Georgia Tech athletic director Mike Bobinski declined comment Friday on the decision that lies ahead of him regarding basketball coach Brian Gregory’s job status.
“I’m just not going to talk about it,” he said. “I don’t want to comment on any of those things at this point.”
It appears that the decision that became more complex with the Yellow Jackets' strong finish will wait until the end of the team's expected participation in the NIT. In his most-recent comments on Gregory and the team, made in mid-February shortly before the team won five of its final six regular-season games, Bobinski said he would wait until the end of the season before making a decision. It is a policy that he has made mention of previously, out of his desire to be fair and to judge the full body of work.
"It's one of the things that you learn when you're in this business, that you can't react game to game, day to day, possession to possession, half to half," he said in the February interview. "You've got to take a little bit longer view or you'll drive yourself nuts. You can't jump from here to there and say, 'Oh, my god, I'm thrilled,' (and then) 'I'm despondent.' You can't emotionally react to things. You've got to take a more balanced and longer view and you can only do that if you have all the evidence in front of you."
The team’s participation in the NIT may complicate the process should Bobinski decide against retaining Gregory. In the annual cycle of firing and hiring, some schools have already released coaches and others likely will do the same in coming days.
Should Tech follow the same course, the school would be days or even a couple of weeks behind in its search process, depending on the length of the team’s success in the NIT. On the other hand, it does not appear that it will be a particularly active year for power-conference schools making coaching changes, meaning that Bobinski would not be as disadvantaged as other years in the pursuit of a potentially similar pool of candidates.
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