I’d say that blog post title is sufficient enough warning for what you’re about to read (well, as long as you have an ESPN Insider subscription). ESPN’s Jeff Goodman graded all the college basketball coaching hires of this year, and he didn’t have much nice to say about Marshall’s.
The grade: D-plus. It was the lowest grade of the 38 he gave.
(Granted, he gave Auburn’s hire Bruce Pearl and Houston’s hire Kelvin Sampson — two coaches who are coming off multi-year show-cause penalties from the NCAA — an A-minus and B-plus, respectively, so … yeah … there you go.)
I’m gonna hold off on judging anything myself. As I’ve written already, this is such a unique situation where a coach’s lack of college experience makes him a totally blank slate at this level. I think the read-react concepts he’s bringing to the program are interesting, but we’ll have to see how the roster takes to them.
