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Friday, January 18, 2008
Things aren’t ‘fine’ under Hewitt
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Paul Hewitt said on 790 The Zone the other day, “I personally think we’re doing fine.” And he’s absolutely right — if we define “fine” as a program being 38-38 over the past 2-1/2 seasons.
Georgia Tech is 7-9. (“We should be better this year,” Hewitt conceded in his radio interview.) No Tech squad has had a worse record after 16 games since 1981-82, Bobby Cremins’ first season. The Jackets have played tough against three really good teams (North Carolina, Kansas and Indiana) but hasn’t beaten a school ranked in the RPI top 50 as compiled by Ken Pomeroy at kenpom.com. It has beaten Notre Dame, which is 51st, and Charlotte, which is 96th.
Opponents have made 45.4 percent of their shots against these Jackets, which puts them a distant last in the ACC in field-goal percentage defense and which, if carried over a full season, would mark Tech’s worst yield since 1989-90. Contrast this with the defense offered up by Hewitt’s first Tech team (opponents made 40.8 percent of their shots) and his Final Four club (38.8 percent). Where’d that go?
Tech has played a difficult schedule, yes, but it needn’t have been this difficult. The Jackets opened at home by losing to UNC Greensboro, which just fell to 9-6 after a 23-point loss to Appalachian State. They lost to Winthrop, which is 10-7 and has since been bested by Mount St. Mary’s and High Point. They lost at home to a Florida State team missing four inside players.
Unless Tech makes a rousing turnaround, this will mark the fourth consecutive season of underperformance. Hewitt, perhaps not surprisingly, will argue the point to his last breath: He said after the UNC Greensboro loss that he considered last season a success because his team made the NCAA tournament, albeit briefly. (In his radio conversation, he referred to Tech’s loss to UNLV as “controversial.”)
This much, however, is indisputable. Only three programs had more than one player taken in the first round of the 2007 NBA draft. (Boston College, which had Jared Dudley and Sean Williams, doesn’t count, seeing as how Williams was dismissed from the team in midseason.) Florida and Ohio State, each with three apiece, were No. 1 seeds in the Big Dance and met for the national championship. Tech, which had Thaddeus Young and Javaris Crittenton, was a No. 10 seed and was ousted in Round 1 by an opponent that made 31.7 percent of its shots.
The bar should have been raised after Tech’s ascent to the 2004 national championship game, but it doesn’t seem to have budged. The 2004-05 squad took six of the top eight players from the Final Four team and lost 12 games and was routed in Round 2 of the NCAA. The 2005-06 team finished 11-17. Last season’s Jackets didn’t win a game in either the ACC or the NCAA tournament. If you’re athletics director Dan Radakovich, would you consider this “doing fine”?
And where’s the assurance next season will be better? The Jackets’ leading scorer and leading rebounder are seniors. Hewitt has signed a highly regarded guard in Iman Shumpert but missed on several local prospects, chief among them Al-Farouq Aminu, who signed with Wake Forest despite the presence of his older brother Alade Aminu on Tech’s roster.
Hewitt told 790 he was “the eighth or ninth choice” to coach Tech and suggested, “There might have been a reason seven or eight guys turned the job down.” And then: “We have done as good as we can do, but we should be doing a little better this year.” Only “a little better” than sub-.500? Why not a lot better?
Hewitt earns $1 million per year doing the job he essentially belittled. His career record in ACC play is 51-64. In ACC road games it’s 14-43. If this is indeed as good as he can do, should we be faulted for wondering if that’s good enough?
Maybe no other coach could have taken Tech to the 2004 title game, but several other coaches could have done more since. And 2004 was, not to put too fine a point on it, a while ago. That giddy season was supposed to have been a springboard. It seems to have become a cushion.
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