Improvement

To this point, Wes Flanigan's initial season as a head coach has not been an utter washout, but certainly not a resounding success by any measurement. (I believe that is a fair statement.) He had the disadvantage of being directly compared to the most successful season in program history, and that certainly has not helped the perception of this year.

Assuming he has the modesty and integrity to admit his failings, how does this coach improve? The AD can give numeric goals he wants the coach to reach, but not having been a coach himself, he cannot give much advice on how to get there. Al Flanigan is a legendary coach who might give some help, but he works in high school, not college. Maybe Wes has colleagues who are close enough to the program to know what did not work who can offer advice. Maybe he and the assistants need to do some brutal self-examination of the program from top to bottom. "Why didn't we win more games than we did? What went wrong?"

Is it a problem of Xs and Os? I certainly could not answer that. It is a lack of talent? Well, we did not quite have the talent we thought we had, but we could have done more with what we had. Was it personnel management, how we handled the players in practices and in games? Maybe there is the key. I don't have the answers, but we definitely need to be asking the right questions, and of the right people.

We need some answers. The AD needs to push Wes to find those answers. Barring unusual circumstances, I think any coach should have three years to get his program going strongly in the right direction. However, it is not unreasonable for the Boss to demand some definite answers as to what went wrong and how the problems are going to be fixed.