Is T.J. Bruce the right person to lead the Nevada Wolf Pack baseball program?
Bruce has an uninspiring record of 125-134 as the Wolf Pack head coach over the last six seasons. His Wolf Pack is 8-12 this year and 10-24 over the last two years. His best year at Nevada was his first when he went 37-24 in 2016. Since then Bruce’s Pack has gone 88-110.
There is little doubt that if Bruce was the Pack football or men’s basketball coach with that sort of sleep-inducing record he’d be coaching elsewhere right now. But he isn’t coaching football or men’s basketball, two sports that require a substantial financial reward in the form of ticket sales and postseason and television revenue.
Baseball gets little, if any, of those things (the Pack hasn’t been to the postseason since 2000) so it is perfectly fine to tolerate mediocrity. The last thing an athletic director wants, after all, is to have his peaceful spring and summer interrupted by having to fire and then hire a head coach. In short, baseball is treated as if it is a women’s sport, where little is expected beyond winning roughly as many as you lose and avoiding NCAA embarrassment.
So Bruce, who was schooled at college baseball factories Long Beach State and UCLA, is perfectly fine as the leader of the Pack program. It also must be noted that Bruce is following a similar career path as former Pack coach Gary Powers, who lasted 31 years at Nevada and won 937 games and went to four NCAA Regionals. Powers was just 234-239 after his first nine years.
•••
The Pack’s patience with Powers paid off handsomely after 1991.
Powers guided the Wolf Pack to 11 seasons of 30 or more wins out of 13 years from 1992-2004 and did it in the Big West and Western Athletic Conference, two of the elite baseball conferences in college baseball at the time.
He filled the Pack roster with future major leaguers and turned the Wolf Pack into one of the more respected programs on the west coast. Powers’ Pack went to four regionals and probably deserved to go to six or seven before he retired after the 2013 season.
Bruce, by the way, was born just three months before Powers was named the Pack head coach on June 25, 1982. And Powers remained the Pack head coach until Bruce was 31 years old. There is no question that Bruce, still just 39 years old, has the potential to mold the same type of career at Nevada as Powers.
•••
The NCAA missed out this week on what could have been one of the more memorable seasons in college basketball history.
Baylor, which beat Gonzaga for the men’s basketball championship on Monday, is already one of the most forgettable NCAA champions in the sport’s history. Baylor and basketball, after all, is about as synonymous as Nevada and ice hockey.
A Gonzaga victory on Monday, though, would never have been forgotten. It would have been college basketball’s first perfect season since the 1975-76 Indiana Hoosiers. And it would have been accomplished by a little school (undergraduate enrollment is about 5,000) in the middle of nowhere (Spokane, Washington) that doesn’t even have football.
Gonzaga winning a national title would have given hope to every school in the nation. Baylor winning, well, it’s just another forgettable championship by a sports factory that didn’t even care about basketball before this season.
•••
Will coach Mark Few ever leave Gonzaga? Anything is possible. But Few, simply, is Gonzaga basketball. He’s never coached anywhere else, serving the Zags as an assistant for 10 years and head coach for 22. He’s gone to 21 NCAA tournaments in those 22 seasons (there was no tournament in 2020), never winning fewer than 23 games in a season.
The Zags under Few own the West Coast Conference and almost never lose a conference game. Gonzaga has gone 62-3 over the last two seasons and has lost just 14 games over the last five seasons. Few has lost just 124 games in 22 seasons with 21 of the losses coming in the NCAA Tournament.
Few has turned Gonzaga into one of the best jobs in college basketball. So why would he leave? Well, boredom might be the reason. He's still just 58 years old. All of his success at Gonzaga has gotten him just one meaningful title: the best head coach in college basketball history to never win a national championship. Is that enough for Few?
If he stays at Gonzaga, it might have to be enough because this year was likely his last great chance to win a title. He had a team with a perfect record in the title game going up against a football school in a quiet gym with few fans to serve as a distraction. And he lost.
•••
Arizona fired its head coach (Sean Miller) this week and the national media has already linked Eric Musselman as a possible successor.
Few, like Musselman, gets linked to almost every job opening. It means nothing.
Musselman, who led Arkansas to the Elite Eight this year in just his second season in Fayetteville, isn’t likely looking for a new job so soon. Why would anyone leave the SEC for the Pac-12 anyway?
Give Musselman at least two more years at Arkansas and then he might just leave for a NBA head coaching job.
•••
Jordan Brown, a former Musselman recruit at Nevada, is now looking forward to playing for his third head coach in his first three active seasons.
The 6-foot-11 Brown, the second McDonald’s All-American to play for the Pack after Luke Babbitt, played one season for the Pack under Musselman in 2018-19, averaging 3.0 points and 2.1 rebounds in 10 minutes a game. He then left for Arizona, sat out a year and played this past season for Miller and the Wildcats and did extremely well, averaging 9.4 points and 5.2 rebounds in 20 minutes a game.
Pac-12 coaches named him the conference’s Sixth Man of the Year. He has a NBA body and skills and will likely make the new Arizona coach look like a genius next year. Come to think of it, Musselman coaching Brown in Arizona would be interesting.
•••
University of Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez announced his retirement this week. Alvarez, who coached the Badgers football program from 1990-2005, was athletic director since 2004.
The university posted the job on the NCAA website this week, saying that a four-year degree is required and that the “candidate must demonstrate a commitment to diversity and inclusion.” The job posting also said “candidates must display strong personal integrity and an understanding of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, including its history, mission, values, culture and importance to the people of the state.”
We have the perfect candidate for the Badgers. Wolf Pack football coach Jay Norvell was an assistant coach under Alvarez at Wisconsin and grew up listening to the cheers from Camp Randall Stadium through his bedroom window in his boyhood home in Madison. Norvell’s father Merritt was a former Wisconsin player and earned his bachelor’s, masters and doctoral degrees from the university and was a former Big Ten athletic director at Michigan State. He was also a member of the Wisconsin Athletic Board and was a pioneer in this country as a strong advocate for minority coaches.
Jay Norvell, whose greatest quality is his “strong personal integrity” would be the perfect Wisconsin athletic director and would do far greater and more important work shaping a major NCAA institution as an athletic director than he would trying to win meaningless Mountain West football titles.
•••
Reed High graduate Jake McGee couldn’t have had a better first week as a member of the San Francisco Giants.
The 34-year-old lefthanded reliever, who was born in San Jose, has appeared in four games and has yet to allow a hit or a run in four innings while striking out five. McGee saved two of the Giants’ first three victories and was credited with the victory in the other.
Comments
Use the comment form below to begin a discussion about this content.
Sign in to comment