There isn’t a basketball coach alive that has enjoyed telling a student athlete that it’s time to pack his bags and find another place to go to school. The decision is rarely made in a vacuum and never made overnight. When a decision is like that is almost always months in the making and requires the Head Coach (as CEO) to have about as uncomfortable a conversation as you can possibly imagine with both the athlete involved and his or her parents.
(You can discuss this on the BSL Board here.)
The Maryland Terrapins find themselves down two student athletes when Terp Head Coach Mark Turgeon decided that he had to make that difficult call regarding two talented freshmen – Makhi and Makhel Mitchell- this past weekend. This was never about talent. That’s not a part of the Turgeon modus operandi. I honestly believe that Makhi could be an all-conference player at some point for somebody. And Makhel is a capable player as well. Both were clearly power conference level talents and might still be for somebody.
It just won’t be in College Park.
For the most part a Head Coach will never make a decision based on optics. You can’t do that for a couple of reasons. First, those on the outside looking in have never spent one minute in your locker room or in the circle of trust at practice. They have no idea what kind of chemistry is there (or is not). The other reason you can’t worry about optics is that it will completely eliminate the kind of bold thinking and action that you think is necessary to either save a season or get you to where you think you can go.
Full disclosure…. I have not spent one second talking with Mark Turgeon about the twins or about this decision other than what I asked him on the air after the Bryant game on Sunday afternoon. I really don’t feel like that’s a conversation I need to have with him nor him with me. That said, I have been involved in college basketball since 1976 (yeah, I’m that old) and I’ve had to have this conversation with kids and parents before. It’s brutal and it positively sucks! But it is almost always the right thing to do.
There has been a lot of talk among Terp faithful that this is completely on Turgeon because the book was out on the twins before they got to College Park. That book read that the Mitchells, while talented and engaging, could be wildly immature. I had an AAU coach from the area come up to me at a George Mason basketball game in early November and tell me that he was 100% sure that the twins wouldn’t make it at Maryland. His point was that Turge might have a chance with one of them but the two together could be a nightmare. It turns out he was spot on. Even with that it is difficult to fault Turgeon and his staff for taking a chance on two 6’10” kids. Every coach in America thinks he’s a part social worker and part Doctor Phil and that things will be different under their watch.
Maybe at the end of the day the moral of the story is that it’s hard to undo in months what took 18 or 19 years to create.
One other thought I would offer up is this…given the fact that these were two skilled 6’10 kids and throw in the fact that they are local and, thus, this is high profile thing with a team ranked in everybody’s top twenty…things had to be a serious boiling point for Turgeon and his staff with these kids. Again, the easiest thing in the world would have been to have let it all go and play the ‘nothing to see here’ game.
I liken it to anybody who has ever run a business or taught a class. Say there are twenty people in your company or in your class and 18 or 19 of them are great people that you love to work with and visit with every single day. The problem is that it is the one or two that are not that way that you go home and talk about and complain about every night and it’s the same one or two that takes the fun out of getting up and going to work the next day. Ultimately it’s the interests of the 18 that have to be served rather than those of the 2.
Obviously, the biggest beneficiaries of the Mitchell’s departure will be forwards Ricky Lindo and Donta Scott and center Chol Marial. Chol got the bulk of the highlights after Bryant but, to me, Scott was every bit as impressive (just not in a visual sense). Maybe one of the unforeseen benefits of the twins’ departure is the fact that now Turge has less options. Coaches can be great overthinkers – especially given a wealth of options. Absent the twins the three of those guys can play in longer stretches and benefit from the continuity. I think we would all be pretty excited to see what Chol might be able to do in 20+ minutes of playing time.
The week ahead includes home games against sneaky-good Indiana and just plain good Ohio State. Both teams are 11-2 and can provide a nice springboard into an 18-game slog of all Big Ten teams over the course of the next ten weeks. Coincidentally the Terps find themselves at 11-2. Each team will tell you that this was never about the first 13 games as much as it is about the last 18.
Terps Analyst
A fixture in the Washington sports scene since his days as a player and a coach, Chris Knoche has accumulated a diverse resume as a media presence in town for more than two decades. That resume has earned him opportunities on both national and local stages and made him a Washington DC staple on radio, television and in digital media.