U Welcomes Tubby
Friday, March 23, 2007

“We’re extremely excited to bring a coach of Tubby Smith’s caliber to the University,” said University of Minnesota athletic director Joel Maturi as he announced the hiring of Orlando “Tubby” Smith as the new basketball coach of the Gophers. “His record on the court speaks for itself, but more importantly, he is an educator of young men and has unquestioned integrity to lead this program to the highest level.”

Smith comes to Minnesota after having spent the past 10 seasons as the head coach of the fabled University of Kentucky basketball program. At Kentucky, Smith coached the Wildcats to the 1998 national championship, four “Elite Eight” appearances, five Southeastern Conference titles, five SEC Tournament titles, and six “Sweet Sixteen” finishes.

In 10 seasons at Kentucky, Smith compiled a 263-83 record for a .760 winning percentage. He began his coaching career at Tulsa in 1991, before becoming head coach at Georgia for two seasons. Over his 16 seasons as a head coach, Smith has an overall record of 387-145 (.727) and has posted 14 consecutive 20-win seasons and 14 straight appearances in the NCAA Tournament.

Smith entered the 2006-07 season with the eighth-place winning percentage among active head coaches in NCAA Division I men’s basketball. In his 10 seasons at Kentucky, Smith averaged over 26 wins per season.

He is one of only nine coaches, and among only four active (joining Lon Krueger, Rick Pitino, and Bill Self), in Division I NCAA Basketball, to take three different programs to the “Sweet Sixteen.” Smith, who has made nine total appearances in the “Sweet Sixteen” in his career, coached Tulsa to two appearances and Georgia to one, along with the six at Kentucky.

Smith currently is 29-13 for a .690 winning percentage in the tournament. He has made 14 straight appearances in the NCAA Tournament spanning through his 10 years with Kentucky, two seasons at Georgia, and two seasons at Tulsa.

In the 1997-98 season, Smith became the head basketball coach at the University of Kentucky and became the first coach since 1961 to win a national championship in his first season with a new program. This feat earned him national Coach of the Year honors.

In 2000, Smith also served as an assistant coach on the 2000 U.S. Olympic team that won the gold medal in Sydney, Australia. He served as an assistant for Rudy Tomjanovich, alongside Larry Brown and Gene Keady.

“It’s been an interesting three and a half months for Gopher athletics,” Maturi said. “It took 17 days to find a football coach. It took us 114 days to find a new men’s basketball coach. I said at the outset that this process would be different. I wanted a coach who wanted to be a Gopher, committed to the academics of the student-athlete and committed to doing it the right way. We needed somebody who will be involved in our campus, our community, and our state.” Maturi indicated he was determined to hire a “high-profile coach.” He remarked that “there are few coaches in America who are more proven, more successful, and more high-profile than Tubby Smith.”

Smith responded by saying “it’s is an honor and a privilege to be joining the Minnesota Gopher family, and I couldn’t be more excited. In your lives you’re going to have moments that there is a gift and certainly for me to be here today is truly a gift. It gives an inspired enthusiasm to me and my family. We’re ready to get going, and we’re going to hit the road running.

“One of the things we expect from the fans, administration and the players is to have everybody on the same page. We’re going to develop a championship program here.”

For his part, Maturi objected to a pair of early reports that appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune indicating that a former Minnesota administrator, Mark Coyle, played a role in the Smith hiring. Columnists Sid Hartman and Patrick Reusse reported Maturi and Coyle conversed prior to the Smith hiring. Maturi responded by saying, “I never received a call from a former co-worker [Coyle]. And I think that the damage done to him is extremely unfair. He was a former associate athletics director at the University of Minnesota and is now an associate athletics director at the University of Kentucky. For anyone to believe that he would ever mention that maybe it’s the right time for Tubby to leave Kentucky is completely false. You have to remember, he still works at the University of Kentucky and those are his responsibilities. I can tell you without a doubt that that is not the case.”

On March 23, prior to the press conference, Hartman wrote, “The move that resulted in Tubby Smith being named the new Gophers men’s basketball coach started about two weeks ago. Mark Coyle, a former marketing director for the Gophers now at the University of Kentucky, phoned Gophers athletic director Joel Maturi telling him that Smith was unhappy with his position as Wildcats coach and might be interested in the Gophers vacancy.”

In the same edition of the Star Tribune, Reusse wrote: “There were conversations after the SEC tournament between Gophers officials and Mark Coyle, a Kentucky associate athletic director who worked at Minnesota from 2002 to 2004.”

On March 25, Star Tribune gossip columnist C.J. wrote that Maturi’s wife Lois was extremely upset by the antics of Hartman and Reusse. “I think Mark Coyle is a wonderful man,” Lois Maturi said, indicating she was disturbed that Coyle and his family have found themselves in a difficult situation “because somebody decided to make things up.

“It’s not right. He’s got a young family; he can’t afford to be effective in his job at Kentucky. And I hope it doesn’t have long-range ramifications for a nice person who is trying to do his job and had nothing to do with it.” She told C.J. that she found it unbelievable that “somebody decided to put something in the paper that was untrue.” However, it should come as no surprise to those familiar with the writings Hartman and Reusse, who on occasion have relied on rumor, hearsay, and pure imagination.

Controversy aside, Smith told reporters at the press conference that the key to winning “is making sure we keep the best players in the state and in the surrounding area.” He indicated he would work with the region’s high school coaches who “can be very helpful to us in landing talent. It’s not just the kid coming here for Minnesota basketball. He’s coming here to be embraced by the community and to grow and to learn from everything that is available here at this university. So when we go out there we’re selling kids our program, not just Tubby Smith. Kids are going to get a great education here at the University of Minnesota.”