Ivy coach to join Donahue at BC?

I said it in my last column, and I’ll say it again: There’s been a lot written in this paper about Cornell and its basketball team. Was some of it warranted? Sure. Is an Ivy League sports page the market for stories about a different Ivy League school’s team? Sometimes. Was I going to hop on that bandwagon? Not at all, it’s not my place.

However, something happened on Tuesday that changed my stance, though not by much. Anyone with half a brain knew that Steve Donahue was done coaching Cornell after the season the Big Red had had. He coached the team to a third straight league title, led them to the Sweet 16, and won the Clair Bee National Coach of the Year Award, and the Big Red’s three stars—and five other seniors—are graduating this year. On Tuesday, Donahue accepted the job of coaching Boston College after Al Skinner was removed from the head coaching position after 13 years on the Eagles’ bench.

My first reaction: Good for him—the change is good for his career. Donahue’s departure to the ACC will definitely have some effect on the Ivy League, but if it weren’t for the final paragraph of a story written by ESPN.com senior writer Andy Katz, there would be no basis for my writing this column.

“Multiple sources in Indianapolis said that Donahue had contacted coaches about joining his staff with the Eagles, including at least one other Ivy League head coach,” Katz wrote.
Hold your horses—this just got interesting. The proverbial $1,000,000 question here is: which Ivy head coach did Donahue contact if the sources are correct and he did actually contact one? Once we know that answer, then the obvious next question is, will that coach actually go?

Immediately I, like many others, began to wonder if Columbia’s own Joe Jones was the head coach in question. And why not? According to former Spec basketball writers, Jones and Donahue thought highly of one another, and any press conference that involved either of them involved a healthy amount of one gushing in admiration about the other. Along with their mutual admiration, Jones has experience as an assistant coach in a major conference, as he was an assistant coach at Villanova for six seasons before coming to Columbia. Jones, like Donahue, is regarded as a solid recruiter, which any head coach would love to have as an assistant.

Before I could think of any more reasons this could work, Spectrum published an update saying that Jones had been contacted and that he had said he was not the Ivy League head coach who had been asked to be Donahue’s assistant at Boston College. While Jones’s saying that does not absolutely preclude him from going to BC—or anywhere else for that matter—it does make it infinitely less likely. What he does with his career is his decision, and I’ll leave it at that.

Jones may be out of the running, but that means that there’s still a mystery afoot. There are six other coaches that could have been approached about joining Donahue, and while I cannot say that I have any legitimate idea as to who that could have been, I’ll do my best to narrow down the options.

There are two coaches—Penn’s Jerome Allen and Harvard’s Tommy Amaker—that it wouldn’t make sense for Donahue to contact, because they seem to want to stay at their current schools. Allen was just announced as the Quakers’ head coach after filling that position on an interim basis last season, while Harvard reported on Friday that the university and Amaker are currently discussing a multi-year contract extension.

Two other coaches jump out at me as people Donahue probably would not have contacted, but for different reasons. Mark Graupe became the interim head coach at Dartmouth in the middle of this season after Terry Dunn resigned. The job with the Big Green marks Graupe’s first head coaching gig, which means he’s probably eager to stick around if the Dartmouth athletic department decides to keep him on—though that’s not a foregone conclusion. On the other end of the spectrum, Sydney Johnson has built quite a team at Princeton in his three years. The Tigers went 11-3 in the league this year, and most of their top players are coming back next year. I have no doubt that Princeton will be predicted to finish first or second in the league next year, and with a chance to bring his team to the promised land of the NCAA tournament and make a name for himself, why would Johnson leave?

That leaves two coaches: Brown’s Jesse Agel and Yale’s James Jones. These two seem more likely than the other four just mentioned to have been contacted by Donahue. Agel has been the head coach of the Bears for just two years, but he has logged 19 years as an assistant coach between Brown and Vermont. In his role as an assistant coach, Agel was widely respected, and a move to Boston College as an assistant coach could be considered by some as a step up. Jones, on the other hand, has been at Yale for 10 years and has been successful in reshaping that program during his tenure. It isn’t very likely that Jones would leave, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been contacted.

That’s the best I could come up with. Remember, there’s a chance that Donahue never did contact any other Ivy coaches and that anything could happen (or not) in the coming days and weeks. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.