needed a new thread first item: the Duck women's basketball team finished the season on a 14 game win streak. The final polish for the streak was a 79-30 loss today to Colorado. That's right, Oregon scored 30 points in a 4 quarter game and lost by 49. They got doubled+19....yikes!! it would be mismanagement by the AD to bring back HC Kelly Graves
Awful season. I haven't been able to come up with the group of donors and/or part of the athletic department budget where the $1.5m buyout would come from. If the donors did want to pay the buyout, great. If the money is coming out of the budget, I think that would be the real mismanagement.
sorry...I think that's a phony excuse. 1.5M buyout is a problem?....his salary is the problem: he has the 9th highest salary in the NCAA. He makes 150K more than Rueck at OSU. We can't know what Tara Van Derveer makes at Stanford since it's a private university, but other than her, Graves is the highest paid coach in the Pac-12 with the worst team with the worst record who ended the season like it did today if Oregon needs to make up for that 1.5M, then hire an up & coming young coach and pay him/her 600K/year
Mark Campbell at TCU. Their women's coaches make on average $220k per year. Of course, he just plucked Sedona Prince as a transfer from Oregon... might have to bring her back.
Yeah, if the solution is to cut the WBB budget by 15%, that could keep the books balanced. I assumed the goal would be to get a big name coach that could take them back to a Top 16 team and while there is a chance the program could do that on the cheap, the majority of coaches of the top 16 programs year in and year out aren't going to make $600k.
I don't think Prince has any eligibility and I don't think Mark Campbell is making anywhere near $220k at TCU. He was basically making that as an assistant at Oregon.
Yeah, the Prince part was just a joke. He was making $190k at Oregon. Sac State doesn't normally pay that well, so he probably wasn't making much more as head coach there. I doubt TCU is paying him more than $400k. I have no doubt that Oregon could easily afford him and that he'd turn things around fairly quickly. Of course, then they'd need to pay him more to keep him. Maybe TCU would up his salary to keep him. Not sure.
I'm sure you remember that I said a week or two ago that Oregon might be reluctant to fire Graves because of the extension they gave him. But it's pretty damn clear he's dragging the program into the toilet and 5 more years of this kind of result is unacceptable the players aren't playing for him and it's very likely, if he remains in place, the Ducks will lose more talent in transfers this year. I've heard a couple of things about Graves and his relationships with players since the big-3 left 4 years ago, and they aren't good at all. Makes me convinced that the glue holding the team together wasn't Graves but Sabrina and Ruthy. if a coach has turned the program a train-wreck, and Grave definitely has, then the AD has to decide between stopping the bleeding or fielding a cellar dweller, year after year. Football is the flagship of men's sports at just about every D1 school. For women's sports, it's basketball. No school would accept the kind of results Graves is producing for their football team; they'd eat the buyout, find the money elsewhere and move on. Oregon needs to treat the flagship of the women's sports programs the same way
I'd be very very surprised if TCU was only paying him $400k, but I don't think we'll know that. Regardless of what TCU is paying him, the only questions that would matter is how much would it take for Oregon to get him, does he want to go to Oregon, and does Oregon even want him. If Oregon can get Campbell for $500k/year, I think that would be a great move.
Do you mind sharing what you've heard? I've read a handful of people say they've heard things, but for whatever reason, the stories never come out. You'd assume if all these people on the message boards know about it, that Mullens is aware too.
what I've heard is a couple of observations from people I tend to trust (at various times they told me Herbert was coming back for his senior season; Mario was gone; Mike White (softball) was holding the AD hostage; the AD was fed up with the T&F coach, Robert Johnson...not sure exactly why; and Lanning would be the hire, and Dillingham and Lupoi the coordinators...all these 'whispers' were 1-3 weeks before the news broke. Bo Nix returning surprised most people) what they said was that Graves almost never engages with his players outside of games and practice. He sets separate and aloof and barely communicates when the team travels. That there appears to be no personal connection between him and the team. And one person I talked to went further: that being that while this aloofness might work for men's sports, especially football and the huge roster, it's much more problematic for women's sports I can't really say if he's lost the team. That might be beyond outside observation. But the way the team played over the last 2-3 months sure looked like a team that had quit on the coach. And a few of the things Graves said kind of looked like a coach not grounded in reality
Appreciate you sharing that. Obviously, if true, that's not great... Do you think he just turns it on in recruiting and then once he gets the players, he disengages? Or is the recruiting not even done by him? Is this new? I'm trying to wrap my head around why he had success for 20 years and now all of a sudden isn't.
Pretty sure Campbell was the recruiter for most of the talent at Oregon. He was also the one who recruited a lot of OSU's talent before going to Oregon. That's why I keep waiting for the Ducks to bring him back. I half thought they'd let Graves go and give the job to Campbell.. but then Graves got the extension...
I would think a male coach would be extra careful about having a personal connection with female players, especially on the road. I know I go out of my way to not talk about personal things with my female colleagues. Once you take a sexual harassment class, and I am sure Graves had to, I am guessing he might find it to be smarter to keep the relationships on the professional side.
Campbell was A recruiter on those staffs, but if the implication is neither head coach at Oregon or Oregon St was involved in recruiting their best players, I would push back. And Campbell didn't recruit Vandersloot or any of the Gonzaga players who won 10 conference champions, or Gray, Van Slooten, and their most recent 5* commit. There was no chance Mullens was going to fire Graves after them having the 5 best invidual history seasons in program history in 5 straight years. I think we're dealing with a bit of revisionist history as nobody was calling for Graves to move on when Campbell left.
No, i didn't think Graves was going to be fired. I thought he may retire or be promoted. But Campbell was the recruiting genius behind both OSU and Oregon's prior runs. And both programs took a pretty steep dive after he moved on.
Oh, how I wish that were true. So many disappointments from my daughters being excited to have a female coach. I think we've found 1 or 2 good female coaches in 8 years of looking... And a lot of very good guy coaches. It has been a shocking and sobering experience. I will say, one of their absolute favorite coaches is a woman. Maybe our experience is skewed though. I hope that's the case...
it's been the downward trajectory since 2020, capped by the 14 game losing streak (in-conference) including a record setting 49 point Pac-12 tournament loss that has brought things to a head Graves doesn't even have the best overall winning percentage at Oregon anymore with his .668 mark. That's goes to Jody Runge at .687. Graves has 3 Pac-12 championships in 10 season; Runge had 2 in 8 seasons when Oregon had all 3 of Sabrina-Ruthy-Satou their record was 97-12 (.890). When he hasn't had those 3 stars, his record is 126-99 (.560). That is a huge differential even though I believe, with Oregon going to the Big-10, it's urgent that Graves be fired, I doubt Oregon will take that step
