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SLU Head Coaches


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4 hours ago, kwyjibo said:

I am curious what metric(s) makes Grawer successful and Crews, Soderberg and Romar not.  I understand that Crews inherited his success for the most part but am curious.  Is it just improvement?  Exceeding expectations--does he get a pass because it was long ago?   Grawer barely averaged to be an average NCAA D-I team in his tenure and never got his teams to the NCAA (he had as we know NIT success).  Crews got two NCAA appearances and wins.  Soderberg never got SLU to the NCAA tournament but his worst year was basically Grawer's average (Grawer had 2 better seasons than Soderberg's best but he had 4 worse teams than Soderberg's worst).    Romar had the best average record relative to other D-1 teams and an NCAA appearance. 

The following shows the average SRS (0 is average D-1) of each coach and percentage of NCAA years by coach.   I think other factors should be at play (like Crews bad seasons are really bad compared to any other coach but Grawer) but it is interesting view.

 
Coach  Ave SRS       Ave NCAA
Jim Crews  4.46 50%
Rick Majerus 4.95 20%
Brad Soderberg  4.32 0%
Lorenzo Romar 8.63 33%
Charles Spoonhour  8.49 43%
Rich Grawer 0.93 0%
   
   
   
   
   
   

 

 

   

Grawer gets more credit for taking a program that was nowhere and returning it to being average to above average.  I would argue the NIT runs were above average years.  Those years also returned energy and buzz to the program.  Going from nothing to respectability is Grawer's legacy.  His time allowed the Spoonhour years to occur.

Crews took a team that had been to the tournament twice in a row and got them back there one more time before absolutely destroying it.

Romar was doing some positive stuff before leaving.  Soderberg kept the seat warm for Majerus.

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2 hours ago, brianstl said:

So Romar doesn't get credit for re-recruiting Perry and then Romar gets dinged because Brad couldn't do the same with Hollins?

 

The fact of the matter is that Romar left Brad with a roster that included Perry, Fisher, Brown, Diener and Sloan.  Those players helped Brad produce his only two post season appearances (NIT) and his two best Sagarin rankings.

One reasonable measure of success is whether a program is better off when you leave than when you take over. By that measure Grawer, Spoon, and RM were successes and Crews, Sodie and yes Romar were not.

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3 hours ago, kshoe said:

One reasonable measure of success is whether a program is better off when you leave than when you take over. By that measure Grawer, Spoon, and RM were successes and Crews, Sodie and yes Romar were not.

Romer inherited a Spoon team that was 15-16 & 8-8 conference which he takes them on to the NCAA.  Romer passes on a team that was also 15-16  & 9-7 conference. Sodie takes that team to 2 consecutive NITS. I don't undersand about Romer not a success or Spoon being unsuccessful.

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10 hours ago, HenryB said:

Rich Grawer saved this program.  SLU was on the verge of leaving D1.  Attendance in the years prior to Grawer was nonexistent.  SLU was so pitiful that a home game was played in West Pine Gym.  There was absolutely zero interest in the program before Grawer.  One thing that he did that has never been equaled by his successors was his ability to recruit locally - that was a great boon to attendance.  He got a raw deal when he was fired. We were playing 4 or 5 freshman and took our lumps but you could see the potential was there. The program was ready to really take off when he was replaced by Charlie.  If you were there in the years prior to Rich you would appreciate how important he is in Billikens history.

dead on 

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