Gary Williams retired yesterday, after 33 years of coaching college basketball and 22 years at the University of Maryland. He finishes as the best coach in University of Maryland history and with the third highest win total in ACC history behind Dean Smith and Mike Krzyewski. Gary won a national title in 2002, a year after getting to his first Final Four in 2001.
Gary won over 600 games between his tenure at Maryland and his stints at American, Boston College, and Ohio State. On the national level Maryland is a less than major entity (don’t let their fans and alumni hear that unless your want to get chewed out), but locally it’s pretty big. The Redskins are first by a wide margin but for several years Maryland was an easy second. There highest points came at a time where every other sports team in the area was down, and for those two years where they competed for the national title in the Final Four they were the only thing worth rooting for.
Even people like me who did not go to school there and had no ties to the university were wearing black and red in support of the Terps. Now there will be a whole lot of retrospectives about Gary on the internet, TV, and the radio of the next day or two, then most of you will forget about it. Maryland, after all, is not that influential the grand scheme of things (again, don’t say that too loud to the alums). But it’s a bigger deal than you might think because Gary’s triumph in 2002 and the decade that followed it say a lot about the state of intercollegiate athletics today.
Gary came to Maryland, his alma mater, from Ohio State during a time when the basketball program was at a very low point. Still reeling from the death of Len Bias, Maryland was rocked again when some serious sanctions were handed down by the NCAA for violations that occurred under Gary’s predecssor Bob Wade. The Terps were banned from postseason play in 1991 and 1992 and from live television in 1990-91. Think about that for a minute: no live television for an entire season. That is a crippler for a program, just short of the death penalty. Gary walked into that situation in 1989, and by the 1993-94 season had them in the tournament. He went on to make the tournament 13 more times in the next 17 years.
When you consider that most years every team in the ACC not named Duke or North Carolina is playing for third place, and that the talent level of the rosters tends to both reflect and perpetuate that reality, Gary’s success stands out that much more. But despite all that, and despite breaking through this barrier to routinely beat both of the ACC’s twin towers pretty regularly and win a title in the process, Gary was not immune to what faces too many coaches nowadays.
After winning the title in 2002, Gary fell victim to the changing atmosphere surrounding college basketball. Gary’s great magic as a coach was getting three and four star players to collectively perform at a five star level. His first big star, Joe Smith, was an overlooked big man who shocked everyone by averaging 20 and 10 for two years on his way to becoming the first overall pick in the 1995 NBA draft. His championship team was stocked with the same type of guys, like Juan Dixon and Lonny Baxter. But once the glow from that team faded, things rapidly changed.
Duke and UNC, both of whom had endured mini slumps during the late nineties and early 2000’s, came back at full strength, and returned the ACC to the two tiered system that had gone away temporarily. Then the AAU/prep school phenomenon exploded, resulting in a consolidation of blue chip talent and a de facto barter system in which college coaches had to engage in transactional practices with gatekeepers who were not a part of the old system. Instead of older, established figures that colleges could trust the new world featured guys with little to no history or allegiances who were looking to do business more than they were looking to teach and develop players for the next level. If you wanted to recruit the best players, you now had to deal with people who operated with little to no rules or organization to keep them in line.
The other thing that exploded was the internet, and the heightened scrutiny that came with it. Instead of local writers, local TV guys, and ESPN if you were big time enough, you now have a plethora of websites, blogs, podcasts, you name it. Anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection can publish anything they want, facts be damned. High school player ratings, once relegated to the back pages of Sporting News magazines, were now viral. Recruiting classes are now graded on multiple platforms, then spoken about on ESPN and sports radio, all within a days time. Never mind that these grades are as much about politics and socializing as they are actual player quality; your reputation as a recruiter can be torn to shreds in a years time simply by landing a poorly rated recruiting class two offseasons in a row.
At the same time one highly rated class that isn’t as good on the floor as advertised can kill your reputation as an in-game coach. At the other end of the spectrum are the multiple NBA draft sites, that rate and rank college players and often specialize in ‘informing’ us who should leave school early for the league and where they’ll likely get picked in the draft that year. Seeing one or more of your best players prematurely at the top of such a list can be a coaches worst nightmare.
Gary was ultimately done in by all of these things. The class he brought in following the 2002 title team was highly touted, but didn’t pan out on the court as planned. Gary’s streak of NCAA appearances ended at eleven when the Terps missed the Big Dance in 2005; from that point on they were 50/50 at making the tournament, in one year and out the next. And then the recruiting suffered. Unwilling to play ball with the AAU crowd, Gary wasn’t able to land many talented local players who were filtered elsewhere. Mention the name Rudy Gay to any Terp fan and watch them turn as red as their team’s jersey.
The return to prominence of Georgetown basketball, which had been in a ten year drought since the departure of Allen Iverson in 1996, also put a hurting on; for a decade Maryland was the only game in town for top local players and now they had to compete against a team that has held a special place in the local African American community for three decades. You feed all this into the increasingly louder microphone of talk radio and the blogosphere and you had a fanbase that was divided into two camps, the Gary-must-go faction and the Gary is just fine crowd. The former looked at the diminishing returns on the floor and the failure to land Gay (and others like Carmelo Anthony and Kevin Durant) as signs that the game had passed Gary by while the latter crowd supported the only coach who’d gotten their team to cut down the nets. You throw in an antagonistic athletic director in Debbie Yow, and the well had been poisoned pretty badly. When sophomore player Jordan Williams decided to go to the league, despite not being ready, that was it. He says otherwise, but I think he had to see that as a sign that it was time to hang it up.
So now Gary is gone, and Maryland will search for a successor. The fans and alumni are about to find out just how well regarded their coaching position really is; they don’t have a loyal alum like Gary to hand the job to, so it’s strictly a business deal. The biggest plus is that the school is in a talent rich area, but the biggest minus is that unless Duke or UNC has a down year you’re playing for third place in the ACC every year. I guess if they pay enough they can get a top level guy to take the job. Of course they could just go up the road to Morgan State and hire Todd Bozeman (hint, hint). No matter what happens, Gary Williams is to be commended for what he was able to accomplish in 22 years in College Park. Have fun in retirement Gary, you earned it. Next stop, Hall of Fame (hell yes he deserves to go in!)
