Ask columnist Jason Williams anything — sports or non-sports — and he’ll pluck some of your questions and comments from his inbox and respond on Cincinnati.com. e-mail: jwilliams@enquirer.com
Topic: Can the UC Bearcats make a consistent run into the NCAA Tournament again?
information: It’s been another depressing winter. I love my panda, but this isn’t fun anymore. Everyone knows they need a new coach, but I’m not sure that will solve the NIL and transfer portal issues. I really wonder if we’ll ever see the day when they play in the (NCAA) tournament on a regular basis again?
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reply: Well, let’s start by hosting another NCAA tournament. This has never happened since 2019 and it won’t happen this season.
For Cal, it all comes down to the coaching hire. It’s not about the money, don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. (I used to be a firm believer in this but no longer believe it – at least in basketball.) UC has enough NIL money to build an NCAA tournament roster on a regular basis.
That won’t change unless college leadership changes the way it hires coaches. Cal is the type of school that must take a chance in basketball and football recruiting. A big city school in the shadow of Ohio State. Safe, status quo hiring is the ticket to irrelevance.
But the current culture at UC—from the president’s office to the lower echelons—is geared toward recruiting these types of employees. UC leadership is risk-averse. It prefers coaches who have a regular winning record in previous games, but don’t necessarily have proven to have won big, or show signs of being a big winner.
In 1989, the University of Cincinnati took a risk and hired Akron native Bob Huggins as basketball coach, if only because of his outgoing personality. Huggins is pictured coaching the Bearcats in a 2005 game.
Cal used to take chances and hire guys like Bob Huggins and Luke Fickell. Savvy coaches are on the upswing in their careers when they are hired. They are both high-risk/high-reward hires.
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Cal basketball was in shambles when Huggins was hired out of Akron. But Huggins is a risk because he’s not a front-line guy and has a very extroverted personality. Yes, it annoyed Cal at times, but he led Cal to the Final Four and consistently helped the Bearcats win big games and conference titles.
Hiring Fickell was a risky endeavor because he wasn’t a full-time head coach. But he’s an Ohio native who served as a national championship coach at Ohio State under Jim Tressel and Urban Meyer. He knows what it takes to win at Cal. He led the Bearcats to the College Football Playoff and consistently helped Cal win big games and conference titles.
The administration that employed Huggins and Fickell is long gone. Cal now has a basketball coach (Wes Miller) and a football coach (Scott Satterfield) who both proved to be solid coaches before they got here. But neither showed signs of becoming a great coach. They were both stable at their previous schools, but both checked out the bureaucracy of a decade as a Division I head coach.
That’s why you miss a coach like Kurt Cignetti.
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Back to basketball, Cal should have a coaching vacancy in six weeks. It’s time for Cal President Neville Pinto and Athletic Director John Cunningham to change the way they recruit and adopt a high-risk/high-reward mentality.
This article originally appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer: Will the Cal Bearcats make a regular appearance in the NCAA tournament again?
