Quote Originally Posted by Goat Holder View Post
I swear I see so much damn vitriol thrown at the man and I don't think he deserves any of it. Most of it seems directed to the Rick Ray hire. For one, NONE of you know a damn thing that went on with that hire. We could have gotten turned down 10 times. And that wouldn't surprise me, since we had just fired what the country considered a successful coach (although we knew it had to be done). Shit, does no one give him credit for finally pulling the plug on Stans? And how do we know Rick Ray sucks? I think his coaching is OK, but just like every other coach, recruiting makes or breaks him. He needs three years at minimum.
Let me preface this by saying that I have zero inside knowledge about anything, but living in Memphis, I listed to Gary Parrish in the afternoons on the way home from work. Gary is the lead college basketball journalist for CBS Sports. He was discussing Ray a month or two ago and said that he received several phone calls from coaches during our search asking whether they should pursue or return interest in our job. He told every one of them to a person that they shouldn't touch it because it had hit rock bottom and the next coach would have a nearly impossible time being successful. Those were his words as spoken on his radio show...

All of that to say, I don't know who we could have gotten, but he steered multiple candidates away because of where we had let the program get to (*Gary Parrish's own words).