For athletic director Gene Doris, the more good teams drop out of the NCAA tournament, the better.
With every elimination game in the Big Dance, at least one more candidate becomes available, and that’s what happened last Sunday when 11th seeded George Mason stunned heavily favored UConn, ending the Huskies’ season and giving associate head coach Tom Moore a whole lot more time to think about what he wants to do next year.
Doris said that Moore, former Xavier, Providence and Virginia coach Pete Gillen, and former Manhattan, St. John’s and New Mexico coach Fran Fraschilla are all on a short list of candidates he feels would be an excellent fit for the university.
The question now is how much interest each candidate has in the university, and now that the season has come to a close for all but four teams, the coaching carousel is going to start spinning quicker and quicker.
Coaches like Moore, who were involved with their current teams this season, will now be able to shift their attention to the various vacancies that have sprouted up over the east coast and throughout the country.
But as Doris put it in the days after Tim O’Toole’s tenure officially ended, the coaching carousel is all a big game of dominoes: what happens at one school immediately impacts what could happen at another.
So Fraschilla, an analyst at ESPN, and Gillen, an analyst for College Sports Television, will also have to take a more serious look at their options in the next two weeks.
” I feel bad, but from my prospective [having the season end] it opens it up a little bit more to move people along and to find out whether their serious,” Doris said. “I don’t think anyone is using us. Sometimes that’s a factor that you have to worry about.”
Doris said the search is moving into the second phase, during which a committee composed of alumni, faculty, and others with ties to the university, will meet for the first time “very soon”, and evaluate a list of candidates generated by Doris and ChampSearch, the nationally acclaimed head-hunting firm the university hired to assist with the search.
The committee will the conduct interviews with the candidates and report back to Doris, who will conduct another round of interviews for candidates he and the committee agree would be a good fit for the university.
All this, Doris said, should happen within two weeks. He has said from the beginning that the university would like to have a new coach in place by the week after the final four, and that remains a possibility, he said.
So who, right now, is the best bet to get the job?
It’s tough to say at this point, but we know this: Moore, Gillen, Fraschilla, and at least two other unnamed candidates (Doris acknowledges having talks with the former three because they revealed to the media that the talks had taken place, but will not otherwise name candidates publicly) are on the list right now, and somewhere between two and five will be on the list of finalists.
It could be that the five Doris has in mind right now are all finalists, and potentially, there’s even the possibility that none of them will be, if they all decide to pursue other options.
The candidate with the most momentum in the rumor mill, for what its worth, is Fraschilla. He told WFAN’s Mike Francessa and Chris Russo last week that the school has aggressively pursued him, and Russo ended the interview by saying, “we’ll see you at Fairfield.”
Fraschilla, like Gillen, would bring instant credibility to the program because of his name recognition and proven track record. He may even have an edge over Gillen, a 1968 Fairfield graduate and a long-time friend of Doris, because he has coached in the MAAC and had great success there, and because of his ability to recruit in New York City.
“I can sum it up in one quick comment,” Doris said. “We’re either looking for a fresh face or a proven winner and he certainly fits the category of a proven winner.”
Moore, on the other hand, may not be a proven winner as a head coach, but can certainly be considered a winner because of the school he’s been at for the past decade, and he undoubtedly fits into the “fresh new face” category that Doris described.
He, like Fraschilla and Gillen, is certain to get offers from other schools, and it may be true because of his up-and-coming status that he will garner the most interest from other schools of the three.
The interest in Moore comes from as close to home as the University of Hartford, but his options don’t end there. He has been recruited heavily by the administration at Delaware, and there’s always the possibility that he’ll be a candidate for a Big East job, if not this year at Seton Hall, at some point in the very near future.
Doris said that he’s happy with how things have gone so far. Given the prominence of the names on the list, there’s no reason in the world he shouldn’t be.
But the names on the list mean nothing if the guy who ultimately gets the job isn’t one of those on the short list of candidates the university wants.
Leave a Reply