Any chance Beilein can come back and coach?
Would he do it? What would he need? Could he do it?
The thread about greatest bball teams really got me thinking how fun and competitive even his very esrly teams were. I would take those teams over anything Howard has thrown out there since year 1.
I know hes 71 but 70 is the new 50. We have 80 year olds with alot more authority in this country than a college basketball coach. Please make this happen. I use to love this time of year and I probably wont even watch the tournament, its just so crappy to have a team this bad.
Collins is not nearly as good of a coach as JB. Plus Michigan is more attractive to recruits than NW (bigger brand, recognition, etc.). So even without NIL money, Michigan should get better recruits than NW as a starting point.
Honestly, a Collins vs JB argument is hard to decide when considering the schools. Collins has taken NW to places they have never been in spite of all the limitations. Collins as Michigan's head coach could be similar to JB at Michigan.
I'm not that familiar with our basketball NIL, but I find it hard to believe it's not in the top ~45 (the rough cut line for at-large big dance bids).
Even if he wanted to do something like this (I would imagine he does not at 71 years old, especially when it basically means starting over at Michigan in some ways), he made it rather apparent that one of the reasons he got out in the first place was that he was disillusioned by the current configuration of the sport, and I don't see where that configuration has changed. If anything, some of the things he would occasionally lament have become more pronounced in the years since his departure.
I am not familiar with this.
He also just sold his house in A2 and retired from the Pistons last year. Coaching years are pretty clearly behind him.
Also why would you want a 71 yr old as the person to dig out of this mess? There are plenty of people under 55 that can coach college hoops, Juwan just isn't one of them.
Call me crazy but I bet there's at least one candidate out there who doesn't need to wear adult diapers and who hasn't bailed on our program at the 11th hour with no plan.
That is an incredibly rude take.
Apologies to all: I should have added the clarification that we can likely find a non-septuagenarian coach who bailed on the program with no plan who ALSO didn't get fired for making racially insensitive comments to his team during his tenure as one of the worst coaches in NBA history. It will be hard, because it's such a small pool of candidates, but I believe!
In short....No.
I love Beilein and he's an amazing coach, but he isn't the answer. His approach was starting to get challenging when he left and now the sport has shifted as far from "development" as possible with NIL, Portal, and Pro options being such a big part of the sport. I think he got sick of all the effort to get guys and then see them leave before they hit their potential with Poole/Iggy and now imagine what that looks like when every season it is a new cast of guys.
Dude - you hire Beilein to recruit and coach the team - you hire people to manage NIL, portal and any other nonsense. You think Harbaugh took care of any of that crap....not a chance.
Dude - we can't hire people now to manage NIL, portal and any other nonsense. If we can't hire it for Howard, then good luck for JB.
If the position opens up - he is my first call to take over for three years and add someone on staff to take over the reigns after that. I do not care what his age is - if the man indicates he has any "fight" in him left, I would hire him on the spot.
No chance. JB hated the direction CBB was heading at the time and it has change dramatically since he left Michigan. He didn't want to deal with constant recruiting and 2 and done players that he has to replenish due to them developing faster than expected.
Just go get Otzelberger from Iowa State.
Someone say berger?
Nope, give me huggy bear, him roaming the sidelines in that Jumpman swishy pant/jacket combo would be awesome!!
He has a $17 million buyout. No chance Michigan would agree to do it and pay him salary on top of it
The main reason he left was because of exactly what has become of college basketball, so I doubt he would ever want to return.
Allowing highschoolers to be drafted again would certainly help fix it.
There's always a chance
For those here that are saying no simply because they dont think he'd want to come back, let me make the pitch to him for his return.
MgrowOld: "Coach B, when you left us for the Cavs you stated you were doing so because you wanted to test yourself, to see if you were able to overcome the challenge of coaching in the NBA right? Well look at the turd of a program we have now. Bringing this corpse of a basketball program back to life will be exponentially more challenging than coaching a bunch of slugs in the NBA."
Coach Beilein: "Challenge accepted, when do I start?"
You use of "slugs" does not go unnoticed MGrow. Well done my friend, I think I was using that quote for a long time.
This is kinda of an interesting thought. Do people still think JB is racist? Because if so, then his return is a non-starter.
I think we owe it to him to let the man enjoy his retirement and more time with his family. It is not his responsibility to come bail us out of a bad coaching situation.
I think he would do pretty poorly in the transfer portal/NIL era. He was an amazing college coach in the old system. He had a system and sometimes that system took a few years to get down. Some athletes wouldn't have the patience for it.
I also think that if he still wanted to coach, he'd be coaching right now.
"I also think that if he still wanted to coach, he'd be coaching right now."
Totally agree. Can't say that loudly enough.
He left for a reason. A part of the reason is the nonsense happening in college sports...
He's 71 and a few years removed from open heart surgery. The college basketball landscape has changed probably five times over since he was last coaching, particularly with NIL and recruiting. I think Beilein saw what was coming and decided he wanted no part of it. The fact that he had an NBA itch to scratch as well just made the decision even easier.
I mean....the guy was either on the NCAA Ethics Committee or was the outright head of it. No way on this planet he'd want to come back and deal with the seedy, disgusting underworld that is NIL recruiting. His whole "I'm not offering you until you come to campus" wouldn't work anymore. There's no relationship building anymore. Its just "who is my highest bidder?" That feels so antithetical to everything John Beilein stood for.
I think he will always be an ambassador for the program. You'll probably see him at alumni events, fundraisers and the like. Maybe he'll even help out with advising on who a new coach should be. But coming back to actually coach?
You're just as likely to get ME as your head coach.
How much would you need? I’m sure we can work something out.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
However, past behavior and as a result performance is the best predictor of future behavior.
Granted the landscape has changed dramatically but the guy was a winner his entire life.
Former Michigan head coach John Beilein on Big Ten Network regarding Michigan's 23-point loss to Ohio State and the state of the Michigan program at the moment: "I don't have a comment right now. I really don't have a comment."
He rebuilt the program once. If he knocked on the door, I'd certainly sit down and listen to everything he has to say.
He wasn't commenting on Michigan. He was playfully refusing to say something positive about Ohio State.
I think it could work if they hire a GM to handle the financial aspect and other bullshit. Let Beilein do a little recruiting and focus on coaching. Rick Pitino is still going strong at 72.
Ant Wright's top 3 has Beilein at #1, with the caveat that it would be a two year run to get his son, Patrick, up to speed to eventually take over the program.
I'm all for Coach B coming back, but if it was just to hand off to Patrick - count me out.
Would much rather hire another innovator like Kyle Smith @ WSU. He constantly rebuilds rosters every year & turns out competitive teams. This year WSU is near the top of the Pac after his top 3 players went for the bag to other major programs.
I'm not surprised that idea came from Ant Wright considering it's absolutely terrible.
That's interesting. Ant says a lot of stuff, but he also knows a lot of stuff. Given the conventional wisdom is that the Beilein likelihood is 0%, I'd be shocked if he didn't have some sort of intel.
Could he? Sure.
Is he going to? Nope.
No idea why people have this thought. He's earned his retirement, he has a pretty sweet BTN gig and being a coach in the college game has gotten infinitely more annoying since he left.
Time to let it go and move on to pining for someone else.
I love the guy but there is no reason to believe he wants to get back into coaching. It’s been four years since the Cavs let him go and he hasn’t taken anything out there.
We just need to find a new guy like the 2007 version of Beilein.
No jobs have opened in Ann Arbor in the last 4 years.
No.
I spoke to him at the UM Club dinner for Brandstatter/Dierdorf retirement.
He looked 5 years younger then that the last game he coached here.
He said he loved what he was doing with the Pistons. (Senior Player Development Advisor)
He looks even better on his BTN gigs.
I believe he has. no unfulfilled ambition for the natty - he is the "anti-Harbaugh."
I don't doubt a word of what you said but I would rather work for literally any other team (college or pro) than the Pistons in their current stature. Michigan basketball sucked this year, but at least they didn't set a record for most consecutive losses in a single season.
If Juwan Howard is the head coach for another season or more, the consecutive loss record is well within reach. He is definitely proving that he’s the guy for the job if Michigan will ever capture such an exercise in futility. I can’t think of another coach more qualified for the position if that is indeed the case. Who else could have torpedoed a program that was a National Championship contender faster and with more humility than the prodigal son himself. Then he can repeat his comment he made as a fab five player “I told you we were going to shock the world”
It could be the greatest comeback story since Kim Kardashian
I don't think nostalgia is the answer to our problems. If Juwan Howard is not the answer, I think we need to move forward rather than look backward. Beilein had some great years here but he left and now he has been out of the game for five years.
Will it happen? No. Is it the best idea for the long term? No.
Would it be better than enduring another inevitable inexcusably bad season under Juwan probably punctuated by an incident that should have gotten him fired in a vacuum? Yes.
I'd rather have him than Howard. Then again, I'd rather have pretty much anyone than Howard (let's hire Tom Crean, then we'd have a Harbaugh here!).
What we should do is fire Juwan and find a young coach who has had success building a program and is ready to move to the next level. Anyone with half a brain would do that. Yet the expectation is that Howard will be back next year.
Fire Warde.
Not gonna happen. Like when people asked whether Lloyd Carr was going to come back in 2011.
I don't know how good Michigan would have been if Carr came back, but they almost certainly wouldn't have been as bad as they were in Hoke's later years. To me the lowest point in Michigan football history was in 2014 when they offered two free tickets to the game with the purchase of a six pack of coke. Basketball is sadly reaching similar lows, thanks to Juwan.