Concluding thoughts

As a senior who will be away on Spring Break next week, I have seen my final Penn game as a student. It was a harrowing walk over to the Palestra for me last night, to know that such a meaningful and enjoyable part of my college experience was coming to an end – and an abrupt one at that. No Ibby Jaaber sitting in the basket after cutting down the nets. Not even a chance to get to ask Glen Miller a question in an NCAA Tournament press conference after a first-round loss. Instead, Penn gritted out one of the ugliest wins I’ve ever seen in that building. After the jump, I offer some concluding thoughts and personal perspective on this team and its beleaguered coach. Pardon the 1900-word essay, but it should be easy reading.

To clear up whatever confusion might exist, I am a die-hard fan of Penn basketball, just like most of you readers, and it pains me to see the team in this state too. I have also had a responsibility as a reporter to cover this team as fairly as possible and not allow my emotions as a fan of the team to get in the way. It’s something that most DP writers grapple with, especially considering how frustrating Penn’s teams can often be.

I am hardly claiming to be the ideal neutral observer here, but I do feel very strongly, as both a reporter and a fan, that the expectations for this team, not just over the past two seasons, but every season that I’ve been here, have bordered on unreasonable. Furthermore, I do not think that Glen Miller ever made a smooth transition to Penn, even in his first season when he took them to within 10 minutes of the second round of the NCAA Tournament. I’ll try to break down these points in more detail and discuss how they relate to the team’s current situation.

In fact, I will start from today and work my way backwards.

There have been a lot of disrespectful messages and comments floating on the DP’s website, the Buzz, and other message boards and blogs about Glen Miller. I have had spirited discussions with many of you about it, and it is clear that I continue to hold a minority opinion. If I were a fan only and not a reporter, and didn't have the same perspective I have now, I would probably be calling for Miller’s firing too. All of those arguments have been hashed out in the past few months though, so I’m not here to continue to argue a point. What I will do is make a few final ones about this program.

First, in case this fact slipped some of your minds, Glen Miller is under a multi-year contract, the details of which are not public. But to put it simply, in order to fire Glen Miller, as so many of you want to do, Penn would have to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars out the window to buy out what’s left on his contract. Then, Penn would have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more on a new contract for the next coach. Given the current economic climate and the recent sharp decline in Penn’s endowment, if Penn were to go this route, the backlash from it would far exceed whatever backlash has occurred from Miller’s tenure as coach. It goes without saying, no matter what you feel about Miller, that to fire him now given this reality would be more irresponsible and disrespectful to this school than anything he has ever done as a coach.

Second, I don’t know who Penn fans would have rather had coach this team in the past two seasons – anyone I guess. But I would submit to you that even if John Wooden in his prime were coaching this year’s Penn team, he wouldn’t have won the league. In terms of talent and experience, Penn is not there yet. Perhaps they could have been coached to more wins, but certainly not past Cornell to an Ivy League title. You can blame Miller for his recruits if you want to, but the truth of the matter is that he brought in the Ivy League Rookie of the Year last season and some other players with a whole lot of potential. They don't always play great night in and night out, but they're much further along in their careers right now than average underclassmen.

And given fan expectations as long as I’ve been at Penn, not even an Ivy League title with John Wooden at the helm would have been good enough. In fact, I recall distinctly after Penn’s most recent Ivy League Championship, there was a general feeling that the season’s goal had not yet been accomplished. It was the third Ivy League title in a row – it was getting old already. Fans wanted a first-round win, and when they didn’t get it, they understood but were a little upset. The new expectation going forward, many fans were saying on the message boards at the time, was not to win the Ivy League title, but to get deeper into the Tournament. Rather lofty hopes for an Ivy League, non-scholarship institution.

So sure, it’s possible that another coach could have presided over a .500 or better season this year, but Penn was not winning a title, so fans would have been upset regardless.

But to be fair, the anger directed at Miller cannot be solely blamed on fans’ high expectations. The underlying problem is that he was never a great fit for the program when he was hired and did a poor job from the day he got here of integrating himself into the Penn basketball community, and even the university community as a whole. Fran Dunphy was not just the face of Penn basketball, but in many ways, he was the face of the school. A Philadelphia icon, he taught a class here, sought the advice of many faculty members that he befriended, and truly understood what it meant to be at Penn and compete in this city’s environment. Dunphy was a Philadelphia guy; he got it.

Miller was brought in as an outsider, and it still feels like he’s an outsider to this day. A lot of the relationships that members of the Penn community once had with this basketball program have since faded or been severed completely. Instead of seeing Miller around campus and getting to know him personally and talk to him about his team, everyone is forced to form their impressions of him from the way he comports himself on the bench and in press conferences. And if you’re just basing your judgments on Miller from his behavior during and immediately following games, it would be fair for you to think he was a total lunatic, as many of you do.

When I was a freshman starting out at the DP, I obviously did not have the privilege of covering basketball. But when Dunphy left that spring, my final exam studying was interrupted by the seniors at the DP. They had called me in to the office, along with every reporter on staff, to assemble a war room of sorts to coordinate the paper’s coverage of Dunphy’s departure. I remember it like it was yesterday. My assignment, which remains to this day the most personally challenging and interesting one I have ever completed, was to revisit Penn’s prior head coach search process – the one that yielded Fran Dunphy as an end result. In a 24 hour stretch, I talked to Dunphy, Paul Rubincam – the executive director of the Big 5 and Penn’s former athletic director, and several of the other candidates that were in the running for the job at the time. The one common theme throughout the article seemed to be the importance of prospective coaches having ties to Penn or the Big 5.

“With experience at Penn and in the Big 5, there's a limited learning curve,” Dunphy told me. Rubincam added: “It really helps to understand the Big 5 and the unique situation that Penn is in.”

Nonetheless, Steve Bilsky went a different route and brought in an outsider this time around. He brought in Miller because he proved himself to be an excellent basketball coach and recruiter. He was not, however, someone that had ties to this school or this city’s basketball tradition. As a result, the learning curve has been very steep. Miller is still learning as he goes along. He still doesn’t fully embrace or understand the meaning of the Big 5, and he is only now beginning to understand the basketball culture here at Penn.

For these reasons, Penn fans have a very tough time embracing Miller. They know him only as the guy throwing his jacket and screaming at his players. There is obviously much more to him as a coach and person. He needs to continue to do a better job of opening up to these fans and this program; he needs to repair some of the relationships that have been damaged and immerse himself more in this school’s community.

But when he is an outsider to begin with, and fans are calling for him to be fired, it is very difficult for him to do that. He becomes disillusioned with the situation and probably less willing to make an effort to learn more about this community and fit into it. I do believe Miller is trying to make a commitment to this program for the long haul, and fans need to start recognizing that he is at the very least going to be here next season, with a team that should be much better and competitive in the Ivy League. With this fact established, it is up to the fans and Miller to act accordingly, however they see fit.

If Penn continues to sputter with Miller at the helm for the duration of his contract, then his contract will not be renewed, nor should it be. And in the meantime, Miller needs to work on closing the gap between being an outsider and an active, proud member of the Penn community. Hopefully, if he makes those efforts during the offseason, they will not go unappreciated. If he doesn’t and this team continues to stink, then he’s truly defenseless.

Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts with me throughout this season. I will continue to entertain your comments and ideas, though I won’t be able to keep in touch next week and am very busy this week. In some ways, I am relieved to be winding down my coverage of Penn basketball. The past season has been tumultuous, to say the least. But the experience overall has been amazing, and I cannot express how fortunate I am to have had the opportunity both to cheer and work at the Palestra throughout my college career.

Fan expectations aside, the basketball culture here is more wonderful than I could have ever hoped for or imagined from an Ivy League school. The passion from the fans this season, regardless of the context, speaks to their enthusiasm and concern for this team. Penn’s basketball culture will never revert back to what it was in decades past. But no matter what your opinions are about this team, the fact that we can still have such spirited conversations about the Quakers, in good times and in bad, is pretty cool in my book. I can only hope that continues long after I graduate in May.

Thanks for reading,

Andrew Todres