Knapp sacked

Before shifting into 24-7 March Madness mode, take a moment to consider the Penn women's basketball team, which got a big shake-up last week when the Penn brass announced that it will not renew head coach Pat Knapp's contract.

About time. Don't get me wrong -- I covered this team my freshman year and developed a lot of respect for Knapp. He is very passionate and candid to a fault, and he struck me as committed to the welfare of his players. I owe him a personal debt for always taking the time to help me understand the team's dynamics. But given how poorly Penn has performed in his five years at the helm, this was the right move for the program.

If you ask me, though, the bigger lesson is that Knapp never should have been hired in the first place.

It's not that he was unqualified — he came to Penn with plenty of credentials, as his bio shows, and he had deep roots in the greater-Philadelphia basketball scene. But he arrived after 18 years at Georgetown, a scholarship program in the Big East with a much higher profile than Penn's. The Hoyas won two regular-season conference titles in Knapp's tenure, and he was voted the league's Coach of the Year in 1993, when Georgetown made its first and only NCAA Tournament appearance.

Penn was clearly a step down from that. Knapp came to Penn voluntarily, according to this 2004 report, which suggests to me that he wanted to take things down a notch and finish his career at a program facing lower expectations and less scrutiny.

The Athletic Department should not be hiring coaches with that profile. Instead, it should be going after up-and-comers — coaches who want to move up in the world, who are ambitious, and who don't want to make Penn their last stop. Coaches like that have a stronger incentive to produce winning teams than someone like Knapp.

“We are disappointed that we did not attain the levels of success we anticipated,” athletic director Steve Bilsky said in a press release.

In the end, Knapp's tenure at Penn had three consistent features: 1) Awesome quotes; 2) Attrition problems; and 3) losing records. The first of those can't make up for the other two for very long.