A Jersey Guy: BC Hoops: Why Not JT III?
The mission of Boston College athletic director Patrick Kraft regarding the men's basketball program was clear.
1. Find a replacement for Jim Christian who was fired on Monday after seven primarily dismal seasons.
2. Find someone with head coaching experience, a proven winner in academic settings.
3. Make sure that coach is at least partially familiar with the Boston College culture as well as the city itself.
4. With racism and diversity issues dominating the campus, make every effort to make it a minority hire.
It is a tight circle of requirements, the pool of candidates was not huge.
Someone like Harvard coach Tommy Amaker, a Duke graduate, whose coaching resume included stops at Seton Hall and Michigan seemed obvious, but BC had flirted with Amaker before and the initial interest by BC seemed minimal.
According to sources at BC, Kraft may be closing in on a deal which makes sense in many ways: Former Georgetown and Princeton coach John Thompson III.
Thompson, the son of Hall of fame coach John Thompson, checks off all of the boxes.
He was born in Boston, went to school at Princeton, where he later coached for five seasons and then in 2004 stepped in to replace his father at Georgetown, where he spent 13 seasons producing a series of winning records before a pair of back to back losing seasons prompted Georgetown officials to make a change.
But JT III, who will be 55 next month, is hardly done and made clear he wants to return to coaching.
Sources at BC say that Thompson is definitely on the leader board, with the major obstacle for Kraft being that there may be other offers forthcoming as the regular season concludes.
It is BC and Kraft's task to close the deal as quickly as possible.
How fast that can be accomplished remains to be seen.