Minnesota Gophers: The long overdue Tubby Smith rant

The University of Minnesota Golden Gophers have the opportunity to take on their former head coach in the fifth place game against Texas Tech in the Puerto Rico Tipoff on Sunday afternoon.

The U of M hasn’t been exactly an athletic powerhouse in the last decade or so. The most successful teams are the women’s hockey team and the volleyball. Good for those squads, it’s awesome to have winning teams in this state, but they aren’t the money making teams for any Division One program: that’s men’s basketball and football.

One of the most frustrating times in the history of the Gophers men’s basketball is the Tubby Smith era. Smith was the Gophers head coach for six seasons and made the NCAA tournament in three of those years, but something was off.

Tubby Smith was better in the first half of his stint with the Gophers than the second half which doesn’t make sense in college basketball. In the first years at a new school, the coach is coaching, for the most part, players that he did not recruit to the school. That means that Smith did better with players that Dan Monson recruited than his own recruits.

Smith’s best seasons in the Big Ten were in his second and third seasons at 9-9. He followed that up with a pair of 6-12 seasons and his final season was an 8-10 campaign. Smith never finished above .500 in conference or above a sixth place finish.

The overall record looks great for Smith at 124-81 at Minnesota, but that is mainly thanks to the cupcake non-conference scheduling that has always haunted the U of M. Smith had a 46-62 conference record. Minnesota is the first school Tubby ever had a losing conference record at, he has that at Texas Tech now, too.

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Tubby Smith was never building anything at Minnesota. He took the job as a retirement gig and to get some extra money before he walked away from the game and never expected to get canned since he had success before Minnesota. Don’t let the national pundits tell you that he was wrongly fired, he was rightfully fired for frankly not caring about his job or the team he was coaching.

Compare all of that to Richard Pitino having a nationally ranked recruiting class coming in next season and just think about it for a little bit. Pitino is actually building something while Smith is doing the same thing to Texas Tech as he did to Minnesota.

It might just be a fifth place game in a tournament that ESPN created for the mere purpose of having content, but I truly hope that Tubby Smith sits back and thinks about his little stool and wonders how he got beat so bad by his former school.

Next: Gophers football has finally won again!

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