Pat Kennedy decided to resign as DePaul’s basketball coach, and Sunday he passed along that news to athletic director Bill Bradshaw. But after the official announcement Tuesday, Kennedy was asked if he had feared getting fired.
“I didn’t have a fear of it,” he said. “I had a concern. You always have that concern in this business. But we (he and school officials) hadn’t had any discussion of it. That is why it was such a family thing. For 30 years you’ve been with the same (family), and you’ve always been a hot commodity. Then all of a sudden you say, OK, you’re going to take the year off.”
But you’re not such a hot commodity now, someone says to him.
“No,” he said. “Oh, no. You’ve got to be smart in this business.”
That answer explains much of Kennedy’s pre-emptive move, which came before school officials conducted their annual evaluation of his program.
He was coming off a 9-19 season, the Blue Demons’ second straight losing campaign, and one in which he missed four games with a bulging disc in his back. One of his players had quit, four others had been suspended for academic failings–and one of those, Imari Sawyer, had embarrassed the school further by sucker-punching an opponent. Crowds at home games had dwindled, interest in the program had waned and the Blue Demons had failed to qualify even for their Conference USA postseason tournament.
“We appreciate Pat’s position in all of this,” Jim Doyle, DePaul’s vice president of student affairs, said Tuesday, and it was clear why. After a season like that, the school was receiving pressure to rid itself of Kennedy, and his move saved it from having to make a decision on Kennedy.
Now the school must decide who will succeed him, and Bradshaw has already received calls.
“But I haven’t had time to think about that,” he said. “I’ve been emotionally bogged down by all of this. I’ve been emotionally whipped. But we can’t be rushed.”
DePaul’s assistants, who didn’t learn of Kennedy’s decision until Tuesday morning, will be retained until the new coach is hired. Their ultimate fate, said Doyle, “will be the new coach’s decision.”
Kennedy, 53, reached his decision in the wake of DePaul’s season-ending loss Friday night at Marquette. Immediately after the game, he spoke optimistically about next season and hitting the recruiting trail and filling the last scholarship the Blue Demons had available. But later, while driving home alone through the snow, his thoughts turned to the immediate past and his future.
“I had to say, could I get it back to where it needs to be, or is it time for somebody else to do it?” Kennedy said.
And why did he decide it was time for someone else?
“Because no matter how I try to paint it, when you go from 21 [wins in 1999-2000] to 12 [last season] back to nine, it needs to start heading back up that mountain as quickly as possible, and sometimes the best way to do that is change,” he said. “Change brings instant enthusiasm, excitement, all those things. I didn’t have the inner confidence to go to my administration and say, `I can do this for sure, right away, next year.'”
Friday evening he discussed this with his wife, Jeannie, and the next morning canceled his scheduled recruiting trip.
“Then I knew in my stomach,” said Kennedy, whose record at DePaul was 67-85. “If the tank is empty, you can’t fool yourself. If you don’t come to work every day with a passion and a desire to do the best job you can do, then the stomach isn’t as full as it needs to be.”
That solidified the decision in Kennedy’s mind, and the next day he called Bradshaw and told his athletic director he was coming over to his house.
“When I got the call, there was a sense of urgency [in his voice],” Bradshaw said. “It got me in the pit of my stomach. I said to my wife, `Something’s wrong here.'”
And why does he think Kennedy reached his decision?
“I’ve been tossing and turning myself trying to get at that,” Bradshaw said. “Sometimes with Pat, as affable as he is, it’s sometimes hard to get to that center. So what pushed it over the edge? On Friday night, when he left the arena, my understanding was he was going recruiting. So I don’t know. It’s amazing to me. But you have to trust it. I didn’t try to talk him out of it. I didn’t tell him he was making a mistake. I didn’t tell him things would be any better. There wasn’t any of that kind of conversation.”
There was only acceptance, and with that Kennedy’s stay at DePaul was over after five seasons and a record of 67-85.
Five years ago Kennedy succeeded Joey Meyer, whose failure to successfully recruit the Public League had been seen as one reason for the program’s decline to a 3-23 record in Meyer’s final season. Kennedy’s DePaul career started spectacularly, as he corralled a recruiting class that included Public League stars Quentin Richardson, Bobby Simmons and Lance Williams, and it peaked when that group made the 2000 NCAA tournament as sophomores.
But then Richardson exited for the pros, and the Blue Demons’ once-shining future dimmed significantly. That left Kennedy drained and under considerable fire, and on an evening ride through the snow last week, he decided to remove himself as a target, even though his contract runs through 2007.
He refused to discuss what arrangements, if any, had been made about that contract, and he talked only generally of what he might do next (probably some television). He talked of someday coaching again, but he seemed very much a man in need of a sabbatical from a job that had carried him to the heights and down to the depths.
“How do you know the timing is right?” Kennedy asked. “It just felt like this was the time. It was the right thing to do.”
Kennedy’s record
SEA. SCHOOL W-L PCT. TOURNAMENT
’80-81 Iona 15-14 .517
’81-82 Iona 24-9 .727 NIT first round
’82-83 Iona 22-9 .710 NIT second round
’83-84 Iona 23-8 .742 NCAA first round
’84-85 Iona 26-5 .839 NCAA first round
’85-86 Iona 14-15 .482
Totals Iona 124-60 .674
’86-87 Florida St. 19-11 .633 NIT second round
’87-88 Florida St. 19-11 .633 NCAA first round
’88-89 Florida St. 22-8 .733 NCAA first round
’89-90 Florida St. 16-15 .516
’90-91 Florida St. 21-11 .656 NCAA second rnd.
’91-92 Florida St. 22-10 .687 NCAA Sweet 16
’92-93 Florida St. 25-10 .714 NCAA Elite Eight
’93-94 Florida St. 13-14 .481
’94-95 Florida St. 12-15 .444
’95-96 Florida St. 13-14 .481
’96-97 Florida St. 20-12 .625 NIT finals
Totals Florida St. 202-131 .607
’97-98 DePaul 7-23 .233
’98-99 DePaul 18-13 .580 NIT second round
’99-00 DePaul 21-12 .636 NCAA first round
’00-01 DePaul 12-18 .400
’01-02 DePaul 9-19 .346
Totals DePaul 67-85 .441
Totals Career 393-276 .587
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