How Different Would Rutgers Basketball Be Now If It Had Made The Wright Coaching Hire Nearly 20 Years Ago?
Before the coronavirus pandemic wiped out sports entirely from our daily routine Rutgers basketball was on its way to ending a 29-year NCAA Tournament drought after posting the school’s first winning season in 14 years.
But it has always been a source of “what-if?” at the school concerning a whirlwind week in late March of 2001, after Kevin Bannon had been fired as the head coach.
Bob Mulcahy, then the Scarlet Knights’ athletic director, had his sights set on a rising star in the coaching ranks at Hofstra named Jay Wright. Negotiations had reached the final stages on Wednesday, March 22 of that year, when Wright met Mulcahy at his home to go over contract details. Before signing a deal, Wright said he wanted to meet the Rutgers president first.
That meeting was set up for Sunday.
The three days between the Wright-Mulcahy meeting and making a formal introduction to the Rutgers president dramatically changed the course of the school’s basketball program for the next 20 years.
It seemed to work out ok Villanova, though.
Wright, in the midst of a future Hall of Fame career, has gone 471-182 with two national championships since taking over at Villanova in 2001, with the Wildcats making the NCAA Tournament in 14 of 15 seasons prior to this one. Rutgers basketball has gone 272-335 over that same span, with the NCAA Tournament remaining an elusive goal since 1991.
Mulcahy-- ironically a Villanova grad -- was certain he had Wright locked up.
Then it all unraveled.
Two days after Mulcahy and Wright met at Mulcahy’s house, Villanova head coach Steve Lappas abruptly “resigned” after nine years to take the Massachusetts job. Vince Nicastro, the Wildcats’ AD at the time, claimed to be surprised by the resignation (wink, wink) after Lappas compiled a 174-110 record at Villanova (though his teams struggled in the postseason) and even though his contract had two years remaining.
Now as then, Villanova is a better job than UMass. It’s not even open to debate. Villanova (like Rutgers at the time) was in the Big East. UMass was in the Atlantic 10.
But Lappas, with a winning resume and two years left on his Villanova deal, abruptly decided he wanted a worse job. The reality? He was forced out because Villanova did not want to miss out on Wright, a former Wildcats assistant under Rollie Massimino who always viewed Villanova as his dream job.
Villanova knew it had to act quickly – and did.
By Sunday, the day Wright was supposed to meet with the Rutgers president, four days after Wright met with Mulcahy and two days after Lappas’ surprise “resignation,” Villanova was calling a press conference for the next day to introduce Wright as its new head coach.
Years later, Wright would acknowledge he was “very, very close” to taking the Rutgers job.
How different would the course of Rutgers basketball be had he taken the job? Probably about as different as the course of Rutgers football history had Mulcahy been able to land another big coaching fish in 1983.
Mulcahy, then the president and CEO of the New Jersey Sports & Exposition Authority, teamed up with prominent Rutgers alum Sonny Werblin to hire a football coach that would launch Rutgers into the big time following the firing of Frank Burns.
Werblin, former owner of the Jets and chairman of Madison Square Garden, was known for making a splash with his hires. He snagged Joe Namath away from the NFL in 1965 by signing him for the then-outrageous sum of $400,000.
This time, Werblin and Mulcahy dangled an annual $1 million salary in front of Joe Paterno – for perspective: college football’s first $1 million coach wouldn’t happen until 1996 when Steve Spurrier’s salary reached seven figures at Florida -- in an attempt to lure him away from Penn State. Paterno thought about it for a couple of days before deciding to remain in Happy Valley.
The timing then, as it would be for Wright in 2001, just wasn’t right for Paterno. But at Rutgers, it’s easy to wonder “what if?”