Bill Carmody.
Just saying the name of Northwestern’s longtime basketball coach is bound to cause an uproar. Some say that the amount of time he’s had to bring NU to the semi-promised land of being one of the best 65-now-68 teams in the country is absurd, and that he’s gotta go. Some say he’s done a fine job with what he has to work with at the least basketball school, you know, ever. This generally devolves into two people yelling at each other like they actually have any chance of convincing the other anything like Tony Reali was giving them points for it.
I’ve been at NU for three basketball seasons now. I’ve watched them play Central Arkansas. I’ve congratulated basketball players on hard-fought wins at famed Monday night Evanston eating establishments to remain unnamed. I’ve consoled them about hard losses in the same establishment by making jokes about Jared Sullinger’s alarmingly prominent forehead wrinkles. (Also one time I yelled “GET BUCKETS” to some players I saw there. Not sure why.) Yet through thick and thin, good and bad, player-attended Monkegs and player-attended Satkegs, I’ve never fully formulated an opinion on the so-divisive tieless one. Until after this season.
Nobody can argue that the first million-odd years of the Carmody reign were successful. Apologies to Tim Doyle and Sterling Williams, but NU went a long time without a hope of relevance. That’s inexcusable. And I have a grudge against Carmody because I jokingly added him to my IM roster but he never showed up to any of the games, and we went 0-4, which is totally his fault and not mine for being awful at basketball that isn’t NBA Street Vol. 2.
But recently, things have begun to click. The quality of players improved as Carmody’s staff got into a recruiting groove, with Big Ten-caliber players (again, sorry, Tim) coming into the program, and the team has run off three straight postseason appearances. Sure, it’s the NIT, times three, and the team hasn’t finished higher than seventh in the conference in those years.
In the first two years of their NIT-bound mediocrity, NU started off strong – performing well in the nonconference schedule and notching wins against top-10 teams - but then collapsed down the stretch. This year NU wasn’t on the doorstep of an NCAA bid, and for a long time their season seemed dead as some random celebrity who if I actually mentioned their name people would make “too soon” jokes. But a stretch run featuring two wins against Minnesota, a so-close loss to Ohio State in overtime, two blowout NIT wins and an overtime NIT loss showed the team was capable of doing moderately OK things down the stretch. Neither of things have ever ever happened ever at NU.
Bill Carmody has not been a successful coach at Northwestern. But once things start clicking, they keep clicking. You recruit better players, and those players perform better than your previous bad players. I say that cycle is starting. And sadly, NU’s late-season revival and NIT run were straight-up inspiring.
I’ve never been against Carmody as the guy for NU. But for the first time, I’m going to kick the ambivalance and say I’m pretty sure he is.
Pretty sure.
Sports editor Rodger Sherman is a Medill junior. He can be reached at [email protected]
