Georgia finally hires a new Basketball coach

After UGA fired Dennis Felton on January 29th, the Men’s basketball team has been without a true head coach. Well, today they announced the replacement for Felton and he is, 40 year old, Mark Fox from Nevada. Yeah, I did the same thing “Who”? Well in looking at Fox’s numbers, he looks pretty good on paper. Fox had been coach of Nevada for the past five seasons, where he went 123-43, including 21-13 this past season. He never won fewer than 21 games there and went 29-5 in 2006-07. Nevada competes in the Western Athletic Conference, and Fox’s teams won the league four of his five seasons. They finished second to Utah State this past season. The Wolf Pack played in the NCAA Tournament three consecutive seasons but not the past two. Also, he was named the WAC Don Haskins Coach of the Year three times. So again on paper he seems to be a good, winning coach. In addition, he has a reputation of being a great recruiter. He is also saying the right things. Fox said his teams will place an emphasis on defending and rebounding, while also trying to play as fast as they can on offense. Also, we seemed to be getting a pretty good deal for him, only paying him 1.3 million dollars a year for 6 years. That is a million less than we were willing to pay Mike Anderson from Missouri.
I hope this hire is a brilliant one by Athletic Director, Damon Evans. I have to trust that he has done his due diligence and he knows who he hired and has complete faith that Coach Fox is going to turn around the Georgia basketball program. But my big question is, what took so long? It was not like they had to wait for Coach Fox to lose in the NCAA tournament since his team didn’t make it this year. It was clear that Damon had his eye on Mike Anderson from Missouri and Jeff Capel from Oklahoma. But Coach Anderson turned down an offer to stay at Missouri and all indications were that Coach Capel wasn’t going to leave Oklahoma for Athens. So I guess Coach Fox was the third choice. Well, all of that doesn’t matter now. He seems to be one of the up and coming young coaches and he is going to have to use all his coaching and recruiting skills to turn this program around. Even though I really wasn’t aware of him before today, I am willing to give him a chance to see what he can do. There is no reason why the University of Georgia can’t be a football, baseball, tennis, gymnastics, and basketball school.

Go Dawgs!