This has taken a while to post, as it has taken a while to get approved here. At this point, this is kind of old news. As Marquette fans expected, it appears that Buzz Williams is going nowhere. Nothing is final until the paperwork is signed, so we shall see, but it looks like OU will have to look elsewhere for a basketball coach.
I have no animus toward Oklahoma, but I have been one of the people who has found the assumption that OU would come in, drop a wad of cash, and steal our coach more than a little offensive. We have read all about what a great university OU is. I am sure it is a legitimate university with many fine programs. I do not see much point in comparing rankings of various programs, and these are often just guesses anyway, but it is fair to say that it is a decent public university. It is not an academic joke, like several of the universities in the SEC and at least one in Tennessee. But Marquette is a respectable private university, with fine programs in many fields and enough prestige to open doors to its graduates.
OU might well have a superior athletic program. It is certainly larger than Marquette's, and of course, OU has one of the nation's better football programs, while Marquette does not have a team. That is commendable. Really. But OU's success in non-revenue sports like wrestling and gymnastics have nothing to do with the state of the basketball team. As for football, having grown up in Texas, Buzz is a college football fan. If he ever leaves for a school with a footbll team, he will no doubt support the team, attend the games, and probably talk the coach into letting him attend a few practices. But he will not go there because the school has a football team. Actually, in describing the things he liked about Marquette recently, Buzz mentioned the absence of a football team. Basketball is the priority at Marquette.
As far as money goes, Marquette will match or surpass OU. Yes, I know. You have lots of money from football. If OU chooses to pay a coach Phil Jackson-like money, Marquette cannot match it. But you can't and you won't. OU might have a much bigger endowment, but at a time when the university is cutting programs and raising tuition, it is not going to dip into it to pay a basketball coach. At the level OU can actually afford to pay, Marquette can afford to match it, and will. Buzz is already being paid in the range of the best coaches in the country, and his predecessor was as well.
If you poke around the internet, you can find the figures that shows that Marquette is second in spending on college basketball, trailing only Duke. Those numbers are a bit slippery, as they do not compare apples to apples. Since Marquette does not have football and since men's basketball is the revenue-producing sport, many of the athletic department expenses which might be spread among the department as a whole get charged to basketball. OU no doubt does the same thing with football. But the bottom line is that Marquette spends a lot on basketball. No coach is leaving Marquette to go to OU because he will have more money to spend. He won't.
Looking at the basketball programs, I am sorry, but Marquette's is clearly superior. You are not going to believe that, but take a look at some facts and numbers. That state-of-the-art practice facility that you are planning to build? We already built it. Marquette has one of the best in the country. The conference we are in? Typically comparable to or better than the Big 12, but it did not almost disappear last summer. History? If you go back to about the 60's, roughly comparable. Marquette made the last six NCAA's. OU missed the last two. OU produced the player of the year a couple years ago, and sends players to the NBA. Marquette sends more players to the NBA, including the guy who is arguably the best in the league.
But let us put aside the comparison of facilities, records and all that and just focus on one fact. What Oklahoma considers a large crowd is what would get a Marquette coach in trouble. Back in the Wayman Tisdale days, I recall reading an article about how the stunning and successful Sooners had just broken a record for the biggest crowd in the state's history, upward of 9000. At that point in time, that was fewer people than Marquette had drawn to every home game in about fifteen years. Since then, Marquette has moved into an NBA arena. It is rarely full, and the listed attendance is of tickets sold, not actual bodies present, so at some early season games, it is less than reported. Nonetheless, I believe there have been only a handful of games in the last 20 years or so where Marquette has drawn fewer than 9000, and most were either NIT games where tickets were on sale for a couple days before the game or the result of a blizzard or the like. Marquette packs in fans, and the support for the team dwarfs that of OU. What you consider a huge crowd and would like to see on a regular basis is about half of what Marquette will average for a season. For big games against conference rivals, Marquette will double the largest crowd OU will draw in a year.
We got used to hearing the same type of rumors with our last coach. Lots fans of large universites assume that they can go grab whoever they want, and cannot imagine that when it comes to basketball, a little Jesuit university can match or surpass them. So yes, we get pretty annoyed when people start posting about how they are just going to come in and swipe our coach. Many here have speculated that Buzz might leave for Oklahoma now or somewhere in Texas in the future due to location. This is something Marquette obviously cannot match, and if he decided to leave for that reason, most Marquette fans would wish him well. But on the merits of the basketball programs, there is no reason he would want to leave. Moreover, that Jesuit affiliation is something that Buzz Williams and some others have found much to their liking. It will not be a deciding or even important factor for every coach, but it will be for some, and seemingly for this one, and it is a factor which OU cannot match, in much the same way that Marquette cannot match OU's location.
Good luck in your search. You are likely to hire somebody pretty good, but the expectations of your fans are a bit out of line. The same is probably true for Pitino, Wright, Dixon, or a dozen other coaches your fans might be familiar with. If your fans knew who they were before your coach was fired, OU is probably at best a lateral move.
