In the context of Penn State basketball, Sandy Barbour was an outsider.
She didn’t know much about the program, at least not much more than what someone casually aware of the its existence might. That Penn State basketball has not been traditionally good.
So as she watched the fourth year of the Pat Chambers era unfold it would have been easy to see this as a chance to make an early impact. Barbour has hired basketball coaches before and seen at least one of those hires go on to have relative success. Removing a coach like Chambers may have been a controversial move, but it wasn’t as though she was opting to displace Coach K.
But Barbour watched the program go through the ups and downs of the 2014-15 season and saw what she needed to see.
The challenge was still there though even after her decision to extend Chambers an additional two years. Where is the line between believing in the process, and feeling like it’s time to move on. How does one find that line? You could argue Chambers has had his time, you could argue the rebuilding takes time.
“That’s not an easy thing to do,” Barbour said in her office this week. “To really analyze and understand the programs. So very candidly I’m basing my evaluation on Pat’s values, his fit with this university, his relationship with his student athletes and I think all of those are contributors to success. And i really like what I see there.”
Barbour seems to realize the other part of the equation as well. Something that has largely been missing nearly since the first season of Penn State basketball. The support and infrastructure that an administration can provide a program. The hardest part, figure out what “enough support” looks like. Air Force cadets can’t fly a Space Shuttle, but they also can’t win many dog fights in crop dusters.
So that same problem sits in front of Barbour. A great building does not automatically equal a great team, but it’s hard to build a great team in a bad building.
“The other piece of it is on us which is “what are the investments in men’s basketball.” I will say this very clearly: we can win at everything we do, and that includes men’s basketball. But for some reason -and not for a lack of effort- but for some reason men’s basketball has taken a huge back seat and I like to think that that’s over.”
“That we will put the appropriate effort into men’s basketball being a winning, successful, sustainable success just like football and women’s lacrosse and wrestling, you name it. That’s probably the longer piece of this, what are those steps from a marketing standpoint, from a facility standpoint. I think the program itself has been pretty well taken care of but there is a lot that goes into it because in the end we’re talking about recruiting. I think Pat and his staff have done a great job at that. That’s another one of those success indicators to me.”
The age old question though. Can Penn State basketball win in the Bryce Jordan Center? A building that has horrible lines of sight, rarely sees a full crowd and was always built for things other than basketball.
Barbour contends, perhaps because a cash strapped university has no other option, that yes the program can win there.
“Absolutely, yes,” Barbour said. “I think the bones of what a program needs are right here, they’re absolutely right here. There are some of the relatively easy things to do like the branding, like the film room. I think the things that are going to take a little bit more time are actually looking at the bowl. The first thing you see is how far away the end zones are.”
“The space behind the basket. What do you do with that? I don’t know. The building is not ours, the building is Penn State’s. The building does not belong to intercollegiate athletics. We have a great relationship with our auxiliary partners that run the BJC so we’ll work together to figure those things out. But I don’t know that those are snap your fingers and figure those things out.”
With a Top 30 class coming in this summer (something Barbour notes as a first for the program) and recruiting as good as it has ever been, the decision for extend Chambers certainly seems like the most logical at this particular juncture.
But the always present negative of an AD who cares if you win: The fact the AD cares even more when you lose.
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