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What was the worst?

Worst hire in RU sports history?

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M

mikeyoc

All-Conference
Apr 19, 2005
1,250
1,238
113
G- RUnit said:
It’s Littlepage and not even close. Totally destroyed our basketball program.
Anderson beat PSU.
Shea was actually a good coach just not an East Coach guy.
Ash probably 2nd worst IMHO.
Fred was right about All Sports Conference although cost us three decades.
Thought Eddie would be better.
Mike Rice was nutty and a time bomb but really firing a coach because he threw a basketball at a player… Press run amuck.
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Spot on. Occasionally, even the runners-up did at least one thing right. Littlepage did NOTHING right
 
R

RU848789

Heisman
Jul 27, 2001
65,217
44,289
113
S.W.A.I.N said:
Both awful, but Shea inherited same old RU, Ash had all the support, facilities, TV deals, etc. to be successful and still sucked.
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I guess when looking at it more closely, the best answer might just be that they were equally inept and it's probably not worth a deep analysis to say which one might be worse. Both inherited mediocre teams that were on the downswing a bit (Graber was 4-7 his last season, while Flood was 4-8 in his last season) and both had nearly identical records; below are some details...
  • Shea was 11-44 overall (winning 20% of his games) and 4-32 in the BE
  • Ash was 8-32 overall (winning the same 20%) and 3-26 in the B1G (very slightly worse).
  • Even their points for/against were very similar, as Shea's teams had 928 points for and 2078 points against (44%), while Ash's teams had 630 points for and 1300 points against (48%, which is slightly better).
Yes, Ash inherited better facilities than Shea did, but I'm not sure they were "relatively" better vs. their conference peers than Shea's were vs. his (hard to measure). Probably the thing that always made me think that there couldn't ever be a worse coach than Shea was the fact that his team lost a game against a team of RU football alums (most who weren't actively playing) that practiced for one hour before the game. To me that just represented, viscerally, how bad Shea was. Anyway, that's enough thinking about how bad both were. Let's go beat OSU.
 
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B

BillyC80

Heisman
Oct 23, 2006
17,104
15,526
72
I voted for Fred, and the Littlepage years totally sucked, but man, I really hated Ash as a coach. He rubbed me the wrong way since day one, and the first time we punted on a 4th and 2 from the opponent’s 39 yard line, I knew we had no shot to succeed with that guy.

Looking back is fine, even if it’s painful, but I’m just glad the excitement is back now, with Pike and Greg building us up to respectability again.
 
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G

G- RUnit

All-American
Sep 13, 2004
14,373
7,976
113
Good-Knight said:
Are people forgetting the coach who was by far the greatest embarrassment: Kevin Bannon. For years after that if you got introduced as "former Rutgers Basketball player," people just laughed . Most of us have found ourselves in a position where we were in over our heads, plenty of us have lost our tempers or otherwise had mental meltdowns, but having a promising career snuffed out due to weirdo perv stuff? That's difficult to understand and hard to forgive. For all the others on this list I think their hearts were in the right place. Can't say that about Kevin Bannon.
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Meh. Wasn’t a good person at all but firing in retrospect seems ridiculous. See all the Bobby Knight stuff.
 
M

MikeR0102

All-American
Oct 3, 2003
16,444
5,722
113
Voted Gruninger, but Ash and Mike Rice Jr we’re truly terrible hires for various reasons
 
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