New Nittany Lion basketball coach Mike Rhoades spoke for just over five minutes during his prepared remarks at his introductory press conference on Thursday afternoon, checking off all of the obligatory boxes about how excited he is to be at Penn State, how he will develop relationships with players on and off the court and that they will play an exciting brand of basketball while building a program the ‘right way.’
In comparison, the always verbose Micah Shrewsberry spoke for just over 10 minutes when he was introduced at Penn State (and then again at Notre Dame on Thursday). For his part, Pat Chambers pontificated for just over seven minutes when he was hired, flanked by Graham Spanier and Tim Curley in what feels like a completely different universe.
All told, Rhoades’ terseness is an appreciated understanding — intentional or not — that it doesn’t much matter what anyone says at these events. The work is still left to be done. Talk is cheap, winning is less so. In his brevity, Rhoades also echoed the kind of “been there and done that” feeling Penn State has generated toward these sorts of proceedings by virtue of going through four coaches in five years. End of the day, everyone just wants to see what happens next. Chambers proved that Penn State could be a recruit destination, Shrewsberry that the portal could erase years off the traditional rebuilding timeline. Rhoades will try to prove that it wasn’t all a fluke.
“We wanted to find a coach who wanted to be at Penn State,” Penn State Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Pat Kraft said on Thursday. “We wanted someone that had the same confidence and chip on the shoulder that we all have as an organization. We wanted someone who knew how special Penn State was but also loved to compete. You got to compete every day. We wanted someone who wasn’t going to back down from anything. He was going to go and fight and fight for Penn State every single day and was going to grind. You got to grind to be great.”
The question, of course, is how Rhoades will go about that grind and what Penn State will do to smooth the edges of the challenges he faces. Rhoades is the latest iteration of a coach trying to take on one of the more challenging jobs in college basketball. It’s not as though he will be the first to try hard, which is probably all the more reason why Thursday was a reminder that Penn State itself will have as much to do with his success as anyone.
“This is Penn State. You’re always going to do it the right way and with with great class and dignity, but you could win big that way, too, without a doubt, and we have a plan to do that,” Rhoades said.
He mentioned the allure of Penn State on a few occasion. A product of the Keystone State, it’s understandable that he would find being near familiar things appealing while also jumping up to a rare Big Ten coaching vacancy.
“This is Penn State,” he said.
And it sure is.
In the fallout of Micah Shrewsberry’s departure — something Penn State never wanted and probably could have avoided — it will be interesting to see how the athletic department responds to that loss in regards to its approach to institutional support. Rhoades could be the best coach in America, but if Penn State isn’t supporting the program in the ways it could be, it might not matter.
Because this is Penn State, and that could mean “This is Penn State after all, where men’s basketball has long been an afterthought” or it could mean “This is Penn State, one of the nation’s most lucrative athletic departments and it decide men’s basketball was important.”
It’s worth nothing that Penn State is under no obligation to throw its financial strength behind men’s basketball. It’s not a moral shortcoming to simply have a decent basketball program and leave it at that. On the academic front Penn State is not the best at absolutely everything and that’s just how the world works. There’s even an argument to be made on the eve of the college football playoff expansion that from a business perspective the money is simply better spent elsewhere. Nevertheless Rhoades’ introduction was a reminder that a good coach is only half the battle. Rhoades will have to prove his worth on that front, but if Penn State doesn’t pull its own weight when it can, this song dance will be repeated once again.
“Today we’re here to build on the excitement many witnessed this season and build on something, something that is bold, different and aggressive,” Rhoades said in his opening remarks Thursday afternoon. “I’m gonna say it again: We want to build something that is bold, different and aggressive and not be afraid. I know this, like the people of this commonwealth and this university, everyday we’re gonna go to work. We will be blue collar. We will have dirt on our hands, and we’ll be damn proud of it. That’s who we are around here. That’s what our basketball program is gonna become.”
Rhoades’ resume is worth Penn State fans being excited about. If nothing else, it’s worth giving him a fair shake like all the rest that have come before him. But at some point Penn State will have passed the crossroads in deciding what kind of basketball program it wants and time will have made the decision for everyone.
