Random thoughts on former coaches thread.....

[b-ball fan]

Devoe played with Knight, John Havlicek, and Jerry Lucas at Ohio State. He was on an NCAAT runner up team. He was a assistant under Bobby Knight at Army and coached Mike Krzyzewski there. Knight was the best coach in the country in the middle to late 1970s.

The game changed drastically while Devoe was at TN but he didn’t. The 2 biggest rule changes in about the last 75 years occurred while he was here. He was a disciplinarian and players were no longer buying into that style. His recruiting tailed off. Navy was a perfect fit for him. I also think that he was a very honest coach, so he lost ground competing with the surge of cheating coaches. He won over 500 games and 11 championships. Anybody calling him average is ignorant of the facts. He also maintained the Stokely Curse that Kentucky faced over the last 15-20 years of the SAC as TN’s home court.

I haven't checked the rosters to verify this fact, but I once read that Devoe never signed a player west of the Mississippi. I just randomly looked at rosters for 2 seasons, and that was the case in both of those seasons.

 

[therickbol]

Don't think she would have been successful. Not as much as people would have hoped. She dominated the women's game for so long primarily because she was getting any recruit she wanted. She wouldn't have been able to pull recruits to the men's game the same way. Look what happened when Auriemma started getting recruits....TN didn't have the same level of success.

It would have tarnished her legacy in my opinion.

I agree. Her greatest strengths as a coach did not line up with elite success coaching a men's team. She would have likely had them competitive because she would not have accepted less.