Saturday, March 28, 2015

Duggar is out

I am wholly disgruntled.



 Now of course, this info is coming from anonymous sources. Neither school has made an official announcement, and ADs and coaches won't return phone calls until probably Monday. But we pretty much know Duggar is out and his ten-year career at VMI is done.

I'm not sure if this should come as a surprise, because Duggar was woefully underpaid, but you'd have to wonder why he chose to sign two contract extensions the past two seasons if he was so content on leaving in the first place. Did our record this past season have anything to do with it? Maybe. But remember that Duggar was in nearly the exact same spot five years ago - after a 10–19 season he chose to interview with The Citadel and ultimately turned down the job. This time it's a different story.

There's no point in speculating Duggar's internal motives - perhaps he was dissatisfied with something/someone in the administration, didn't think we had a chance to compete in the future, or simply wanted a change of scenery. Whatever the reason, he's gone, and now we'll have to look for a successor. We could bump up Daniel Willis, who's been here as long as Duggar has, and who knows the system just as well. Or we could reach out to Jason Allison, who was an assistant at App State this season and may love to have a head coaching job. Then there's Ramon Williams, who just finished his second season as a VT assistant. He is very knowledgeable about the game of basketball, and having a coach of color might serve as a recruiting advantage.

Ideally you'd try to hire someone that is committed to the run-and-gun system we currently employ, because if we try rebuilding now into some slow, grind-it-out, Princeton offense (a la The Citadel), we might even be worse than we were this year. And for those that say the up-tempo style isn't sustainable - you're wrong. The previous seventy years of VMI basketball clearly indicate that we cannot compete with a traditional offense - just ask El Cid, who was dead last in Division I in defensive efficiency, and has never been to the NCAA tournament in 68 years. Neither has Army in that same time span. This is a problem that all military schools face - the inability to recruit solid athletes and defensive specialists, and the general wearing out of players as the season progresses.

Duggar leaves VMI with 151 wins in just ten seasons, two of which were 20-win seasons and one that resulted in the first national postseason tournament appearance in 37 years. We made the conference tournament title game three times in his tenure - we did so only twice between 1978 and 2006. Duggar was by no means perfect but he did more to revitalize a dormant basketball program than any other coach at a military school in decades. I can't imagine how our players will take it.





It will be very interesting to see how Coach B is received when his Bulldogs visit Lexington next season.
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