During the Mexico trip one of the many conversations that dealt with sports was about college basketball coaches who went to the NBA and found great success. We came up with Larry Brown and absolutely no one else. So I was interested to read this piece from the Extrapolater about Tim Floyd, the head coach of USC when I was catching up on things this morning.
I lost track of Floyd after his epic flameout as successor to Phil Jackson as Bulls coach and the subsequent .500 season he had with the New Orleans Hornets. The big difference between the two levels of basketball is recruiting, of course, and Floyd was able to convince talented players to come play for him at the University of New Orleans and Iowa State while he was handcuffed by lesser lights at the professional level. Like his fellow pro failure and USC compatriot Pete Carroll, Floyd has established that he knows how to draw players to his program.
O.J. Mayo, the consensus best high school player in the country, signed on for a one-and-done and Floyd loses only one senior of major consequence from this year's Sweet Sixteen team. But Mayo might not be the last great player that Floyd brings onto campus. He's already gotten a committment from Dwayne Polee Jr. to join the Trojan hoop squad, for example. Polee is a 14-year old at Westchester high school in Los Angeles, although he had exactly zero high school games under his belt when he signed up for action. That's the kind of proactive manuevering you can't get away with in the NBA, no matter how much Danny Ainge chats up the mothers of All-Americans.
But back to Mayo and his impending season of college ball. Floyd has built a team around him that, barring any criminal malfeasance on Mayo's part, will be a preseason favorite for the title next year. Floyd proved at Iowa State and New Orleans, both the college and the undermanned pro team he took to .500, that he could coach a little bit. Unlike their opponents in the second round this weekend, Texas, who couldn't maximize the return on Kevin Durant because Rick Barnes seemed befuddled about how to use him, I'd bet on another Carroll-like performance from Floyd. Carroll turned Reggie Bush and LenDale White into first-round picks in the same year and I bet that Floyd will know how to get the most out of Mayo without subjegating his current stars to the background.
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