This Substack was started about 15 months ago, mainly as a place to post some of the random charts and graphs I put together focusing on Penn State Men’s Basketball. Despite the blog-like format of this place, the intention was to avoid doing much editorializing here and primarily keep the posts observational or informational.
My preference is to avoid regularly posting straightforward opinion pieces here, for several reasons:
Primarily it’s because I’m not a writer, and don’t pretend to be one. I’m much better with numbers than words, and my Grammarly subscription more than pays for itself to make these posts even somewhat coherent.
The second reason is that I’m not an expert or an insider. I follow the sport and the program very closely, and I think I can share or point out some things that could be valuable to folks who follow less closely than me, but much of what I know about basketball is just regurgitated information from folks who are much more connected and/or knowledgable than me.
Lastly is that I’m a pretty cynical fan. I’ve been told that it’s a Northeast thing to expect the worst for your sports teams, but in this case, it’s more likely related to the 30+ years of energy and emotion I’ve invested into such a disappointing basketball program.
It seems a bit pointless to regularly write pessimistic, poorly constructed, uninformed opinion pieces about a topic as niche as Penn State Basketball. But given that this has been one of the more interesting 6-month periods of time I can ever remember in those 30+ years of following the program, I thought I might bend my own rules just a bit.
Some life events have transpired in the time since I started this place, and that has impacted the amount of time I have been able to spend on this little hobby. I’m hopeful that in the next few months, I’m able to devote more time to writing here about the upcoming season, but prior to that, I feel like there is some catching up to do concerning a very eventful last few months in the Penn State basketball world.
Penn State Basketball fans barely had a chance to reflect on the successful finish to last season before the storm clouds started moving in around the program… again. It’s become an unfortunate tradition now that every good PSU season must be followed by an absolute disaster of an offseason. This one was easier to predict than the last few given the circumstances, but the net outcome is roughly the same: the head coach is gone, and we’re back at square one.
With several months now passed, the feelings from PSU fans about the departure of Micah Shrewsberry seem to run the gamut: anger, confusion, sadness, and bitterness probably describe the prevailing emotions among most.
I can’t overstate how great of a hire Shrewsberry was two years ago. He was exactly the right guy at the right time to lead this historically tragic program out of the dark ages. And in an unbelievable set of circumstances for a program like this, not only was a perfect fit available to hire right when we were looking, but they went out and actually landed him. That’s never happened before for Penn State basketball, it was shocking to experience as a long-suffering fan.
It’s easy to look back at Shrewsberry leading Penn State to just their 5th tournament appearance since 1956 (in just his second year at the helm) and state the obvious about how great of a job he did here, but even before coaching his first game, I was completely sold on the fit. The combination of his soft-spoken personality, his meticulously tactical approach to the game, and his experience in coaching across several different levels of basketball made him uniquely qualified to take on one of the more challenging high-major jobs in Division-1.
Additional reasons the fit made sense:
Shrewsberry was a relatively young guy, he was an analytics guy, and he had close relationships with current stars in the NBA that he helped develop and coach.
He constructed a sneaky-good staff by bringing home a proven Philly recruiter and PSU grad in Adam Fisher and adding a slightly outside-the-box recruiting coordinator from the media side in Brian Snow.
Shrewsberry not only had NBA and Final Four coaching experience, but he had also just come off two years being a top assistant in the Big Ten.
He immediately took the program to levels of recruiting that had never been achieved at Penn State previously. The amount of 4 and 5-star recruits that took official visits here in just two years outnumbered the total number of all previous years combined.
Maybe most importantly, there was almost zero “coach-speak” from Shrewsberry. He wore his heart on his sleeve and pulled very few punches in calling out bad officiating or owning his own coaching mistakes. His press conferences and interviews were always fascinating and educational.
Maybe Micah Shrewsberry won’t go on to be a Hall Of Fame head coach. Maybe things won’t work out at Notre Dame. Even if Penn State could have hung on to him for another year or two, there’s no telling how that would have gone either. It’s impossible to say what his future holds, but there’s no denying that he was a perfect hire here and what he achieved in two years was extraordinary.
The truth is, any basketball coach who came to PSU and succeeded quickly was not likely to stick around here very long. That sort of achievement will immediately draw the attention of bigger and more prestigious programs.
So it’s no surprise that Shrewsberry was being linked with several head coaching vacancies before his second season at Penn State had even wrapped up. It was later reported that he was taking phone calls from Notre Dame as early as January, long before it was known how strongly his PSU team would finish this past season. Penn State was no longer the only high-major program that saw Shrewsberry as a perfect fit for their head coaching position.
Publicly, Shrewsberry said his decision to go to Notre Dame mostly came down to location. An Indiana native getting to go back home to coach, I have no doubt geography played a major role in his decision. But fans who followed the situation closely will always have some lingering questions about whether Penn State did too little too late.
The school tried to paint a picture of having done everything it could to keep Shrewsberry, and they reportedly did make a sizeable offer, unlike anything the school had ever ponied up for basketball before. There was even talk of stepping up the NIL efforts a great deal, something that Shrewsberry had called out months earlier as a major issue and an area where PSU was lagging far behind their peers in the Big Ten.
In the end, there may not have been anything more Penn State could have done in the several weeks of negotiations that led up to Shrewsberry leaving. Their fate may have been sealed during the previous 24 months that Shrewsberry spent here, learning first-hand just how little Penn State Basketball means: To the school, the athletic department, the national media, the Big Ten, high-school recruits, transfers in the portal, and maybe most importantly, to Happy Valley itself.
It’s no secret that basketball is historically a second-class citizen in this part of the world. And when Shrewsberry spoke about “going home”, I think it’s safe to say he has more than just geography in mind. As perfectly as Shrewsberry fit for Penn State, Penn State never really fit for Shrewsberry.
He must have truly felt like a fish out of water coming here to Central PA, a place that still doesn't really appreciate or even “get” basketball. And to stick with the water metaphor, even though Penn State seemed to finally be getting on board with caring about basketball, he probably felt that he was always going to be swimming upstream if he stayed here.
Part 2 will have some thoughts on the Rhoades hire