Billy Gillispie Unemployed Again?

If you ever wanted to write a book on the rise and fall of top college basketball coaches, Bob Knight might come to mind.

Knight was highly successful at Army, which allowed him to move on to the fertile hoops heartland of Indiana and build a dynasty with the Hoosiers. But his personal demons ended his career there after great several national titles and he finished his career with more tempered success as Texas Tech.

Longtime coaches like Eddie Sutton, Jim Harrick, Jim Calhoun and many others have been successful coaches, but have had off court issues or cheating scandals which clouded their images.

Now bring in Billy Clyde Gillispie, who first became known to many as a great recruiter in the state of Texas while at Tulsa under Bill Self, and parlayed that into head coaching jobs at UTEP and Texas A&M, where he turned the Miners and Aggies around in short order. Then used those successes to move on to one of the most storied programs ever at Kentucky…but that’s when the wheels began to come off.

While in Lexington, Gillispie has some issues with driving while intoxicated, and UK let him go. Perhaps he would have been able to survive DUI’s, but losing is far less acceptable when coaching the Wildcats.

Fast forward a couple of years, and Gillispie finds himself at Texas Tech after the Pat Knight experiment didn’t work, and even BCG can’t do miracles with a team that had few Big 12 level players.

Last week Gillispie was again under a firestorm of attack, as several of his players went to the athletic director to complain about abusive tendencies towards them. This is nothing new, as as far back as his days in college station we’d heard of abuse towards Aggie players and even assistant coaches.

Now give me an old school disciplinarian coach any day, but many of the stories heard over the years from fellow college coaches even shock them as over the top…and these guys have heard it all.

One story we’d heard over and over from college coaches around the country is that one assistant, who’s now a very successful Division I head coach, was brought to tears by Gillispie in front of the team and staff as BCG questioned his committment to spending the extra hours needed to be successful.

It was known by all at the time that this assistant had a very sick child in the hospital, and the coach had been spending most of his non-basketball hours with his child.

Of course Gillispie can afford to spend 24/7 on basketball, as he’s never been married or has a family, so perhaps he doesn’t understand what it means to have a sick child. But in this instance, many college coaches from around the country found this incident so distasteful that they talked about it a lot…to each other, and to me.

No, this situation at Texas Tech was somewhat predictable, and it’s quite likely that BCG will find himself on the unemployment line again soon.

And this time very likely for good.

We’ll talk about this sotry, and others, all week on the Greg Swaim Radio Show. And you can talk about it with us, and others, at the BigTime Sports Forums.