Tommy Two Time

Question for you: Which team is worse, the team Tommy Amaker left in Ann Arbor or his current 20 loss Harvard team?

Answer: A Push

When Rick Pitino, said no to Michigan and took the Louisville job, I was crushed. How close was Michigan basketball back to greatness? As close as Dicky V on ESPN saying Rick was taking the Michigan job. That close. At the time, I thought "Sailboat" Bill went out and got a good young basketball coach that was known as a great recruiter and a disciple of Coach K at Duke.

When Tommy Amaker got the Michigan job he called it his dream job. Well, this dream turned into a nightmare. Tommy showed he could only recruit one or two quality players a year and his teams lacked talent and depth. But a good college coach can take decent High School talent and make them into NCAA stars, right? Not under Tommy's watch. The Michigan basketball team lacked fundamentals in all aspects of the game and even when Tommy did have talent on the floor his lack of leadership and bench coaching cost him a number of games. See, Tommy never found his way back to the NCAA's playoffs in his 6 years at Michigan. You could say he was stuck in a NIT rut.

So now Tommy is gone and John Beilein has to live with what he left. This year has been a game or two away from the worst in Michigan basketball history. John knew he had his work cut out for him, but did he know this program had hit such a low? Who do we have to thank for the lack of talent and skill? Tommy. Who do we have to thank for one of the toughest non-conference schedule in the country? Tommy. Which coach even cost Michigan a loss in Boston this year? Again Tommy.

So now what? Both men need to start over and hit the recruiting trail to start building back each program. Coach Beilein has a couple of commits coming in next year and highly ranked transfer from Arizona. But Tommy is up to his old tricks again and has grabbed a top 25 recruiting class at Harvard.

What? Top 25 class at Harvard? That seems to be a little surprising. Since Harvard has some of the highest academic standards in the country and did I mention they don't offer athletic scholarships? Wow! Talk about snake oil salesman!

It seems Tommy might have stepped a little outside the lines on recruiting while the standard for enrollment has seemed to have dropped way down. Here are a couple of snapshots from a recent New York Times article on Tommy Two Times new moves:

But Scalise said he was not aware until told by The New York Times that Amaker’s top assistant, Kenny Blakeney, had traveled a long distance to play pickup basketball with a recruit during periods when the N.C.A.A. does not allow contact with prospective players. Blakeney said he had not been officially hired by Harvard when he visited that recruit and another prospective player.
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Another issue arose with the recruiting of Zack Rosen, a 6-1 point guard bound for Penn and sought by universities like Rutgers and Virginia Tech. Amaker saw Rosen’s father, Les, in a grocery store in Trenton during the Eastern Invitational tournament last summer. At the time, coaches were restricted only to watching recruits and saying hello to them or their parents if they bumped into each other.
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Yale Coach James Jones said he had seen an academic change at Harvard. “It’s eye-opening because there seems to have been a drastic shift in restrictions and regulations with the Harvard admissions office,” he said.“We don’t know how all this is going to come out, but we could not get involved with many of the kids that they are bringing in.”
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Looks like both coaches have their work cut out for them. Let's hope Coach Beilein takes a different path then Tommy Two Time.