DePaul dumps Cats
Coach Bill Carmody brought a Princeton-style offense to Northwestern, but we finally saw an Ivy League lineup on the floor Saturday in a 69-59 loss to DePaul. Unfortunately, the talent level seemed more like Cornell than Princeton.
At the end of the game, NU put a lineup of Tim Doyle, Evan Seacat, Craig Moore, Vince Scott and Vedran Vukusic on the floor. That's the whitest lineup in NU history. And is that a good thing?
Carmody fiddled with the playing rotation again and greatly reduced the playing time of Michael Jenkins and Mohammed Hachad to nine and 11 minutes, respectively. Moore played 33 minutes and is looking like the starting point guard of the future -- and present.
Bernard Coté was missing in action again with only five minutes of PT. We still don't know what he is capable of so far this year.
Tim Doyle has played well so far this year, but he's hardly worthy of 35 minutes in a game. His line for the night: 35 minutes, five points, three assists and three rebounds. But it's hard to fault Carmody for playing Doyle when it doesn't seem he has many other worthy options at guard this year.
The Cats still are desperately looking for a second scorer to Vukusic, who had 29 points on the day. What other options could develop on the year? Michael Thompson? Down with the flu, but you'd hope he could be a factor on the offensive glass this year. Coté? We don't know. Hachad? He doesn't have Carmody's confidence right now. Moore? He's shown the ability to hit shots, but he's really a spot-up shooter at this point. He has confidence and that's saying more than most on the team.
If only the search for a second scoring option was the only search ongoing. Northwestern is in need of an identity, too. This team is not nearly as athletic as last year and lacks the ability to create any scoring opportunities off the fast break. It's a half-court team and the reduction in playing time of Hachad at the expense of Moore may be reflective of NU going away from Hachad's athletidcism in favor of Moore's shooting ability in a half-court setting.
Northwestern plays Virginia in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge on Wednesday at 7 p.m.
Comments
Isn't it time Bill Carmody realize that he and his staff are unable to recruit a Top 100 player to come to Evanston and that it's time to make some changes so that a better quality of player comes to NU?
Carmody is a great coach. But he is an indifferent recruiter and his three assistants have no experience recruiting Top 100 players. Paul Lee's only other recruiting experience was for the worst hoops program in the Ivy League -- Columbia -- and the other two guys had no college coaching experience until Carmody hired them at NU.
No NU fan should want Carmody to be fired. But no NU fan should think that the players Carmody has brought to NU will EVER get the Cats to the NCAA tournament.
So what the solution? The obvious one is to pony up the money and hire a bonafide top flight recruiter away from a big time program. Sure it will cost a little money -- the Cats will have to improve upon his salary quite a bit to attract someone from a winning program to a loser -- but it's a lot cheaper than hiring a new head coach.
As Gary Barnett showed, it takes a coach with a bigger than life personality to convince kids that a losing program can be turned into a winner. As Bill Foster showed, Top 100 kids like Evan Eschmeyer and Rex Walters can be convinced to sign with NU.
So because Carmody can not get a personality transplant himself, he's going to have to hire an assistant to do the job for him.
But the Cats won't ever play in the NCAA tourney with the type of talent Carmody is bringing in -- and that includes the three kids he signed for next year. None of them are program turners.
AD Mark Murphy has to pressure Carmody to shake up his staff. Or else when Carmody contract runs out he must go so the Cats can hire a go-getter, bigger-than-life personality driven coach who can turn NU hoops around the way Gary Barnett did to football.
All NU fans know that it's easier to turn around a hoops program with just two star recruits than it is to turn around a football team with just two star recruits.
GO CATS!
Posted by: IvyLeaguer | November 27, 2005 08:14 PM