The last 48 hours have felt like a fever dream, but if we get British Mamadi, two shooters, and keep IMac I’ll never wake up from that dream.
Odom off to a flying start!
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I’m not impressed when I keep thinking we could have had:
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If you’re looking for a coach who can get confrontational, may I suggest…Ryan Odom??
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Holy shit we got Danny Hurley with hair
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You’ve obviously never heard Tony say “Gosh darn it!”
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Thats solid proncunciation and usage of the word fuckING
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Keep me out of these nerd references or Ill start banning people
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Wikipedia’s up to date. Did one of y’all do this? Went to see when he graduated from HSC b/c my brother went there, but Ryan was there later. Ryan Odom - Wikipedia
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They’re showing Odom how it’s done, even if BDragon wants to bulldoze their home.
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That Dragon post was an absolute all timer outta nowhere. We gotta find that one
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Dont look at it as tearing something down. I am all about growth and opportunity. Let the swim team have a new facility to show off.
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Ryan Odom looks a lot like his dad, didn’t realize that. Guess I never really looked at him before. Voice too…like dead on.
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Take off the glasses and thin the hair a bit (a lot) — and you have his old man. If he can also recruit a Randolph Childress, Rodney Rogers, and Tim Duncan, we’ll be ok.
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Omg we might try to offensive rebound!
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Leaving my spiel on Odom here. Caveating this by saying that I was (am?) a RIBer. I felt like there was a way of doing things that worked for us. Continuing to keep Tony’s staff in place, following Tony’s program structure, while being more willing to engage with the modern college landscape felt attractive to me.
Given that we’re moving on from the Tony era, Odom is close to my preferred candidate. I don’t think he’s a great coach like Tony was (for the record, I don’t think Shaka is either; Byington might be great). But he’s at least a very good coach, and he brings something we’ve sorely missed: a regional approach.
The recruiting strategy we employed for the last 15 years (recruit across the whole planet with little regional bias) only works for non-blue blood programs if you have a truly great coach, and Tony was the best CBB coach in the country. Even then, the recruiting strategy started to show its flaws when Tony could no longer scout players like a maniac—partially because of new live period rules, partially because Tony stopped showing up to said live periods. Players underperformed expectations and left early having little tie to the region.
Odom, at the very least, understands the region and understands where UVA fits in the region. There are real reputation challenges to overcome in recruiting athletes to UVA. I honestly think that Odom’s time at VT and VCU helps him in understanding these reputation challenges from the perspective of a local outsider. Other potential hires may have been confounded by these challenges.
Our last major sport coach to successfully recruit Virginia, Mike London, had similar experience at other local schools (London failed for other reasons). Bringing on Griff Aldrich, another local HC with UVA experience, helps here. If Odom’s able to overcome these challenges and develop a real pipeline of regional talent, he’ll not only improve the talent level here, but he’ll also improve player retention dramatically (local kids are less likely to move), which is a massive advantage in today’s game. Given that we’re not likely to hire another all timer, hiring a very good coach with real advantages in local recruiting is 100% the way to go.
Also, more than any other candidate, Odom feels like the closest thing to a Tony-nostalgia candidate this side of Sanchez. He even looks a little like Tony. Happy it turned out this way.
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I am very sceptical on the Associate HC position to the lawyer turned coach dude.
I just wanna be on the record for that
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He’s living the dream of every lawyer - to become an ex-lawyer (whatever he’s doing is just details)
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You sound like an lawyer, counselor
Also, absolutely. Great great for him. But he didnt make his loot being a lawyer…
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