it wasn't necessarily a bad hire...especially since the pool on candidates was small and money was extremely tight. He was the only guy half decent that RU could hire who wouldn't make facility demands. Rice was on that coaching list on candidates I put out in Feb of that year but I think there were others we wanted more.....Gianni from La Salle, Donahue who has been at bust since moving from Cornell to BC, Amaker, and McCaffery who was at Siena, I wanted him, I think he would have came, he interviewed at SHU
I don't recall many voices of dissent. He was actually a hot candidate coming off their NCAA tournament appearance and he had an excellent winning percentage. And let's face it, he hit the ground running with recruiting. Had he not imploded, all those guys would be seniors now. But it was never meant to be because he was nuts.
Actually McCaffery wasn't even available when we hired Rice. He was hired earlier. IIRC FHJ wasn't going to be fired because we weren't going to pay to let him go. TP even came out and said he wasn't going to be fired. Only when FHJ had that baseball debacle were we able to let him go and that was later in the offseason after many other coaches had been hired already.
There was a clear difference between year 1 and year 2 and 3. Rice was very respectful to officials and in public respected his players. I was a huge Rice critic at first, but he was starting to grow on me.
Except that there were warning signs of a possible anger management issues that were not properly vetted. SHU gave Rice only a telephone interview, partly because we just got rid of a nut job in Gonzo, and partly because Hobbs (SHU's Law School Dean) received a phone call from Petino pushing Willard for the job. Hobbs had his mind set on Willard after the Petino phone call.
Yes, throwing a basketball at somebody is anger management problems. Not being able to understand what is acceptable or not falls under "management problems".
But I don't think that Rice threw basketballs because he was angry. I think he threw basketballs because he thought being excitable was an acceptable way to show his passion and because he thought throwing basketballs at players (and insulting them) was an acceptable way of motivating them and getting them to play harder.
I'd upgrade him to better than average coach. He was definitely knowledgable down to even the small details of a proper box out.
the year Waters won 20 games was back when the NIT tried to get northeast teams to the quarter finals at the garden......RU won three home games against patsies to get to MSG...the NIT no longer uses this tactic.
If TP read this board or the SHU board, he would have figured that out.
He had a method to his madness...comfortable in chaos that's why you threw basketballs at them. Of course what you never saw that after practice the players well except Biruta and Kone were perfectly fine with it and were putting Rice in headlocks and having fun. The fact that none of the players made a major complaint about it is pretty striking. Biruta left..Kone was going to transfer but he actually stayed another year.
