Penny Hardaway’s tenure in Memphis won’t be remembered as much as the timeless drama of Clyde Drexler’s misadventures in Houston or Patrick Ewing’s complete trouble in Georgetown.
In Hardaway’s eight years as a head coach, despite having no real experience, there were some real wins, some legitimate highs and moments, and it felt like he might have had the opportunity to make all kinds of outlandish boasts that left many of his senior colleagues privately wondering if he knew he was swimming in shark-infested waters at the highest levels of college basketball.
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Now, as Hardaway wraps up his most disappointing season yet — Memphis is an unfathomable 12-18 and may not qualify for the Conference USA tournament despite being considered the most expensive roster in the league — an old truth in college sports is ringing and roaring in the Bluff City.
Even legends are not immune to consequences.
With one game left in Memphis’ season, university officials and supporters are seriously discussing Hardaway’s future, with the school weighing multiple factors, including the political implications of telling Hardaway his services are no longer needed, sources told Yahoo Sports. Hardaway is a local icon and is desperately trying to get another year to turn things around.
But ultimately, another factor could outweigh the possibility of a broken relationship with the most popular player in school history. Earlier this week, athletic director Ed Scott told the school board that Memphis basketball would be $1.2 million short of budgeted revenue due to declining attendance. Scott subsequently declined to be interviewed by local reporters, deferring his thoughts until after the season – perhaps a sign that a final decision has yet to be made.
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It would be an ironic end to Hardaway’s tenure. Eight years ago, when Tubby Smith sleepwalked to a fifth-place finish in Memphis with a much stronger version of the current American version, Hardaway and his local media allies seized on fan apathy and promised to assemble one of the top recruiting classes in the country to quickly fix the program’s problems.
But after Memphis lost 96-89 to South Florida on Thursday night in front of a nearly empty FedExForum, Hardaway fell into hollow spin, calling the season a “one-off” rather than an indictment of a program that should never have been so derailed.
“If I wanted to get 20 wins a year, I would run the cupcake schedule,” he said. “But I’ve been coming off 20 wins every year on a tough schedule, so with the negatives that come with that, it’s just part of the process this year. We ended up getting hit by a non-conference hit, and then we went into the conference and didn’t take care of things.”
Penny Hardaway has a 174-86 record as Memphis head coach, but the Tigers are just 12-18 with one game left in the regular season this season. (Michael Hickey/Getty Images)
(Michael Hickey via Getty Images)
Indeed, Hardaway has always been ambitious with his plans, a formula that John Calipari perfected two decades ago when he led Memphis to four straight Sweet Sixteens and within a second of a national championship: recruit elite players, load up a non-conference schedule to get into the NCAA tournament seeding discussion, and then dominate a powerhouse conference.
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It’s always unreasonable to expect the same results from Hardaway. Even for a program with a rich history of success dating back to the 1970s, the Calipari era was an anomaly for Memphis, setting an impossible standard for every coach who followed.
It’s a different job these days, too.
Even as Memphis desperately tries to get into the Big 12 via acquisition, it’s still stuck in a significantly weakened league due to the departures of Houston, UCF, Cincinnati and SMU. At the same time, the NIL landscape made it nearly impossible for schools outside of the power conferences to compete for some of the top talent Hardaway brought in early in his career, such as James Wiseman, Precious Achiuwa and Jalen Duren.
While Memphis has the resources and boosters to fund a winning basketball product stateside, it’s hard to imagine Memphis being a job that would attract anyone other than an up-and-comer that most fans have never heard of. This is also part of calculus.
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But ultimately, if Hardaway is sidelined, it’s going to come down to this: Even in his best years, when he showed up on the court to be a legitimately good product that could compete with teams like Houston and beat them at times, he only had one NCAA Tournament win.
What if? They are almost endless. Nothing is more important than the first round of the 2023 NCAA Tournament, when Memphis beat Florida Atlantic 8-9 to set up a game after Farleigh Dickinson shocked No. 1 seed Purdue. Instead, a contested jump ball call went to Florida Atlantic, and the Owls got the winning layup with seconds left to advance to the Final Four.
If Hardaway wins that game, maybe he has enough credibility to get through the season, and like many programs that rely heavily on the transfer portal, he doesn’t build the right mix of talent and chemistry.
Instead, local questions began boiling over Hardaway’s coaching focus (his teams ranked among the nation’s worst in turnovers every year), his staff (mostly Hardaway’s old friends and colleagues, with the exception of 65-year-old former Indiana University and UAB head coach Mike Davis, and lacking actual college basketball experience) and whether his martyrdom tendencies would get in the way of fixing glaring problems.
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That said, he told the Memphis Daily News after last Sunday’s non-contest loss at East Carolina, “No matter what you say — it’s easy to kick me, I’ve been getting kicked since I’ve been here, and nothing’s going to stop me from fighting.”
Maybe it’s just the old athlete’s suspicion that still ingrains in the 54-year-old Hardaway’s soul. This is also nonsense.
Eight years ago, Memphis gave him a job that was widely considered a top-25 job at the time, although his coaching experience included several years in middle school and high school. He arrived with a wave of fanciful promises (“We’re going to win a national championship,” he told The Athletic in 2019) and unearned bravado (“We want all the smoke,” he said after a No. 1 recruiting class) and was cheered at every turn. Hardaway received such insane support that he even convinced then-school president David Ladd (who should have known better) to fight the NCAA because it would never earn Wiseman eligibility. It ultimately resulted in a lengthy, unnecessary, and intrusive investigation that was unnecessary, even if the resulting penalties were minor.
Of course, there are the occasional Hardaway detractors. That’s the job of being a high-profile coach. But until now, with the bottom slipping out from under him, Hardaway’s backing is more solid than his record demands, for one reason: He’s Penny Hardaway.
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That’s why hiring program legends — especially those without a real coaching record — is a risky proposition. The enthusiasm is always stronger at the beginning, but the impact of the fall hurts more.
If this is the end, Hardaway’s tenure won’t be remembered as much as Ewing or Drexler or even Chris Mullin’s failures at St. John’s. He’s had top-notch players, occupied the building, and generally been solid on the sidelines for quite some time. You could even say that, overall, Memphis hasn’t been a disaster after winning the Conference USA Championship a year ago and winning the NCAA Tournament three of the past five years.
But Memphis fans won’t see it that way — in large part because the legacy of players like Hardaway sets a standard that Coach Hardaway isn’t living up to.
