Commentary : Bob Wade Was Wrong Choice to Begin With

Deja vu isn’t the correct term to describe this. It is not an illusion that we have all been here before. We have. Nearly three years ago the University of Maryland somberly convened a news conference to announce the resignation of its basketball coach. Then, as now, the resignation was coerced in the aftermath of a scandal. Then, as now, the outgoing basketball coach was not present. Then, as now, there was division on campus and in the community over the fairness of the decision. Then, as now, the faces were sober, the mood grave. Then, as now, the site of the assembly was the stately lobby of the main administration building. While the faces change, the circumstances don’t.

It’s nearly three years later, and now, as then, Maryland basketball is literally and figuratively at ground zero.

Bob Wade should never have been hired to be Maryland’s basketball coach. He was wrong from Day 1. How he got the job was absurd. Former Maryland chancellor John Slaughter conducted no search. To build bridges to Baltimore, he hastily picked Wade, then sought approval of his choice. In a rare example of Macy’s asking Gimbel’s, one of the calls Slaughter made was to Georgetown’s basketball coach, John Thompson. “All the things I wanted to see in a basketball coach were embodied in Bob Wade,” Slaughter said when he hired him. But where was he looking?

Wade was a high school coach. Maryland is one of the gold-plated basketball programs in one of the unimpeachably elite conferences in the country -- hardly an entry-level position. This wasn’t a step up, nor a jump up, but a methane-boosted rocket to the stars. It makes for a swell Chip Hilton plot, but an unhappy documentary.

Remember, when Wade took the job College Park was still reeling from the Len Bias trauma; even the most experienced college coach would have been hard pressed to thrive. But Wade had no experience whatsoever in any of the critical areas: college coaching, college recruiting, college boosters, and dealing with a non-cheerleading media. Nor did he have the personality to accept tutoring. Wade was unaccustomed and unprepared for the totality of the Maryland job, and Slaughter -- who has since cavalierly moved on -- had no business pressing it on him. Maryland gave Wade a mountain to climb, and a lead weight to carry. Wade cooperated by dropping the weight on his own foot.

Wade’s record underlines his deficiencies as a college coach. In three ACC seasons, he was 7-35. Against the conference’s best coaches -- El Deano, Jim Valvano, Mike Krzyzewski and Terry Holland -- Wade was 3-24. Wade recruited well, but unwisely. Of his seven recruits, his prized catch, potential all-America center Brian Williams, transferred away and demeaned Wade’s coaching talent on the way out; another flunked out; another was dismissed under mysterious circumstances; another has been named on an assault complaint; and another ripped his teammates in print and did not discourage speculation that he would also transfer. Wade’s one winning team featured three of Lefty Driesell’s recruits: Derrick Lewis, Tony Massenberg and Keith Gatlin.

Immediately upon taking the job, Wade’s troubles began with the players and staff left over from Driesell. Wade tried to precipitously fire assistant coach Ron Bradley, and bungled a clumsy attempt to run off another player, Phil Nevin. Wade obviously wasn’t liked by most of the players he inherited; five transferred out, and one voluntarily red-shirted. Wade’s position was that wholesale transferring was to be expected with any coaching change, but wait and see how many on the current squad transfer after a new coach is named. Whenever Wade was questioned about any of these things, he became frosty and defensive. He wore a shell as thick and forbidding as a terrapin itself. Given the tattered state of the program he inherited, all anyone asked of Wade was relief from screaming headlines. But for the past year all the news from College Park was bad.

Yet for all that, Wade would still be the coach if this was just about his record, or the media, or the transfers, or even the alleged violations-none of which was large enough to sink him.