Fall of a Basketball Dynasty
Is this Tennessee’s fate? IMHO, the answer is yes, unless we get a new coach soon.
Is it Tennessee's fate? The dynasty, sure, the dynasty has passed. Just as Texas declined after Conradt left, and Connecticut will decline after Auriemma retires, and Notre Dame after McGraw calls it a day.
But that said, this article feels very underwhelming to me. It's focused on seeding as a measurement but doesn't really explore what contributed (or contributes) to the rise and fall of programs, not in any real capacity. For the longest time it was a smaller sport with a smaller public footprint where a handful of programs vied for players from small pool of superior talent. Coaches of significant skill in the older days commanded the attention of those recruits, and as almost every school in the 1970s/80s/90s treated women's basketball as an afterthought, there wasn't really much benefit to choosing a big Power 5 school over a smaller school. That enabled schools like Louisiana Tech and Long Beach to compete on a more even footing with Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Stanford, et al. And building on that, the writer failed to factor in any of the changes media (and ESPN in particular) have brought to the sport, and I don't think the conditions seen in the 1980s apply today. P5 schools can now offer better facilities, better exposure, better advantages, and that gives the ones who commit resources can now aggressively recruit a growing (still small, but not *as* small) pool of talented players. Successful programs will be slightly less tied to coaching alone, and commensurately less tied solely to coaching eras, and slightly more tied to the P5 system as a whole. In theory, as the pool grows (to the extent that it will), more programs would improve along with the general upswell.
Or put more simply, while the dynasty is over, Tennessee hasn't "gone" anywhere; it just has to commit to winning and putting the resources and people behind the program needed to win.
