Podcast: Early favorites to replace Juwan Howard, latest on Greg Scruggs situation, more
The Michigan Wolverines need a new men’s basketball head coach after Juwan Howard was dismissed over the weekend, and the search has no shortage of candidates as efforts to replace him ramp up.
TheWolverine.com’s Chris Balas put out an update on Monday stating Florida Atlantic’s Dusty May and Colorado State’s Niko Medved might be the two names to watch for now, but plenty of others could emerge as the search continues to roll along. Many of them could be names that we see coach games in this weekend’s opening of the NCAA Tournament.
Our Anthony Broome and Clayton Sayfie discussed the potential candidates for the gig on Monday night’s show, in addition to just how good a job this Michigan gig might be compared to the rest of the Big Ten Conference.
“On3’s Pete Nakos reported that Louisville has $3-4 million pretty much in the in the bank, in their collective right now to build a roster for next season, and that’s going to be for the next coach to use that,” Sayfie said. “It’s basically their mini salary cap. Does Michigan have a plan like that?
“Those are the discussions that are going to have to be had beyond the preliminary ones that you have at the beginning of a search. And if you’re going to entice a top coach to come, then you better have a pretty darn good plan in place. That’s something that we don’t know the full details of as to what Michigan has to sell. But we do know from the past couple of years with NIL, at least that aspect of it, which is really pay-for-play, has not been good enough. And I think that’s gonna scare off some coaches.
“So what does your candidate pool look like? It’s mostly made of a lot of mid-major guys and you can certainly hire a good coach from those ranks. That’s a pretty common jump right now in college basketball, not just right now, but historically in college basketball. But at the same time, it is somewhat of a risk and you don’t want to be back in this situation three years from now because you hired somebody who didn’t get it done in their first opportunity as a high-major coach.”
Other topics include Dug McDaniel and George Washington III entering the transfer portal, Khani Rooths’ de-commitment, Michigan football’s spring camp opening with Greg Scruggs’ OWI arrest on Saturday morning, John Beilein’s role in the search and much more.
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