Mark Turgeon joins ACC as Maryland Head Coach

ACC Teams Coaching Carousel College Basketball40

Mark Turgeon convened a meeting of the Texas A&M basketball family at 7:45pm Central / 8:45pm Eastern. Fifteen minutes later the news broke that Turgeon had accepted the vacant Maryland men’s basketball job. SFN welcomed Coach Turgeon accordingly. (Link)

Yes, BJD95 is on suicide watch.

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ACC Teams Coaching Carousel College Basketball

40 Responses to Mark Turgeon joins ACC as Maryland Head Coach

  1. Wolfy__79 05/10/2011 at 6:31 PM #

    as soon as SFN put this hire up i took a look at wiki for dude’s record. hey, it’s somewhat impressive to me.. but i’m glad he’s not in raleigh.

    the thing that sticks out the most to me from what i’ve read is that the a&m job was a turn key job and he hasn’t built anything. this job, will require alot of building and putting together the moving pieces.. so we will see what kind of coach he really is. …eerily similar to hole roy if you ask me.. got hand me downs in kansas from brown! all in all, i think it’s a good hire for them but it would have been a bad one for me..

    initially i was a bit taken with MG coming to coach at NCSU.. it only took a little while for that to pass.. i researched a little and just listened to what the man had to say! i know one thing, he’s got the charisma to coach at nc state!! his career, imo, speaks for itself.. he’s built each job he’s taken since his days at ucla.. i didn’t even know who he was then, but i’m totally sold on MG now. …i think he has put together a GREAT coaching staff and i really hope he can make a positive impact for our roster right away and win 20+! we can argue for only five months or so on this.. but the season will start and we get to see how good he is!!

    turgeon.. i just want to personally thank whoever is responsible for you not being in raleigh! ..and that can go for the rest of the assholes who are scared of the PACK!

  2. choppack1 05/10/2011 at 6:44 PM #

    Let’s get this right.

    On one hand – you’ve got a coach A who had some successes and reached the Great 8 at a major school – missed the tourney…then saw it all fall apart. He went to 5 NCAA tournaments in 11 years at the major school, he has a mediocre 5-7 NCAA tourney record.

    On the other, you have coach B who made 4 consecutive tourneys at a major school in 4 years, went to a Sweet 16 at a mid-major. He has a mediocre record of 5-5 in the NCAA tourney (but better than Coach A).

    Yet, some are saying, I’d rather have Coach A than Coach B. Whatever – this hire simply showed where Maryland is in the pecking order right now and where we are.

    Don’t get me wrong – I support our Coach. I also had concerns about Turgeon. However, you’re kind of throwing reason out the window if you think Maryland’s hire sucks and ours is great.

  3. JT 05/10/2011 at 7:07 PM #

    Seems to me that both were good hires and I’m glad we got who we did. Now it’s just a matter of seeing how it plays out and I’m pretty damn confident.

  4. mak4dpak 05/10/2011 at 7:20 PM #

    So MG was fired, and Utah not interested in MG. So what you smokin. He resigned from bama, and Utah was courting MG, with us, but we won. That is how I understood it to be, correct me if I am wrong. Certainly not throwing MG under the bus, when he hasn’t even coached a game for the Red and White of NC State. Go MG!

  5. packalum44 05/10/2011 at 8:13 PM #

    I’ll take the charismatic guy known for recruiting over the “dry” guy known for “chopping wood”.

  6. Wolfy__79 05/10/2011 at 8:24 PM #

    yeah.. i think turgeon is a fine hire..i don’t see that coach A is the worst scenario at all.. given he put each team in the position he did versus getting it handed to him.. i’m wont’ argue and i’m surely not comparing NC STATE to maryland.. sorry, i’m biased as hell but NC STATE > maryland all day everyday. we are way ahead of them and everyone besides the blues in ACC titles.. and 2 versus 1 on national championships as you all know.. so yes, i’m biased as hell but i won’t ever compare maryland to nc state in anything even with the consideration of the embarrassing performances we’ve put up over the last decade. and most especially here with the coaching hires.

  7. choppack1 05/10/2011 at 9:03 PM #

    and I’ll take a guy who wins – I don’t give a flyin’ flip about charisma.

    Bill Bellicheck, Coach K, Dean Smith, Tom Laundry and John Wooden…if only they wore red shoes and sunglasses, maybe then they could have hung some banners!

  8. 61Packer 05/10/2011 at 9:19 PM #

    Of the 4 ACC new hires, Maryland, as I earlier predicted they would, got the best hire. This is no knock on Gottfried, but look at what Turgeon has done overall. He turned Wichita State into a force and at Texas A&M won at least 24 games each of his 4 years there. His teams didn’t finish below .500 in the Big 12. That’s not bad for a football school. The difference between Mark T and Mark G is that T is a solid coach NOW who is obviously on his way up, and G was a solid coach years ago, but will have to get back in the swing after two years on the sidelines. Would he have landed here had he not been a friend of our AD?

    Overall, the coaching talent is going way up in the ACC, which will make everybody’s job harder next season. Wake Forest will be lost again, but I see 8 or 9 other ACC teams that have a realistic chance to grab the two other opening-round ACC tourney byes next March, which should be our goal going into next season. Our new staff can do this!

    But to those who think Maryland is going to be lost with Turgeon, better think again.

  9. bamawolfpacker 05/10/2011 at 9:36 PM #

    Forgive me if I am not impressed with A&M’s record lately as a football” school. I am much more impressed with Mark G at Bama than with whoever at wherever. See ya in the fall.

  10. novawolf 05/10/2011 at 10:22 PM #

    So I’m to believe that many of the people on this site would be okay with a guy who runs Roy’s stuff in slow motion….yeah right!!!

  11. tuckerdorm1983 05/11/2011 at 6:43 AM #

    i think MD made a good hire. Gary is a good coach, but a little psycho. Maybe Gary has been drinking too much coffee and that is why he is so temperamental these days. The only true test on both our hire and MD along with the rest of the new hires in the ACC is to wait several years and see.

  12. ryebread 05/11/2011 at 9:58 AM #

    I’ll admit that I was extremely concerned about us potentially hiring Turgeon and have been pretty vocal about it on this site. Yes, he’s won a lot of games at A&M, but he inherited a pretty good program that BCG built and then didn’t take it to the next level. They were the 3rd best team in the Big 12, but routinely got blasted by Kansas and UT in big games. They played gritty, hard nosed defense and paired it with stall ball on offense. They could get to the tournament, but couldn’t do anything while there.

    I think he actually did a better job at Wichita State, but something didn’t end well there based on how bad they were during Marshall’s first season. That probably had a little to do with Marshall and a little to do with Turgeon, but that program didn’t appear to be left on solid footing — almost like Turg got out before the thing came crashing down.

    When you paired it with all the rumors about stubbornness and mediocre recruiting, Turgeon just screamed HWSNBN to me. I was scared to death we’d hire him and then have that cycle all over again with a new AD. Yes, he’d have gotten us back into the tournament and way better than the SL era, but I never felt he’d ultimately break through. After about 5 years we’d have had some nasty infighting and probably had the AD vocally supporting the coach. It was going to get ugly. I felt the exact same about Brey, which is why I didn’t want him either.

    I’m not saying Gott is a better coach. I think they’re probably fairly similar. I do think that Gott will either break through to the Sweet 16/Elite 8, or will flame out. Either way, his trajectory and ceiling will probably be more quickly obvious.

    Finally, I never understood why people thought the finances around Turgeon would make sense. TAMU has big oil money and the oil companies are currently the most profitable on earth. Like Texas, we had absolutely no chance of outbidding them for a coach if they wanted to keep him. Looking at what MD paid, it is obvious to me that TAMU went to a certain point and said “you can have him at that price.”

    I feel much better about Gott at $1.2M with lots of incentives than I would about Turgeon at $2.5 – 2.8M. I think we’ll get comparable results, but at about 1/2 the price.

  13. bradleyb123 05/11/2011 at 10:03 AM #

    I don’t think many are saying MG was a GREAT hire for us, and Turgeon was not a good hire for Maryland. They’re both probably comparable, but personally, I think I like MG over Turgeon. But it’s the big picture that (IMO) makes him the better hire. They’re comparable, but we got him for $1.2 million/year. Maryland paid something around $3 million/year for Turgeon, didn’t they? I like MG’s staff that he has assembled (no comparison for Maryland yet, since Turgeon hasn’t hired any assistants yet). But getting MG so cheaply left plenty of money in the coffers to hire some solid assistants. Overall I think we got the better deal, and arguably the better coach.

    But here’s the important part. It was said that Maryland was a top-10 or top-15 job to be had. Yet, they had just as much trouble bringing in a guy as we did, if not more. They handled their search poorly, and ended up with a guy roughly comparable to ours. But they also threw a LOT more money at him. So is Maryland a much better place to be? Or could we have gotten a guy by simply throwing a ton of money around, too?

    And their search was quicker than ours, but they didn’t have to wait for coaches to get eliminated from the dance before interviewing them like we did.

    The fact is that Maryland certainly did NOT hit a home run with this hire. It’s never easy to bring in the home run guy. Even UNX couldn’t do that the first time they called ole Roy.

  14. rtpack24 05/11/2011 at 11:27 AM #

    Turgeon is the coach that Yow referred to in reference to Roy and K. It was not Marshall. Turgeon will have a difficult start if his head asst. gets the A&M job. He has been his lead asst. and recruiter since he has been a head coach.

  15. JSRy2k 05/11/2011 at 12:43 PM #

    @bradleyb123: Great point, on paper we probably got the best deal of anybody when you consider record and price tag.

    As for who truly did better, let’s wait and see some on-court results…

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