The quest for ex-Missouri coach Quin Snyder
Somewhere, Quin Snyder is probably playing the what-if game. What if he'd had a "starter" job somewhere, before landing at high-profile Missouri in the competitive Big 12? What if he'd taken a harder line in assessing character when he happened upon the questionable recruit?
Today, Snyder is out of a job, resigning last week at Mizzou after a tenure that didn't quite reach seven years. And we'll play the game along with him.
What if Washington had hired Snyder in the spring of 2002, when he was one of the hottest coaches in the country?
Snyder, the ex-Mercer Island guard who played in three Final Fours at Duke, was interviewed in 2002 by then-UW athletic director Barbara Hedges, and it's believed he was at the top of her list to replace Bob Bender. Of course, Hedges pretty much hired coaches from the pages of GQ Magazine.
There were a couple of stumbling blocks. Snyder was thought to be reluctant to follow somebody, like Bender, out of the Duke family. And he was already making something like $1 million at Missouri, which probably would have caused Hedges to up the ante not only for Snyder but for her football coach, Rick Neuheisel.
Lorenzo Romar, then at St. Louis, clearly was a fallback candidate. I won't forget the emptiness in his voice over the phone on a Sunday at the Final Four when asked how he felt about his interview with Hedges.
"I didn't know what to feel," he said blankly.
Of course, Snyder pulled out, Hedges hired Minnesota's Dan Monson, and then he backtracked after initially taking the job. Washington was left with Romar, who has been the best thing for UW basketball since a roof over the gym.
Now Snyder might have matched Romar. We'll never know. In any case, UW probably would have shaken down donors for more money — not to renovate Husky Stadium, but to quadruple the size of the compliance staff to ride herd on Snyder and Neuheisel.
Meanwhile, the NCAA enforcement staff probably would have set up a branch office in a trailer between the Graves Building and Edmundson Pavilion.
Not that the Huskies didn't run into some early NCAA problems anyway, with assistant coach Cameron Dollar. But this is what the NCAA wrote in 2004 in handing down recruiting sanctions against Missouri and Snyder: That his staff "took risks and pushed the limits" with prospects. "Viewed individually, the violations were not egregious, but when viewed in the aggregate, the violations were significant."
Sound familiar? Most times when the NCAA dealt with Neuheisel, that was pretty much what it wrote.
What if Gonzaga, not Missouri, had ended up with Ricky Clemons?
In 2002, the Zags were among a handful of schools Clemons considered as a guard at Southern Idaho JC. Gonzaga scouted him closely, and Mark Few, the head coach, at least mulled him as a candidate to test his theory that one borderline character has a real chance to flourish among good ones.
The exception might have been Clemons, who in 2003 was busted at Missouri for domestic assault. That led to jailhouse tape recordings Missouri papers obtained, involving everybody from the school president's wife to the wife of an assistant athletic director who referred to one assistant coach as a "snake."
Long story short: Clemons was every coach's worst nightmare.
It's unclear whether Gonzaga offered Clemons a scholarship. One take is that the notion was rebuffed at the desk of athletic director Mike Roth.
In any case, Snyder can't necessarily be pilloried for accepting Clemons; a good many scofflaws are out there playing college basketball. But whether it was bad judgment or bad luck, the Clemons fallout was heavy.
And so was Snyder's failure to get a team into the NCAA tournament his last three seasons, which totaled 42-42. The best the Tigers could do on his watch was a couple of ties for fifth in the Big 12.
Some days are diamonds
Eddie Sutton's bizarre weekend, capped by his announcement Wednesday night that he will undergo alcohol rehabilitation, only underscores what a trying season it has been for some of the biggest coaching names — albeit, for most, only on the court.
Sutton's Oklahoma State team, which lost to Gonzaga at KeyArena in December, is only 13-12. Last weekend, he crashed his SUV and was cited for DUI, taking medical leave the next two games before the resignation.
Some others with teams having off-years by their standards, none locks for the NCAA tournament: Lute Olson at Arizona (15-9), Tubby Smith at Kentucky (16-9, four games behind SEC East leader Tennessee), Rick Pitino at Louisville (16-8, but 4-7 in the rugged Big East) and Jim Boeheim at Syracuse (17-8).
Sutton has 794 victories and has said getting to 800 is important to him. The school has said it will count son Sean's victories the rest of the way on Eddie's total, which seems presumptuous, except the NCAA manual provides for that option as long as the school declares ahead of time.
Funny, but in 1995, when Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski was out with health issues, the school couldn't run fast enough to distance him from the 4-15 interim record compiled by assistant Pete Gaudet.
Tree-huggers and air balls
According to The Oregonian, this could be the first year all of the state's Division I men's basketball teams — Oregon (11-14), Oregon State (10-14), Portland (8-16) and Portland State (8-15) — finish with losing records. Of course, PSU didn't field teams from 1981 to 1996.
The only other states without a winning team are the basketball bastions of South Dakota, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont.
And what's more
• Big Sky player of the week is 6-5 senior Kelly Golob of Northern Arizona, a 2001 grad of Olympia High who averages 13.4 points. He's a three-time Big Sky all-academic performer with a 3.79 GPA in exercise science. NAU is 18-7 and 10-1 in league.
• Daniel Kickert of St. Mary's has become the highest-scoring Aussie in college history, with 1,787 points.
• The fact J.J. Redick and Adam Morrison are leading their teams to excellent seasons doesn't always follow with top scorers. In four BCS conferences, the leading scorer is on a team unlikely to make the NCAA field — Quincy Douby of Rutgers, Ronnie Brewer of Arkansas, Vedran Vukusic of Northwestern and Thomas Gardner of Missouri.
• Maybe the most stunning stat out there is West Virginia's team assist-turnover ratio of 2.02 (2.24 in Big East games), based on its 416 assists and 206 turnovers. The Mountaineers force 18.1 turnovers a game and commit only nine.
Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com