Son of a Preacher Man

So the Gophers finally hired a basketball coach, after supposedly being turned down by Shaka Smart, Brad Stevens, Fred Hoiberg, Flip Saunders, Mick Cronin, Andy Enfield and the cute girl in the chemistry lab. Their new coach is going to be Richard Pitino, son of coaching legend Rick Pitino:

Pitino, 30, was an assistant coach at Northeastern, Duquesne, Florida and Louisville — working as the top assistant under his father during the 2011-12 season. He accepted the position at Florida International last year, where he had signed a five-year contract with a base salary of $250,000 a year. Pitino’s buyout at FIU reportedly is also $250,000. Terms of the Minnesota deal are not yet known, but he can expect a significant raise. A news conference to introduce Pitino likely will be Friday.

Pitino, who led Florida International this season in his first year of head coaching, is less than half the age of Smith and the youngest of any Minnesota basketball coach since the Gophers’ original coach in 1897.

This hire actually may turn out well. It speaks well of young Pitino that he was willing to work for people other than his famous father. Among his other mentors is Billy Donovan, the highly successful coach at Florida who was in turn a protege of Pitino's father. Relationships in the coaching business often work this way and the younger Pitino seems to have made the right moves up to this point.

The goofy thing about this coaching search has been that neither Norwood Teague, the Gopher athletic director, nor his top assistant Mike Ellis, has said much of anything during the search period, which allowed speculation to run rampant. We don't really know if the Gophers actually made a job offer to any of the individuals that were linked to the job, although it's reasonable to surmise that most of the candidates would have been plausible.

The other thing that was likely painful for Gopher fans to learn is that the job isn't necessarily well regarded. While the Gophers are members in good standing of the Big Ten, they haven't been especially relevant in the conference for a very long time now. Over a dozen seasons have passed since Clem Haskins was run out of town and in the years since then, the Gophers haven't finished any higher than the middle of the pack in the Big Ten and mostly have been residing in the second division. It's a tough neighborhood, of course, but aside from perennial dogs Northwestern and Penn State and newcomer Nebraska, no team has been less successful than the Gophers in recent years. The national press did a lot of sneering at the news that Tubby Smith had been fired and it couldn't have been much fun to learn that at least some coaches apparently preferred life in the mid-majors to walking the ancient floors of Williams Arena.

It's easy to see why, though -- as much as people around here love the Barn, it's an old building and it has to be a tough sell to recruits who can see much more modern facilities elsewhere. And given the sense of entitlement that many young basketball players learn from their AAU experiences, the idea of playing in an antiquated facility can't be particularly appealing.

Can Richard Pitino change that dynamic? Perhaps, although it was telling that on KARE's 10 p.m broadcast last night, sports anchor Eric Perkins was openly speculating that young Pitino would be using this job as a stepping stone and wondered aloud how long he'd stay here. There's a lot of fatalism in the Minnesota fan base.