Stanford's Trent Johnson to LSU

Talk about recruiting an entirely different type of student-athlete.

I don't know anything about the situation, but I wonder what Stanford and Mike Montgomery (new Cal coach) are thinking right now. Could he have come back?
 
This is within days of Montgomery going to Cal. I also wonder, had he known Stanford would be opening, maybe he would have held out for that job instead. I suspect so.
 
There is, shall we say, cultural significance to this hire.

For Johnson, it's an absolute slam dunk to get away from a terrible situation. All we would hear as Stanford struggles next season would be how he wasn't as good as Montgomery. I wonder if he's appreciated for their Sweet 16 run.

For LSU, I am guessing they got Johnson on the cheap, relatively speaking. I'm with Bob in that I'm not a huge Johnson fan, but I respect what he did at Stanford. Anyone who has success in a major sport at a place with strong academic standards is to be commended. But if LSU had a firmer committment to hoops, methinks they could have snagged someone better. If Texas, Tennessee and Florida can all have great basketball programs, there is no reason why LSU couldn't.
 
I hear part of the reason Montgomery left Stanford for the NBA was due to increased admission standards for athletes. Doug Gotlieb said as much on his radio show in talking about the difference in Stanford's standards when was recruited as compared to now.
 
The rumor I heard was that they intended to make some cultural significance.

I also saw that they just hired the former Duke AD. Good luck on turning LSU into Stanford/Duke.

My issue with Johnson is that I don't think he accomplished that much at Stanford. When you have two big guys like the Lopezes, you should be planning on the S16.

His four years were, 8 seed, no NCAA, 11 seed, three seed. Let's put it this way... he's not handing it off where he got it.
 
There were all sorts of rumors about Trent Johnson wanting an extension for a long time and the AD not giving it to him because he didn't like him.
 
I would've hired Anthony Grant. Young coach. Fun style. Knows the SEC. Hell of a recruiter. Also meets the "clutural needs" if that part is true.
 
What are the differences between Stanford's academic standards for their athletes versus the typical schools? I imagine they're tougher. I understand the $$ part you're emphasizing. In fact not being good in football probably isn't a coincidence. Stanford may care more about volleyball, water polo, and the Sears Cup overall.
 
Admissions for athletes is a little easier but still high. Last data I saw -- which was a while ago --was Stanford football had the highest I-A (before the whole FBS nonsense) SAT scores with Rice being second.

Tom Davis left Stanford in the 1980's famously saying nobody would ever win anything there after a prized recruit who wanted to commit was denied admission. In the 70's a Stanford coach won conference coach of the year honors for not finishing in last place. What Montgomery did was nothing short of amazing. The team hadn't been to the NCAA tournament since 1942 when he took over and he took us over and over and over again and even won 9 straight first round games with a final four and a couple #1 seeds thrown in. His Brevin Knight team ended Tim Duncan's career and Monty did it with all different kinds of talent that dramatically improved year over year.

Guys like Art Lee, Mike McDonald, Chris Hernandez, and David Moseley positively sucked as freshman and were all-conference by the time they were done.

Trent Johnson did not leave the program in as good shape as he found it. The Lopezes were going to Stanford no matter what. Johnson only won 2 tournament games in 4 years and they were this year. His teams were never as fundamentally sound as Montgomery's. Mitch Johnson is the only player who has gotten any better during his career and several others have regressed (call it Terence Rencher syndrome). Color me unimpressed and I'm happy he's gone just pissed about the timing in relation to Montgomery leaving for Cal.

Stanford wants to be good at all sports. Football is tough because admissions make it hard to find a great number of top players. Unfortunately, Stanford doesn't pay market rates for top football and basketball coaches either. As long as that's the case, we'll be lucky to have a Harbaugh for a couple of years and then hope we don't hire a Teevens to replace him. The football and basketball salary debate occurs every few years. Montgomery had actually worked up a pretty good salary before he left for the Warriors.

I'm hopeful that what Montgomery did at Stanford can be accomplished by someone else but it was pretty amazing. With Howland at UCLA locking down the L.A. talent, and high school kids no longer allowed to go to the NBA, it is going to be much tougher for Stanford to compete.

If I were AD, I'd pay whatever it took to get Montgomery from Cal.
 
My sister got recruited by both Stanford and Cal, and Cal (an incredible school with a notoriously academics-first approach) made it significantly easier to get in. Still.. athletics was going to gain her an admission to Stanford she wouldn've have prolly gotten otherwise. Another prominent athlete from my high school with a 12-something SAT got in to Stanford as well.

The school did some interesting things. Athletes don't live together exclusively as freshmen, etc.
 
The rumor for weeks down here in SEC land was that LSU was dead set on hiring a black coach and I don't know why that is.

And I think had VCU made the tourney, Grant was a shoe-in for LSU. There were even talks of Lowery from SIU going to Baton Rouge, although I don't think he would have taken the job if offered. Okie State has Lowery's name floating around their boards as well.
 
Go Trees, thanks for the wonderful insight. Different schools can choose how much they want to look the other way when determining whether to admit someone who already has surpassed the NCAA test minimums, and it's interesting that Stanford may even be more difficult now. Obviously if they admitted athletes using the same standards as all other students, fielding competitive teams in the Pac 10 would be near impossible, but the fact Stanford can be competitive and even really good on many levels is commendable. To Husker's point, maybe it's not as impressive as a school like Rice or maybe Vanderbilt kicking *** in almost all sports, but it's certainly more impressive than a school like Texas always being good.

Interesting you say the Lopez boys would have gone to Stanford regardless of Trent Johnson...why is that?

I wonder how good of a job Montgomery will do at Cal. He's been away for a long while. That being said, Tara Vandeveer brought back the Stanford women's team to the Final Four after she left for a while, and if Cal's admissions standards for athletes aren't as tough as Stanford's, let's see how fast it takes for Cal to get really good. It helps that Cal is really young anyway, so Montgomery isn't inheriting chopped liver.
 
I know Stanford is a lot harder for non-athletes to get into now than it was in 1995. Maybe what Gotlieb is seeing is just relative to the change overall. It is a tough situation to recruit in. There are only a few Okafor's out there who are good AND can get in. Most of them have been dreaming of going to a UT or Michigan or Notre Dame on top of that. In basketball, you only need a handful of top players so it is much more manageable than football.

I have no problem with the admission standards going up but I still want to be competitive. The key here is that the student part of student-athlete does stay paramount. There are some very smart, driven kids who score barely over 1000 (old scoring rules) on their SAT who can still succeed at Stanford. If they happen to shoot 3 pointers very well, I have no problem letting them in. In the end, the athletic skill is just another characteristic that makes one "well rounded". The athletes really are a normal part of the student body. There are no athletic dorms and all freshman must live on campus and get random roommates. There is a frat many white football players join and a different one many black football players join. It's pretty non-exclusive though and I had friends from that freshman dorm who went on the the NFL, the Olympics, dot-coms, and won Survivor.

But, I think the bigger issue rather than admissions that Stanford needs to face is the desire to pay "market rates" for top football and basketball coaches. Harbaugh has ambition, but what if the school paid him top dollar as his teams improved and he built a Montgomery-like power out of the football team? He'd be of tremendous value to the school. Stanford is one of the top 25 football programs of all-time and historically has placed an emphasis on it. There's no need to go University of Chicago and drop football altogether. The school believes that commitment to excellence extends everywhere and should act like that on the football field and basketball court.

Stanford athletics is a really interesting beast. In the 1980's the administration decided that they really did want to be good at sports and since then has won more National Championships than any other school. Despite having an undergrad population under 8000, Stanford competes in more varsity sports than UT and at a very high level.

As for Brook and Robin, the Lopez's mom went to Stanford as a swimmer. They were of that very small segment that grew up dreaming of going to Stanford. Here's a segment of an article after they signed:

In reply to:
Click to expand...
 
I've been following Johnson's career for several years. I was surprised that he took the LSU job and believe he was motivated by four factors: 1 - the contract extension issue at Stanford 2- the recruiting problem at Stanford of which he was well aware when hired considering he coached there before leaving for Nevada 3 - the ease with which he will be able to recruit at LSU 4 - the $$$.

One reason I was surprised that Johnson took the job is that Baton Rouge, LSU and the SEC are so different "culturally" from the previous stops along his basketball career (Boise State, Washington, Stanford, Nevada and Utah), with a stint as an assistant at Rice being the closest thing to the "south." This will be a major adjustment for him. I just cannot see Johnson "hanging out" with the likes of Les Miles - talk about two people with intellectual and social differences.

Johnson is a good coach, buttoned down and a disciplinarian. He and his family are classy people.

He has been an excellent recruiter his entire career. Recruiting at LSU will be a cakewalk for him. If he sticks around, LSU will win 20 games within two years and 25 in his third year.
 
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