“As The World Turns” was once a great soap opera. The University of Memphis Basketball program may have surpassed that level of drama over the last few years.
In a statement released earlier this week by the university, head coach Penny Hardaway made the following announcement:
“I want to thank Rick, Faragi, James, and Demetrius for their service to the University of Memphis and our basketball program,” Hardaway said. “These are good coaches that I’ve worked with closely over the past few seasons, but I made the difficult decision to go in a new direction with our staff.
“The timing is not ideal, but I want to give this team the best opportunity to reach our goals of winning the American Conference and advancing in the NCAA Tournament,” Hardaway continued in the statement. “With the season rapidly approaching, we are going to move quickly to complete the staff.”
Rick Stansbury, Faragi Phillips, James Rosser, along with special advisor Demetrius Dyson, will not return this season for the Tigers.
It’s hard to imagine how the timing could have been worse. The Tigers will open fall practice in the next couple of weeks. For the first time under Hardaway’s leadership, the team was intact in August, and the chemistry was being developed.
Hardaway won’t have to start completely from scratch to build a new coaching staff. Mike Anderson, the former Indiana and UAB coach, Andre Turner, the former University of Memphis player and coach at Lane College, and Jermaine Johnson, the former Ridgeway coach, will form the base of the coaching and support staff.
The coaching staff at Memphis has been a revolving door since Hardaway’s arrival, but this mass exodus shocked many in the Tiger basketball community and the national media. Over the next two weeks, Hardaway will interview candidates for the open positions.
No reason was given for why the change had to occur this close to the season, but critics of Hardaway were quick to voice their opinions when the news broke.
Memphis will face a tough non-conference schedule. The team will travel to Maui to face the national champion Connecticut Huskies in the opening round of the tournament. Memphis will also travel to face Clemson and the University of Virginia, among other tough games on the schedule.
The Tigers have announced an exhibition game for charity against the University of Alabama, which will take the place of one of the two exhibition games the team normally would have played. The entire schedule for the team should be released in a couple of weeks after the conference releases the dates and times for all the games.
