It’s been a short four years since Penn’s last official search for a new men’s basketball coach began. But in that blink of an eye, much has changed at the Palestra.
After the 2005-06 season, legendary coach Fran Dunphy announced he would end his 17-year tenure at Penn and hop down to Broad street to lead Big 5 rival Temple.
When Dunphy left, however, the team’s outlook was much brighter than it is today in the midst of a new coach search. The Quakers had just rounded off an Ivy League championship season, their fourth in five years, that ended with an impressive showing in the NCAA Tournament. The No. 15 seed Penn lost by just eight points to No. 2 Texas A&M.;
Just 16 days after Dunphy vacated the position, Glen Miller was named his successor. A former Brown head coach, Miller brought along with him a resume highlighted by the promise of his Brown squad that swept Penn for the first time ever in 2004.
In Miller’s first season with the Quakers, he led a team assembled by Dunphy to a championship 13-1 Ivy record, a league title and another appearance — this time at the No. 14 seed — against Texas A&M; in the NCAA tournament.
But with Dunphy’s recruits, namely two-time Ivy League Player of the Year Ibrahim Jaaber and Mark Zoeller, graduating in 2007, the Quakers' top spot in the standings began to erode.
In 2007-08, Penn slipped to third in the conference at 8-6 behind Brown and an undefeated Cornell team. The next year, the Red and Blue fell to 6-8, their first finish below .500 since 1991.
This season, Miller and the Quakers got off to an 0-7 non-conference record, the team’s worst in 10 years. He was relieved of his position in December and volunteer assistant coach Jerome Allen was named interim head coach.
Directing Miller’s recruits, the former Penn basketball alum battled through to a 5-9 finish in the Ivy season with several key players injured.
Penn’s Ivy record this year is the program’s worst since 1968 when the Quakers finished 4-10 in the Ancient Eight under the helm of Dick Harter.
But after the 1967-68 season, Penn entered one of its most celebrated eras.
Harter led the team to a 38-4 Ivy record and two league titles over the next three seasons, a standard of success that was continued by Chuck Daly.
The future Hall of Fame coach led the Quakers to a league title in each of his first four seasons on the Palestra’s sidelines.
Daly would go on to establish himself as one of the game’s greatest coaches, winning back-to-back titles with the Detroit Pistons and a gold medal as coach of the 1992 Olympic Dream Team.
The huge coaching void left by Daly was filled by Bob Weinhauer, who had a near-flawless tenure. He won at least a share of the Ivy title in each of his five seasons at the helm.
Penn then claimed just two conference titles in the next seven years split by coaches Craig Littlepage and Tom Schneider during the 1980s, but with the entrance of Dunphy in 1989, the Quakers would again return to form.
Fast-forward to the present and now athletic director Steve Bilsky has embarked on the search for Penn’s newest coach in the program’s 113-year saga.
This time around, though, there is no Ivy League championship banner freshly hung from the Palestra rafters, no recently stamped tickets to the big dance and no winning record.
However, Penn’s next head coach will inherit a team that is down, but not out.
Seniors Darren Smith and Andreas Schreiber have said they plan on returning for a fifth year with Penn, while injured junior forward Tyler Bernardini will also return. Tack on a recruiting class that is at least seven deep and it seems the new coach will have some talent to work with.
Talent, and a whole lot of history.
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