As disappointing as it was to watch Micah Shrewsberry bolt for Notre Dame, there is a silver lining. He not only proved that a new coach could step into this role and win almost immediately, permanently shifting decades-old expectations around the program, but he forced the athletic department to start taking basketball more seriously.
While Penn State Basketball may be starting over yet again in one sense, there is also momentum that appears to be carrying over from last season’s success, and plenty of hope that this momentum can be leveraged to take the program to the next level. It feels like we caught a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel and it doesn’t seem completely out of reach any longer.
Enter Mike Rhoades
I’ll go on record before he ever coaches a game for Penn State to admit that Rhoades was initially not my first choice for this job when Shrewsberry left. It wasn’t that he lacked the qualifications or experience, or that the hire doesn’t make sense. I think any hiring consultant worth a damn would have implored Pat Kraft to give Rhoades a serious look, and it’s not a stretch to think that he could wind up looking like a fantastic hire in a few years. My initial hesitancy about Rhoades was based more on the history of PSU hoops, which has nothing to do with him.
For many years, conventional wisdom around the program was that for Penn State Basketball to climb out of the basement of the Big Ten, they just needed to find the right guy to lead them as head coach. They would historically look for somebody with an existing Penn State or Pennslyvania connection, pay them a meager salary, and then give them 5-10 years to figure it out.1
That had been the strategy since Bruce Parkhill walked away: Jerry Dunn got 8 seasons, Ed DeChellis got 8, and Pat Chambers got 9. Having just 3 coaches over 25 years almost anywhere else in the country would suggest 2.5 decades of fairly consistent, winning basketball. But of course, at Penn State, it meant a 49% overall winning percentage (379-409) and just 33% in conference play (142-292).
Despite the poor results, I bought into that conventional wisdom for a long time. That was seemingly the only way other programs had escaped similar situations. If a bigger commitment wouldn’t be made to basketball by the AD, we were stuck playing the coaching lottery, just waiting for the day our number hit.
But several major things shifted in college athletics during Pat Chambers’ time here:
The first was the transfer portal. In 2016 there were less than 500 transfers in D1 basketball between ~355 teams, or a little less than 1.5 players per team on average. In the last two years, there were nearly 1700 transfers per season or roughly 4.5 players per team. Recent rule changes, the pandemic, and much more leniency from the NCAA have turned the portal into a circus these last few years, with no end in sight.
The second big shift was the Name, Image, and Likeness ruling in July of 2021 which now dominates all college sports discussions.
These changes have completely upended the way college basketball rosters are being built and likely played some role in the coaching search that landed Shrewsberry 2 years ago. He was not the type of coach that Penn State would have given serious consideration to 5 or 10 years earlier. Mike Rhoades, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of coach that would have been targeted in past searches. His hiring feels like it has much more in common with the DeChellis or Chambers hires than the Shrewsberry one. That doesn’t mean they got it wrong, but it’s another slight change of direction from the last hire, and could be framed as a reversion to what I’d call “the old way”.
Of course, maybe part of this direction change is intentional, as many fans feel spurned right now by the last guy leaving so quickly. Rhoades seems like he views this job as a destination job rather than a stepping stone. He’s a sensible hire, the blue-collar kind of hire that seems to resonate with a lot of Penn Staters. He is extremely on-brand for this school and this program, for better or worse.
Timing is Everything
In some ways, Mike Rhoades coming to Penn State felt almost inevitable, but the road to get him here was a long one. He’s been on the radar of many PSU fans for several years now, I can specifically remember the first time I started hearing his name in connection with Penn State.
It was 2019 and in Pat Chambers’ 8th season at PSU, he had just gone 14-18 after an 0-10 start in the Big Ten. The program was one year removed from winning 26 games and the NIT championship and Chambers was seemingly on the cusp of finally turning the corner. Despite solid metrics that suggested the team was far better than their record, it was an utter disappointment at that stage in his tenure and it seemed Chambers’ days may be numbered.
Meanwhile, Mike Rhoades spent the 2019 season winning 25 games in just his second season at VCU, cementing the fact that the success he had at Rice was no fluke and he was well on his way towards landing a power conference job. It was around this time that I first started hearing his name brought up by fans as a potential next head coach at Penn State.
Of course, it wasn’t meant to be just yet, and instead, things got very complicated in the way only PSU Hoops can2:
Chambers gets a stay of execution for 2020, and the team bounces back to have one of the best seasons in program history, only to have their first tournament berth in nearly a decade ripped away by Covid.
Chambers then is let go3 just weeks before the 2021 season starts, for reasons that still haven’t been entirely spelled out by the school or Chambers himself.
Jim Ferry takes over for the 2021 season and does an admirable job holding the team together in a trying season full of game cancellations and Covid shutdowns and with a roster full of unhappy players dissatisfied with the way the school handled the Chambers situation. It was time for a hard reset on the program, so the coaching search that arguably should have started 2 years earlier was finally happening.
Mike Rhoades' name was again garnering a lot of attention during this 2021 coaching search, as he just wrapped up another NCAA tournament bid at VCU. He was proven, he was ready, and he fits the mold of the past few hires at Penn State. His name was mentioned in nearly every article listing potential PSU candidates at the time, but it’s not clear how closely he was considered at this time.
Say what you will about Sandy Barbour, I know there are mixed feelings about her among Penn State folks, but in that 2021 coaching search she decided to break the cycle of predictable PSU basketball coaching hires and for the first time in decades set the program on a different path. She didn’t hire a Penn State guy, a Pennsylvanian, or even a current head coach.
Maybe I give Sandy too much credit, perhaps she just got lucky. Maybe all the great things I pointed out about Shrewsberry’s qualifications in Part-1 were so obvious that Barbour would have been a fool not to hire him. Regardless, the combination of 25 years of banging our heads against the wall, the drastic changes taking place in the sport, and the controversial parting of ways with Chambers culminated in the Athletic Director finally being inspired to look for a different kind of answer.
None of this is to say that Pat Kraft should have looked for the same kind of candidate this past spring. An outside-the-box hire was always going to be my preference after the Shrewsberry experiment paid off, but I’m not even sure such a candidate existed this time, and if they did, they likely would have been a much bigger gamble4 than Shrewsberry was.
It may not have been as serendipitous as many fans would have liked, but Penn State basketball always plays out more like a horror movie than a rom-com, so this is a way above-average outcome. Penn State and Mike Rhoades finally got the timing right to bring him to Happy Valley, and ultimately I think PSU landed the best candidate they possibly could have in this particular search. It’s a job well done and Pat Kraft deserves some praise of his own.
Looking To The Future
Rhoades has demonstrated he knows how to navigate the transfer portal. He pulled in solid transfers at VCU and already in his brief time at Penn State he’s just wrapped up the last piece of what is a promising roster for 2023/24, one that required filling a lot of empty spots. He’s also put several of his recruits in the NBA recently, so we shouldn’t anticipate any issues with high-school recruiting either.
I do worry about how his scrappy, aggressive, defensive-first style of play will translate to the Big Ten. I will dearly miss the offensive efficiency and low-turnover style from last season, and can’t envision a Mike Rhoades team ever running a similar system. That’s by design, to be clear, it doesn’t seem to be in his coaching DNA at all. And ultimately that’s fine, so long as he can figure out how to manufacture wins, style points don’t matter.
Furthermore, the NIL problems that Shrewsberry called out have reportedly been addressed, and I’d go so far as to say almost entirely fixed in the short term (based on the news this week). Similarly, the salary we’re paying Rhoades is now competitive with other winning head coaches in the Big Ten. Those are all firsts in the history of the program. This is what real momentum looks like in practice.
For the first time, Penn State Basketball is committing to winning with its checkbook, not to mention the help of some generous donors. The ball might have been dropped in not hanging on to Shrewsberry for longer when they had the chance, but it seems evident that the mistakes have been recognized and they are attempting to be corrected in a way that I’ve never seen before.
Even if the cynical part of me is still hanging on to some doubts, the objective part of my brain recognizes that we’re entering an era of Penn State Hoops unlike any we’ve ever witnessed before. It feels like lessons have been learned, resources have been allocated, and talent has been acquired. And for the first time, it’s all happening at the same time.
In the coming weeks and months, the content here should hopefully return to normal. I’m looking to examine the offense Mike Rhoades used at VCU and try to predict what we might see next year for PSU on that end of the floor, maybe dig into some player previews now that the roster is set, and try to catch up on where recruiting stands with the new staff.
It was the assumption of most fans (and we can assume the Athletic Department) that you couldn’t even judge a new coach properly until they had at least 4 years to recruit a full roster of their own guys.
Apologies for the history lesson.
Or forced out, really.
The irony here is that Adam Fisher was simultaneously a big gamble due to the lack of HC experience and also completely on-brand having been a PSU assistant and a PA guy. Maybe we just can’t escape this.