I think we all understand that college basketball is not Mike Francesa’s primary area of expertise.
The Yankees, the National Football League and the ponies? Yes.
College hoops and college hoops recruiting? Not so much.
Still, what happened on WFAN Wednesday was just embarrassing.
Francesa interviewed four local college coaches — Fordham’s Tom Pecora, Rutgers’ Mike Rice, St. John’s Steve Lavin and UConn’s Jim Calhoun — and could not have been more out of it. (All the audio can be found here.)
It was the first day of the NCAA early signing period, yet Francesa appeared to have no earthly idea of this fact.
To open his interview with Rice, who has secured a Top 10 recruiting class of seven players, Francesa referred to “our college basketball little swing-around.”
“Little swing-around”?
It was Signing Day, Mike.
All it would’ve taken was for one producer to whisper into Francesa’s ear, “Hey, Mike. It’s the first day of the basketball signing period and you’ll be speaking with Mike Rice and Steve Lavin, both of whom have highly ranked recruiting classes.”
Instead, Rice himself had to bring it up early in the interview.
“Today is signing day for us, Mike, and we already have four out of the seven commitments in,” Rice told Francesa. “And a lot of the recruiting experts in the country have us a Top 10 team in the country.”
“Wow,” Francesa said, obviously hearing it for the first time.
Francesa did seem to know that Fred Hill preceded Rice as the Rutgers coach and that Hill came in as a highly regarded recruiter. When Francesa asked Rice how he would be different, Rice gave a sharp answer.
“Experience,” he said, underscoring the fact that Hill had no head coaching experience when he took over. “I’ve had three years of making feel uncomfortable.”
Rice coached at Robert Morris for three years before coming to Rutgers, twice going to the Big Dance.
When Lavin came on, Francesa appeared to understand that the St. John’s coach had secured an elite recruiting class — although he didn’t explicitly make the Signing Day connection.
“I’m not one to worry too much about recruits, but it sounds like, according to these reports, that you had a Top 5 recruiting class,” Francesa said.
As the interview progressed, Lavin twice had to explain that former Purdue coach Gene Keady is a special assistant/adviser and not an assistant who will teach on the floor.
“He sits in and observes,” Lavin said of Keady. “He can’t instruct or teach on the floor.”
“Oh, he can’t go on the floor?” Francesa asked incredulously.
“No, he’s an adviser.”
“Oh, I thought he was going to be a full-time employee. He’s not full-time coach then, right?”
“He’s a full-time employee. He’s a special assistant to me. He’d be the equivalent of a Tex Winter for Phil Jackson.”
OK, then.
Never once did Francesa mention a single player, or recruit, for either program. You think he could’ve thrown out, ‘Hey, I hear D.J. Kennedy is your top player, Coach Lavin. What can you tell us about him?”
So just keep all this in your back pocket when March Madness rolls around.
Because you know Francesa is going to bust out a bracket and start pontificating on the state of college basketball come March.
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erod / November 11, 2010
That guy is just full of himself. He takes what he hears on TV and reads in the papers and then makes predictions on the tournament. He does not really have any first hand knowledge of how good each team is and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Maybe he should actually watch a team play before commenting on them. The average college basketball fan knows more than he does. The worst part is that he seems to act like he’s an expert on every sport.
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sino428 / November 11, 2010
The problem is with Francessa, he constantly writes off recruiting. I hear him say all the time that “he doesnt get into recruiting”. But how can you have serious conversations about college basketabll without discussing recruiting? In this day and age where the top players only stick around a year or two, recruiting plays such a huge roll in how a team will do each year.
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shufan04 / November 11, 2010
He stopped trying a long time ago. Personally I think he just got older and complacent and decided that he would just pay attention to the NFL and baseball and largely ignore everything else because he didn’t feel like devoting the time. Sadly a huge chunk of older NY sports fans still hang on every opinion he gives, no matter how ignorant the viewpoint is, or how arrogant and dismissive he is of anyone with an opposing opinion.
His view that the college basketball regular season “doesn’t matter because all the good teams make the tournament at the end” gets more ridiculous by the year. But again, following college basketball nationwide would require some actual work and a time commitment on his part, so instead he pretends that nobody cares.
This may have a lot to do with why Mad Dog left him. In addition to monetary considerations, I think Russo wanted to be able to talk about things on a national level instead of focusing on Yankees and Mets talk for 75% of the year and NFL for the rest.
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