Miller's Replacement Candidates Reported

Adam Zagoria - a blogger for sny.tv - is reporting on three emerging candidates for the recently vacated men's basketball head coach position. I can't vouch for the legitimacy of the blog post (he cites only "Sources"), but he says that the top candidate is Andy Toole, associate head coach at Robert Morris. It's pretty early, in my opinion, for this information to be public and credible, but figured I would go ahead and report it here anyways.

Toole started for the Quakers in 2001-02 and 2002-03 (he transferred from Elon after his sophomore season) and was co-captain for the 2002-03 Quakekrs team that went 14-0 in League play and 22-6 overall in addition to finishing 3-1 in Big 5 play. Over the 2006-07 season, Toole was an assistant at Lafayette, and has served in his current position since 2007.

The other two candidates Zagoria indicates are no surprise: Lafayette head coach Fran O'Hanlon and Cornell head coach Steve Donahue, both assistants under Fran Dunphy. Both were speculated to replace Dunphy when he left after the 2005-06 season.

The full post is here, or you can just click below the jump to get the full text of the Penn portion of the post, along with my initial views on the information.

Sources say there are three leading candidates for the Penn job vacated by the recent firing of Glen Miller.
Andy Toole, the associate head coach to Mike Rice at Robert Morris, is the leading candidate, sources say.

A Red Bank, N.J. native, Toole was a co-captain of the 2002-03 Penn team that finished 22-6. He helped Penn reach the NCAA tournament in 2002 and ‘03.

Cornell coach Steve Donahue, who has led the Big Red to back-to-back NCAA tourney appearances, is also a candidate, as is Philly native Fran O’Hanlon, the Lafayette head coach.

In my opinion, it's far too early to start breaking down potential candidates. First of all, I'm sure interim head coach Jerome Allen will be in the mix, especially if he performs well over the second half of the season. Also, O'Hanlon and Donahue's names will continually be mentioned for the opening but both are in jobs right now that many would consider better than the Penn offering.

And again, I don't want to lend too much credibility to this post, but it does show one critical fact if, in fact, it's true: athletic director Steve Bilsky is looking at candidates with experience in Philly and at Penn. That would seem to show his admission that hiring someone without that experience in Miller may have been a mistake.