Andy Enfield's Honeymoon

USC head coach Andy Enfield made a lot of noise this past week with his interview in Men's Journal. He threw insults at Tim Floyd, Steve Alford and others. Some of it is basically the stuff that coaches are supposed to say behind closed doors to recruits but don't say in public, but a lot mirrors the general media narrative.

Enfield, of course, was the darling of the 2013 NCAA Tournament, when his Florida Gulf Coast squad made a shock Sweet 16 run. He took over FGCU and in one year took them to the Sweet 16, so the media narrative goes, and therefore he's going to rapidly turn around USC. His argument against Alford ("I've made it to one Sweet Sixteen in two years, and he's made it to one Sweet Sixteen in 18 years.") is the same one that has been repeated over and over again in the media.

The thing is, it's a nonsense argument. As I pointed out during FGCU's run, their run was great fun precisely because it was such an irrational fluke event. That Florida Gulf Coast team was improved over the season before, but they were also a 15 seed. To argue that Florida Gulf Coast was better than, say, Georgetown, simply because they won head-to-head and went further in the NCAA Tournament is laughable.

In the end, what matters to fans and what hangs banners up is NCAA Tournament success, but if you want to know how good a team is and how well a coach built a program, you look at the full sample size. A regular season title in a major conference is a much more significant and difficult achievement than a Sweet 16 run because you can't just get hot for a few minutes and pull an upset or two. You have to be really good for 16 or 18 games. And as I wrote a few weeks ago, the myth that Steve Alford is a coach who wins in the regular season but can't win in the NCAA Tournament is wildly overblown.

As I said at the time:

As @tsnmike pointed out, if FGCU drew Duke instead of Georgetown, they lose that game and Enfield is considered a terrible hire. Same dude.
— Jeff (BPredict) (@BPredict) April 2, 2013

If your coach turns from being a terrible hire to a great hire in two games, you have a bad metric for determining a great hire.

To briefly defend Enfield, a coach taking over a program that has struggled for a while often has to be a little bit brash in order to get others to take them seriously and to draw recruits. But if the whole logic of hiring Enfield was to land those great recruits, where are they? He has one four-star recruit for next season (point guard Jordan McLaughlin), but so far that's it for big acquisitions.

As USC struggles this season (and I think they're a borderline Top 100 team at best), the new car smell is going to start to wear off. By next season, Enfield is going to have to start delivering wins, or these types of media puff pieces will disappear.