The Penny experiment appears to be over
As ever, Hardaway's promising glimpses are outweighed by his mess
www.eamonnbrennan.com
It used to be easier to spot a dysfunctional program. When player turnover was much less common, a program that churned through people — where players willingly left often, or coaches not-so-quietly ran them off, or players were being suspended or dismissed with anything approaching regularity, or assistant coaches moved often — would be one reliable telltale sign.
Now that turnover is a standard offseason rite, and places are stolid as Virginia are rapidly overhauling their rosters, one must typically peer deeper to truly see a program coming apart. Are there rumblings among other coaches? Are assistants anonymously whining? Do the message board randoms seem unusually agitated? Is the coach reactive and scrambling? Are the NIL people grumbling? Is the AD new?
Key word there: typically. Because then there's Memphis. The current state of Memphis men's basketball is quite obvious, as it goes.
The timing is not ideal is doing a Mountain-sized amount of heavy lifting here. The 2024-25 season begins Nov. 4. For most programs, the first official fall team practice allowed under NCAA rules will take place in about 20 days. In reality, most programs have been working out and preparing in earnest for weeks already. The season might as well have started.
This would be a slightly strange and sudden firing spree if it happened at the end of a disappointing season, in March or April. It would be odd if it happened in the dead of the summer. To do it in September is bizarre — yes, even at Memphis, even by Hardaway's standards.
And it was bizarre even before Pat Forde’s reporting at Sports Illustrated late Wednesday night that there exists an anonymous letter alleging widespread potential rules violations in the program, with Hardaway’s personal involvement, that the University of Memphis has already forwarded to the NCAA.
Indeed, maybe the existence of this letter makes Wednesday’s total assistant coaching staff clearout less bizarre? It’s unknown whether the two news items are related, but it is hard to imagine they would be. Either way, even if they exist in total mutually exclusive isolation, together they constitute a big fat mess.
Messiness has always been a staple of Hardaway's time at Memphis, sometimes to an externally exaggerated degree; that exaggeration has even overshadowed some genuinely impressive coaching work. But this? This is the kind of mess that suggests — even as Hardaway and Memphis embark on a crucial and still quite possibly successful (?!) 2024-25 campaign — that one of the most fascinating experiments in recent college hoops coaching history is shortly about to conclude.
Which is too bad, frankly, because the potential was always there. Hardaway, a beloved former player with outsized '90s-kid cultural cachet, earned a very desirable college coaching gig on the strength of little more than his success as a local high school guy and his raw interpersonal charisma.
