bobinator said:
Like anything, I think it's more complicated than that. Of course he was exactly like that here, even people that liked him as a coach like me were making fun of his cult by about halfway through his tenure here. But there's a lot of layers why it wasn't a big deal early on:
1 - The rules changed after he got here. It was a lot easier to give a coach some rope for a rebuild and weird culture bits when he was hired here in 2019. There was no immediate transfer eligibility. Buzz was stuck with the roster Kennedy left him with (plus his recruiting class) whether he wanted to be or not. It was easy to look at some of that stuff and think "well Kennedy's players weren't used to playing this hard, this is all part of that transformation."
2 - The COVID season - It seemed like we had things turned and headed in the right direction towards the end of year one, and then the program just completely fell apart during the covid year. And because of everything happening, nobody was that upset that we were terrible. People weren't so much mad, they just stopped caring, plenty of other things going on to focus on. Then McNeilly broke with the Buzz cult or he was excommunicated or something which meant we lost our best player to TCU.
3 - We almost made the tournament in 2022. About 3/4 of the way through the 2022 season, the Buzz tenure was on the brink. I remember posting on here after we lost to South Carolina that it was the first time the thought of "maybe this is really not going to work" really entered my head. Then we went on the lose four more games in a row, granted three to very good teams. Marcus Williams leaves the team. Whole thing was in shambles, but then we turned it around, rattled off some impressive wins including making the SEC Tournament championship, and then I think the NCAA snub bought him some rope with the fan base. For an offseason, it felt like we were all in the bunker together to some degree.
The biggest difference though between here and Maryland is that Maryland didn't want to lose their last coach, and Buzz isn't as good as he is. When we fired Kennedy we hoped that Buzz would immediately be successful by bringing Blackshear with him from Virginia Tech and making the good parts of the Kennedy team better, but it was always a possibility that we were headed for a program reset. He couldn't just bring his whole team though, even if he wanted to.
But now the rules are different. A program like Maryland doesn't want to build a culture brick by brick from the ground up. They want to make a splash in the portal and AT LEAST be competitive year one. So all of Buzz's bits just make him seem like a man out of time trying to coach like Hoosiers instead of modern basketball.
Good points, and additionally schools that are not traditionally good at basketball are typically happy with almost any success that a coach has.
So Buzz probably road the coat-tails of the Marquette run at Va Tech, and then rolled that into the Aggie job when he was starting to wear out the Va Tech welcome by coming 'back to Texas' which was an easy sell to an AD looking for a good fit.
Also, I think the whole 'Leader of Men' angle he tries to sell looks really good to Univ Presidents when there are so many scummy coaches out there like Beard (choker), Kiffin (cheats on wife, leaves programs high & dry), Petrino and several basketball coaches even like Bruce Pearl, who had a pretty terrible reputation when Auburn hired him.
This is especially true at a conservative school like A&M.
That being said, I think the Maryland job for Buzz will be like BCG at Kentucky.
It will be harder to get the high end guys to buy into your diving on the floor, out-work everyone plan.
Sometimes are you are better off being in the shadows of the major sport than the spotlight of being far and away the school's primary sport, where people DEMAND success.
Maryland only has basketball and they aren't gonna tolerate too many bad seasons.
I think he will get next year and maybe the 3rd year, but if the honeymoon is already over, then he better be in the tourney the next two years or he is sunk.