The Full Monty

Clearly, taking our arch rivals most successful basketball coach is no longer considered blasphemy for the Cal faithful. As soon as the words dismissing Ben Braun were out of Sandy Barbour’s mouth, a hue and cry ensued demanding Mike Montgomery be his successor. It’s not hard to understand the appeal of seeing Mike Montgomery’s scowl on the sideline of Haas Pavilion. Montgomery took a clear cut bottom of the conference program at Stanford and made them a perennial P10 contender. He’s won over 70% of the games he’s coached at both Montana and Stanford, took the Cardinal to ten straight NCAA tournament appearances including one to the final four. He’s a future hall of fame coach who happens to live in the Bay Area and is currently unemployed. What’s not to like?

I’m glad you asked. Despite his incredibly impressive resume, Montgomery is in fact not a good fit for Cal. Montgomery has never been known as a great recruiter and he privately expressed his distaste for the process before leaving Palo Alto for the NBA. Stanford is unique in its ability to attract student athletes distinct from the health of its athletic programs or the recruiting acumen of its coaches. It has a nationwide brand based on stellar academics and its bucolic campus, not to mention the $125k+ in scholarship value they offer. As a result, Montgomery had good but not great talent at Stanford. In his 18 year tenure in Palo Alto, he attracted only two more McDs All Americans and fewer top 100 recruits than Braun did during his twelve year run in Berkeley. That’s shocking when you consider the disparity in the two programs on the court success and points up both Monty’s recruiting challenges as well as his ability to win with less talent than his opponents.

Montgomery won by having a system and finding kids who fit that system well. His teams were big, strong and rough down low and populated with great shooters who could come off screens and drain jumpers. His system was one that was as tightly scripted on offense and as complex on defense as any in college basketball and relied heavily on fourth and fifth seniors who had mastered the system for it work well. While I can imagine a similar approach working in Berkeley, it doesn’t strike me as one that leverages Cal’s inherent strengths and weaknesses as well as it did Stanford’s. Cal has a far more flexible admissions department when it comes to student athletes and the urban campus has always attracted some of the better basketball players on the West Coast. Recruiting those types of players requires a head coach who is a tireless and passionate recruiter. Even when he was forty, that wasn’t a favorite part of Montgomery’s job, at age 60, it’s very hard to imagine he is this type of a lead man. It’s doubtful that there won’t be more turnover in Berkeley than on the Farm as Stanford attracts players who are degree first and basketball second while Cal is almost certainly the opposite. This will lead to fewer senior dominated teams which were the hallmark of Monty’s Stanford program

It’s worth noting that the one arguable blight on Montgomery’s career is his lack of success in the post season. Outside of the one final four run, Montgomery was .500 in the NCAA tournament, not a terrible record until you realize that nearly 75% of his losses were when Stanford was a higher seed and a clear favorite. Stanford’s lack of athleticism, especially in the backcourt and Monty’s rigid offensive system were the culprits in Stanford’s post season stumbles. Trent Johnson may not be nearly as consistent as Montgomery in terms of the regular season, but it’s not hard to imagine he will have more post season success with his use of the motion offense and his approach to peaking his teams later in the year.

Finally, Mike Montgomery is sixty one years old and has already proven all he needs to in the college basketball coaching profession. He won’t come to Berkeley with the hunger or energy he had when he arrived in Palo Alto in the late 1980s. Cal needs that dynamism in its next head coach. It deserves someone who wants to define themselves by their tenure at Cal and not see it as a last stop before retiring. In short, Mike Montgomery is not the answer.