If you had asked Florida Gator basketball fans to offer their ideal replacement for Billy Donovan, chances are that Archie Miller would have been the runaway top choice. For this reason, the hiring of Louisiana Tech’s Michael White as the school’s new head coach might not be seen as a home run.
Given that the past 25 years have marked the zenith of Florida athletics, it is reasonable for fans to expect a home run. Yet, Miller wanted to stay in Dayton with the Flyers, so under those particular circumstances, expectations have to be adjusted. Within those expectations, how should Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley be evaluated? Did he make a reasonable move which can be seen as beneficial for the Gators… without requiring mental gymnastics best reserved for a game of Twister?
Let’s discuss…
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Before he left for the NBA and the Oklahoma City Thunder, Donovan was set to make just over $4 million per season. This deal with White is for roughly half that amount. Florida might get a lot more than what it’s currently paying for, but right now, the money dedicated to White is — within the larger marketplace — appropriately modest. White could become a superstar coach, but right now, he’s still waiting for his first big breakthrough in the profession.
White won at least 27 games in Ruston, Louisiana, over each of the last three seasons. Moreover, his Louisiana Tech teams lost a combined total of only eight conference games over the past three regular seasons. The problem was that at the lower end of the college basketball food chain, low-calorie versions of both the WAC and Conference USA did not provide enough schedule heft to give the Bulldogs an at-large NCAA tournament bid in the event that they failed to win their league tournament. Sure enough, Tech went 0-3 in the conference tournament. The Bulldogs lost as a top seed in the 2013 WAC quarters, the 2014 C-USA final, and the 2015 C-USA semifinals, that last game being a de facto road game in Birmingham against UAB.
What you can see from White’s body of work at Louisiana Tech is that he got his teams to max out within the course of the regular season, and then ran into bad nights with no margin for error. The fact that White won consecutive conference championships by dominating the competition (as opposed to backdooring into a league title with a 12-6 league record) shows that he’s quite capable of getting his players’ attention, not only earning but sustaining their trust. At Florida, a strong conference season and a large pile of wins will not lead to a No. 3 seed in the NIT; they’ll lead to a top-five seed in the Big Dance. White deserves that benefit of the doubt.
What should also be pointed out is that Billy Donovan came from Marshall without NCAA tournament appearances. In that sense, White is very much a hire in the Donovan mold: He’s coming from a lower-tier basketball conference in the South without an NCAA tournament. He’s young — at 38, he’s older than Donovan was when Foley hired him in 1996, but like Billy D., he’s under 39 years of age at the time of his arrival in Gainsville.
Foley clearly wanted a talented coach with the energy needed to make Florida great… and the youthfulness which would make him want to stay in Gainesville for a very long time. The formula worked perfectly with Donovan, so Foley can’t be blamed for wanting to strike in a similar manner with White.
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There’s one aspect of White’s body of work which might get overlooked, but shouldn’t be discounted in sizing up this hire: White knows how to beat SEC teams on the road. He’s shown as much in each of the last two postseasons.
In 2014, Louisiana Tech — a No. 3 seed in the NIT — visited second-seeded Georgia in the second round. The Bulldogs won that game with a working margin after bolting to a huge lead and surviving a late Georgia rally. This past March, the Bulldogs were once again a 3-seed in the NIT. Once again, they visited a 2-seed in the second round, Texas A&M. Once again, they controlled that particular game from start to finish. If White is going to get knocked for failing to win a conference tournament, he should certainly get credit for his SEC road conquests. (As an added note, Louisiana Tech won at Oklahoma two seasons ago, in December of 2013. The OU coach? Lon Kruger, who beat Billy Donovan by six years in becoming the first man to lead Florida men’s basketball to the Final Four, in 1994.)
Has Michael White shown that he can punch above his weight, beating power conference teams on the road when situated at a program in a mid-tier conference? Clearly. No, he doesn’t have the reputation which comes from being a Rick Pitino protege as Donovan was, but his familiarity with the SEC — dating back to his days as an Ole Miss player and assistant coach — should put him in position to scout opponents and recruit at a high level. He has all the tools he needs to succeed.
On balance, this is a solid hire — not the spectacular hire Archie Miller would have been, but certainly not a Dave Leitao head-scratcher from DePaul, or the gamble Avery Johnson represents at Alabama. There’s plenty of logic behind Jeremy Foley’s decision. If it doesn’t work out, one can’t really fault Foley for using roughly the same thought process which led him to bring aboard Billy D. nearly 20 years ago.
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If there’s a single reason for Florida to be concerned about a non-home-run (read: non-Archie Miller) hire at this point in time, it is simply this: Though hardly a guarantee of failure, it is often hard for a coach to be “The Guy Who Follows The Guy.” White is, of course, the inheritor of that very position. Directly succeeding Billy Donovan isn’t supposed to be easy, and moreover, Florida fans are all too aware of the last time they replaced a local icon with someone else.
Ron Zook was chosen to replace Steve Spurrier as Florida’s football coach in 2002. Familiarity with the program and the ability to recruit (we all know how well Zook can recruit…) were seen as sufficient to keep Florida football on top, but Zook was clearly not cut out for a position of such stature and visibility. Sure, Michael White has already proved himself as a collegiate head coach, unlike Zook, but the broader common thread is obvious and not worth shoving aside: Replacing a giant is a rough business, even for skilled coaches.
Consider what the great Gene Bartow had to go through at UCLA after replacing John Wooden. (Similarly, consider what Mike Krzyzewski’s successor will one day have to deal with at Duke.) Bartow led UCLA to the 1976 Final Four in his first season, but the “Wooden would have done better” chorus — readily replicated many other programs where a new guy replaces an icon — always followed him around. Bartow quickly burned out at UCLA, and it wasn’t until he went to UAB that he found a second home as a coach (his first one being Memphis State, where he led the Tigers to the 1973 national title game… only for Wooden and UCLA to beat him).
Michael White is far better at coaching basketball than Ron Zook is at coaching football. Moreover, Florida basketball does not carry the kind of local, cultural weight today that UCLA basketball carried in the mid-1970s. No one is claiming otherwise. However, one thing remains the same: It’s hard to replace legends.
If White can’t establish a firm footing in his first three seasons or so, and if the hashtag #TeamBadLuck follows Florida into the near future, will Michael White lose hold of the Gator program? This might seem like unreasonable doomsday speculation, but there’s ample precedent pointing to coaches — even accomplished ones such as Bartow — not fitting in as immediate replacements for historically great predecessors.
Ultimately, Michael White appears to be a sound and logical answer for Florida with Archie Miller content to stay at Dayton. Yet, the ghosts of the past can take on a life of their own in big-ticket college basketball. Florida should expect to remain a second-weekend team in the NCAA tournament in a majority of seasons, picking off a Final Four every now and then. If Michael White is to meet that standard, he’ll probably need to be shown patience… especially since it took Billy Donovan nearly a decade to begin to win consistently in the NCAA tournament.
