Johnson leaves Stanford for smelly swamp

...er, excuse me, bayou.

Link.

My initial shock at seeing this dissipated once I learned that the LSU job pays twice as much. That knowledge, however, begs the question: why does LSU pay twice as much?

Let's face it, LSU is not a basketball powerhouse. They did make a run to the Final Four two years ago, to be sure. But that was the first real sign of life in the program since the Shaq years, and even the Shaq teams were not particularly good at anything other than blocking shots (incidentally, Jarvis Varnado of Mississippi State somehow ended up exactly tied with Shaq for the single-season block record in the SEC, which must be a little frustrating since he didn't get credit for a single block after about the 6 minute mark of the first half of MSU's last game against Memphis and thus had about 26 minutes to break it-- and wow, did that tangent end up being longer than I expected). Stanford won 4 titles in a major conference during the last 10 years. I couldn't even tell you the last time LSU won a title.

So from a prestige standpoint, there's little question that Stanford is the superior job. And yet, it pays less. This is not logical from a market standpoint. High-prestige jobs should land high-value coaches, who should earn the best salaries and obtain the best returns in terms of ticket sales.

Of course, anyone who's read anything I've ever written about economics knows that I'm a frequent mocker of the "everyone is rational" school of economic theory. People act like idiots all the time, and right now it appears that one or both of Bob Bowlsby and Stanford's budgetary committee are idiots. If Bowlsby had the chance to extend Johnson at competitive rates and didn't, he's an idiot. If he wanted to and the committee wouldn't pony up, they're idiots. Johnson is a good coach who earned conference-wide recognition this season, and losing him to a literal backwater of college basketball (man, those Louisiana puns are flying thick and fast today) reflects really badly on Stanford as a program.

Now we enter the "rampant speculation" phase of things, so let me state from the outset which horse I'm backing: Mark Fox. As a former Johnson assistant, he helped recruit a lot of the players which were involved in Nevada's 2004-2007 run of tourney appearances. He's familiar with Johnson's style and offers a semblance of continuity. He's not particularly tied down in Nevada, as most of his best players are leaving. And he's, you know, good. His record has actually been better than Johnson's since he took over the program, although we all know that raw W/L record is oft-misleading in college hoops.

We'll see what happens. The new coach is going to have his hands full, that's for sure. He has to recruit 5 new players for 2009, rerecruit the incoming commits, and convince the current players not to transfer. That is one hell of a rebuilding job. The athletic department had better make a hire quickly, because there's a lot of work to be done.