Taylor didn’t need to make a splash with hire
Gene Taylor’s hiring of Saul Phillips didn’t receive much attention outside of Fargo.
It wasn’t just because NDSU is a mid-major Division I school, either.
It’s because Phillips’ hiring came — unfortunately for Taylor — just three days after the University of Minnesota hired legendary coach Tubby Smith to replace the underachieving Dan Munson.
Minnesota announced on March 23 that Smith would become its next head coach.
Smith left one of the top coaching jobs in the country at Kentucky to take over for Big Ten pee-on Minnesota.
To put it in basketball terms, Minnesota athletic director Joel Maturi made a slam-dunk with Smith while NDSU’s Taylor made a layup with Phillips.
Taylor waited just four days after Miles left to hire a coach. He didn’t even make the position available to outside coaches.
“This is a very attractive job, and I know we’d get very quality candidates,” Taylor said when he announced the hiring. “I had a couple people in mind that I was going to go after that they would have been very good coaches here … it just kept coming back to Saul Phillips.”
Truth is, if Taylor had opened the job to outside candidates, Phillips would have had some tough competition.
At the press conference announcing Phillips as head coach, Taylor said he expected a lot of top Division I assistant coaches would have gone after the job.
As an assistant Division I coach, the next step is usually a mid-major program.
Unless the coach ahead of them leaves, the assistant usually doesn’t get a high-profile position anywhere.
Throughout the entire Phillips’ press conference though, Taylor kept referencing back to “after thinking about the other candidates, Saul was the best fit for this program.”
Totally true.
Taylor could have hired some big-shot assistant from a Big Ten or Big 12 Conference team, but would it be the best for NDSU?
Sure, the boosters would have loved it, but would NDSU have a better basketball team because of it? I don’t think so.
Phillips came to the program three years ago, the same time Ben Woodside and co. came into the program as freshman.
He has a special bond with this group and that will be vital in the coming years when NDSU becomes eligible for the NCAA tournament in 2009.
Also, by hiring Phillips, NDSU will likely keep one, maybe two or three, of its assistants on staff. By hiring an outside candidate, NDSU would have likely lost all the assistants, and the current players, who by the way have made the program what it is and played a large role in Miles making $400,000 a year, would have not been happy campers and maybe transferred.
Hiring Phillips will keep the program basically the same. Instead of a nutty, skinny Miles pacing the sidelines though, fans will have to get used to a nutty, shorter Phillips’ antics on the bench.
While Maturi wowed boosters with his first-class hire, which came with a $1.8 million salary, Taylor went with the boring old promotion of a coach with no head coaching experience. Just remember, Bison fans weren’t overwhelmed with his choice to hire that guy Bohl, either.