Johnny Dawkins, the former Duke standout and assistant coach, was named the new Stanford men’s basketball coach on Monday.
Dawkins was given a six-year deal to coach the Cardinal, which will be his first stint as a head coach.
The 44-year-old Dawkins had been an assistant to Coach K at Duke for the past 11 seasons.
Dawkins’ move to the West Coast has drawn plenty of discussion, both from local media and folks in California. Tim Kawakami of the San Jose Mercury News wrote a piece on Tuesday which took a negative view of the hire. The News and Observer’s Carlton Tudor, on the other hand, thinks the move is a good fit for Dawkins.
Read the articles and you decide who makes a more convincing argument.
Meanwhile in Chapel Hill, presidential hopeful Barack Obama was in town for a pick-up game with members of the UNC basketball team on Tuesday. It seems lately that Senator Obama has been at the center of a number of controveries but how controversial could a pick-up basketball game be? With Coach Roy Williams on hand to watch the game – plenty. Fortunately for Obama, this controversy has nothing to do with him (or Rev. Wright) and everything to do with whether or not UNC broke NCAA rules. According to NCAA rules, coaches are not allowed to watch pickup games involving their players at any time during the offseason.
The NCAA doesn’t see this as a big deal because of the nature of the circumstances surrounding the scrimmage and doesn’t plan to persue any action against the Tar Heels. While I agree with the NCAA in this case (this really isn’t that big of a deal), to those who don’t like UNC, this looks like another case of the Tar Heels getting their hands caught in the cookie jar while the NCAA looks the other way.
the pack got put on probation in 1973 because DT played in a pick-up game. that wasn’t a big deal either except that we had a prefect record and would have won the freakin’ national championship!
Brad,
If you really believe the Pack was put on probation back in ’73 just because David Thompson played in a pickup game, you really need to get out more. Just like everything else with the NCAA, when they know you’re dirty, they get you for the stuff they can document. They couldn’t prove all the “extra benefits” Thompson got, just like they couldn’t prove them for the other schools that were put on probation for illegally recruiting him, but if you think all that happened was a pickup game, then you probably believe Chris Washburn was a Rhodes scholar.
I think that some fans get frustrated by the way that the NCAA operates when it comes to its own rules. Sometimes they go hard line over silly things while letting other things slide. As I said, it this case, Williams was obv. not running a practice. The NCAA shouldn’t sweat this. Williams was not breaking the “spirit of the rule”. On the other hand, there are countless cases where the NCAA slams a school for breaking a “rule” that gave the school no competative advantage. There are many NCAA rules that are silly and a little common sense enforcement would be a welcome change.