBI was to get valuable experience for the underclassmen, but Lester wasn’t the only one who underperformed. Little-used freshmen Yves Jules and Matt Grogan remained little-used. Chaz Williams had an impressive second half, during which he scored all 13 of his points, but played just six minutes in the first half as his late-season slump continued. And while Charles Jenkins led the Dutchmen in scoring with 21 points and flirted with a triple-double by collecting seven rebounds and seven assists, he also had five turnovers and took just 13 shots.
Only Halil Kanacevic and David Imes turned the experience into a positive. Kanacevic had another double-double (12 points, 10 rebounds) and added a career-high six blocks while Imes pulled down three rebounds and had a block in 15 minutes, his most extensive action since Dec. 12 against New Hampshire.
The night was no better for seniors Miklos Szabo and Cornelius Vines, each of whom played key roles in the Dutchmen’s February resurgence but finished their careers by scoring two points apiece. Szabo played just 20 minutes on a night when the Dutchmen needed big performances from their bigs and Vines was 1-of-10 from the field and 0-of-8 in 3-point attempts.
It was quite a departure from the last time they played at the Arena 18 days earlier, when an enthusiastic Senior Day crowd turned out to say goodbye for the first time and saw Vines flirt with the school record for 3-pointers in a single game. Maybe, if the administration could get a do-over, that’d be the last image Szabo and Vines have of the Arena.
And maybe, if the administration could get a do-over, the last image of 2009-10 would be of the exhausted Dutchmen expending every bit of energy in the double overtime loss to Northeastern in the CAA quarterfinals. Maybe there was no way to refuel after that, and after a frantic second half in which the Dutchmen turned a 2-7 start into a 10-8 finish. Maybe it’s better to be left wanting more, instead of getting more and not doing much of anything with it.
The 2009-10 Flying Dutchmen season is like a thoroughly engrossing and memorable concert that ends with the band yodeling throughout its encore. You won’t forget the magic created earlier in the evening—“This won’t define our season,” Pecora said—but the anticlimactic ending will stick for a while.
“Whether you win or lose, it’s a teachable moment,” Pecora said. “When we sit down and meet, I’m going to talk to them about what happened tonight, why it might have happened and how we can prepare to make sure this never happens again.”
As long as “this” also refers to playing in the CBI or CIT, I’m all for it.
Denise the hot intern, above, smiles despite preparing to deliver bad news to her castmates as well as one of the two teams playing tonight at Hofstra Arena.
Tom Pecora couldn’t stop yawning in his office Monday afternoon, and for once it wasn’t I was boring him to tears.
Neither Pecora nor his staff got much sleep Sunday night as they awaited word on whether or not the Flying Dutchmen’s season would continue. The news that the Dutchmen were headed for the CBI and a home game tonight against IUPUI finally arrived around midnight, which set into motion a chain of events that had Pecora and his assistants and his staff spending all day Monday embarking on a crash course of all things IUPUI (well, not all things, we took care of that this morning!).
“What we did last night was we had two guys waiting at Hoop One Video [in New Jersey]—they were sitting in the car, two of our managers,” Pecora said. “As soon as we knew it was IUPUI, we called them at midnight. They got us three tapes and they drove back, got back here about two o’clock.
“Coach [David] Duke was sleeping here. He got up and started watching tape at six. And then I got here at eight and I started watching.”
Pecora said the plan was to produce a scouting report for the Dutchmen in time for practice Tuesday. “So for the kids, it’s business as usual,” Pecora said. “We’re usually ahead of the curve a little bit more.”
—Hofstra and IUPUI have never played each other and IUPUI has played just two CAA opponents in its 13 seasons as a Division I program. The closest connection Hofstra has to IUPUI is a thin one indeed: IUPUI plays in the Summit League, which used to be known as the Mid-Continent Conference, which in turn took in the rest of the old East Coast Conference (Buffalo, Central Connecticut, Chicago State, Northeastern Illinois and Troy State) after the ECC finally broke apart for good in 1994.
Yet is anyone surprised that Pecora, who seems to know and get along with everyone in Division I (well, except this guy), is friends with IUPUI coach Ron Hunter and exchanged texts with him late Sunday night?
Pecora and Hunter have worked together on CBS College Sports’ coverage of the NCAA Tournament and will do so again this weekend. “He texted me ‘Wow, what are the chances of us playing? Now I’ll have to buy you dinner,’” Pecora said, “Because I usually buy him dinner when he comes in to do the TV work. My response was ‘Laughed when I heard. I’ll pick you up Friday morning.’”
Judging by Hunter’s biography on the IUPUI website—which states, in part, “…Hunter has made strong defense, excellent guard play and local recruiting three of his fortes”—he and Pecora have plenty in common on the court, as well.
“I think it’s the same mid-major philosophy that you can get better guards than you can get forwards, so go out and try to play a three guard offense and you’re going to have better players on the floor,” Pecora said.
“It obviously played a role, there’s no doubt about that,” CBI spokesman Ray Cella said Monday of the impact of the Flying Dutchmen’s 8-2 finish. “That’s one of the things that everybody looks at, is the last five or last 10. They don’t admit it anymore, but they still do.”
Like with the CIT, Cella said the CBI is particularly interested in teams such as the Dutchmen, who have a young core returning next year and are eager to continue their season. “Obviously, the fact that they are a young team—even getting in two or three more practices can be helpful,” Cella said. “If they win their game on Wednesday and they continue to play, obviously, not only does it give you more opportunities to be with the kids and [work on] what you need to work on, it also gives you a sense of what the postseason is about and to try to use that to leapfrog into the following season.
“Tulsa won the first year and then was able to parlay that into the last two years [an NCAA Tournament berth last year and an NIT appearance this year]. UTEP last year, look at the year they had. Any chance you get to keep playing, keep practicing and get a game environment is going to help you, especially if you’re a young team.”
—I’m probably the only person who finds the CBI and CIT analogous to Scrubs (yes, I can in fact tie anything at all into the show created by William & Mary graduate Bill Lawrence). Allow me to explain: Scrubs has been revived from the edge of cancellation numerous times. The CBI and CIT allow teams to extend a season that seemed finished after a loss in their conference tournaments. Not bad, right?
Anyway, Scrubs is probably airing its last LAST episode tonight, right in the middle of the Dutchmen’s game against IUPUI. Someone’s season will finally be cancelled tonight as well in an enticing matchup of strengths.
Hofstra ranks among the nation’s leaders in 3-point field goal percentage defense, IUPUI shoots almost 40 percent (39.2 percent) from beyond the arc. The Dutchmen pride (booooo) themselves on limiting teams to less than 40 percent shooting, the Jaguars shoot 51.1 percent, second-best in the country behind Syracuse. It took Tom Pecora until almost February to find a starting five that gelled, IUPUI has used the same starting five in every game this season.
The Jaguars’ three double-digit scorers (Robert Glenn, Alex Young and Leroy Nobles) are all 6-foot-5 or taller, which could present some matchup problems for the Dutchmen. Greg Washington and Miklos Szabo must stay out of foul trouble, particularly early in the first half, and Nathaniel Lester will have to emerge from the doghouse to put in some time at power forward.
If one of the Jags’ trio is held under 10 points, the Dutchmen should win. If not, the race to see whose season gets Scrubbed will go right to the wire and be too close to call. Either way, see you there. I’ll be the guy screaming how the Fordham, Seton Hall and St. John’s jobs are career suicide.
If you don't come to the CBI game tonight, Nelson Muntz will have a lot of fun first beating you up and then laughing at us if consistent fan disinterest sets off an unfortunate chain of events for Dutch Nation (snort).
What I’m about to write is a bit redundant, the basketball blogger version of a priest imploring a parish full of people to come to church. I mean, if you’re one of the nine Long Islanders reading this, there’s a really good chance you’re going to the CBI game tonight against IUPUI (so many jokes about body odor and bowel movements, so little time). So you are not the target audience for a come to Jesus type of message.
So I guess what I’m trying to say here is print this out and show it to your neighbors, your friends, your enemies and that guy down at the corner who is muttering about the end of the world. Because Hofstra basketball as we know it may rest on getting a good crowd to the Arena tonight.
A bit hyperbolic? Perhaps. But there’s a lot more at stake than the chance to continue playing for the CBI championship.
For one thing, it’d be a shame to lose the attention of the administration we insist never takes the fan base into consideration on anything. Jack Hayes said Monday the decision to play in the CBI was entirely basketball based, but I believe the school is rewarding the small but vocal crowd that makes up Dutch Nation (snort) by deciding to play in the CBI. After all, I wasn’t the only person annoyed when the school didn’t pursue a bid to the CBI or CIT last season after the Dutchmen won 21 games.
The explanation that Hofstra is participating in the tournament this season because of its youthful core sounds good, until you realize the Dutchmen were just about as young last year as this despite the presence of six seniors. Hayes said five of the Dutchmen’s top seven players this season, in terms of minutes played, are underclassmen. But last year, the top six Dutchmen, in terms of average minutes per game, were underclassmen (the five returnees as well as Tony Dennison).
Hofstra hates bad publicity. While the school may catch some scorn for playing in a second-tier tournament, nobody’s going to threaten to cancel their season tickets because of it.
This isn’t to say Hofstra was entirely altruistic in accepting a CBI bid and hosting a game. From an administrative point of view, Hofstra had plenty of reason to continue the season. One more win gives the Dutchmen 20, and a 20-win season looks a lot better for everyone involved than a 19-win season. And a win tonight means there’s a pretty good chance Hofstra can declare it played deeper into March than Stony Brook and George Mason. If you think that doesn’t matter to the people who make the decisions in Hempstead, you’re crazy.
In addition, there is considerable mystery over how much Hofstra paid to host a CBI game, if anything. Hayes said Monday the CBI asked him not to comment on the fee while a CBI spokesman told me that “…we don’t talk about that stuff.”
My guess, given the very friendly price tag tonight—$10 tickets, with groups of 20 or more able to buy tickets for the bargain price of $2 apiece and students and faculty getting in free—is that Hofstra is already operating in the black.
But regardless of whether the school paid $60,000 or nothing at all, the administration is still willing to invest in the possibility of a long and expensive tournament run by the Dutchmen, who need to get to the best-of-three CBI championship series (OK, I’m sorry that is still weird, I thought best-of-three series went out of vogue when the NBA did away with them in the early ‘80s) in order to get another home game because the Arena is unavailable next week.
How’s this potential itinerary sound to you: Fly to Duquesne Sunday night for a game Monday, beat the Dukes, then board another flight Tuesday to Kentucky (Morehead State), Colorado State or Oregon State for a semifinal game a week from today. (Of course, the hope is the Dutchmen win tonight and only have to bus to Princeton and Boston for their next two games) And if the Dutchmen were to reach the championship series, the only possible opponent within driving distance is VCU.
This ain’t cheap, and another game or two or five would negate tonight’s profit in a hurry. And minimal interest by the fan base further reduces the chances that Hofstra listens to those of us among the lunatic fringe and elects to participate in something like this in the future.
Look, the CBI is no NCAA or NIT. But it’s something. Bonus basketball—an almost free opportunity to once again ponder the three stars of the game and to see Our Man Corny in action and to enjoy all the other rituals of game night—is never bad. We won’t know until this time next year if the experience of the CBI had any long-term benefits for the underclassmen, but it sure can’t hurt.
Another quiet gathering at the Arena tonight, though, could hurt. I wrote it after the two preseason NIT games drew flies and I continue to believe it: At some point, if the Dutchmen continue to toil in anonymity, Hofstra will re-evaluate its commitment to the program.
Fan interest, or lack thereof, made it easy to justify the elimination of football. I’m not one of those people who thinks Hofstra is eager to swing the ax again, but what if the interest generated by the program continues to lag behind the investment made in it?
I doubt Hofstra will ever drop to Division III or out of athletics entirely, but why should it continue to send the team to Kansas and prestigious pre-season tournaments if nobody cares? Why shouldn’t it just absorb the embarrassment of going back to the America East, hat in hand, or another low mid-major conference?
Most of all, if nobody cares, why should Tom Pecora? This is a convenient segue to mention that I am not oblivious to the news and scuttlebutt connecting Pecora to the vacancy at Fordham. In fact, I have spent several hours the last two days screaming LA LA LA PECORA IS STAYING HERE FOREVER I CAN’T HEAR YOU STEVE MARCUS LA LA LA!!!”
This is where being a total homer comes in handy. If I cared about the Flying Dutchmen as much as I cared about, say, the Red Sox, I’d be stirring the pot too, wondering in print and pixels where Pecora will be coaching next season.
But there are still games to be played, stories to be told and, hopefully, a championship trophy to be won this season. There will be plenty of time, whenever this season ends, to ponder the possibility of Pecora leaving, which, it should be noted, I do about as often as I take in air.
I will say this though: You can do your part to convince him to stay by showing up tonight. Pecora has been here 16 years and is spending as much time in 2010 as he did in 1994 trying to remind the locals as well as the student body that there’s Division I basketball being played in Hempstead. That is beginning to wear on the guy. Give him an idea of what things could be like here by showing up four or five thousand strong.
If not? Don’t say I didn’t warn you. On multiple levels. Pass it on.
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