LETTER: Wolff should start feeling the heat

Normally, a coach can be stubborn and hard-nosed if his team is consistently winning. He can assert that quality at any time because he has the track record to back it up. And if the players, whether they like him or not, respect him (at the very least by the end of their collegiate days), that coach would never have his employment in serious doubt.

The same cannot be said of men's basketball coach Dennis Wolff, especially over the last several years of poor offensive innovation and sudden transfers. Picked to finish first in America East for the first time in six years, the ballin' Terriers are expected to join their more-renowned hockey counterparts in the NCAA tournament. The quality is there in all the positions: talented guards with the ability to score and make plays, exciting wing players who can finish and versatile big men with the dexterity to go inside and out.

But so far, it has all been a matter of meaningless press clippings as the same struggle to find continuity on the offensive end has resurfaced just like it has for the last three years. Wolff has made headlines for this once-decrepit program, leading the team to its first NCAA appearance in the 1996-97 season and surpassing Mike Jarvis as the winningest coach in school history. In the last 10 seasons, however, Wolff has led the Terriers to just one tournament appearance (2002) with three NIT flameouts in the first round. And the players haven't gone in the traditional sense.

Then again, after six transfers, two to rival UMass over the last four years, it has become quite a tradition at BU. These two factors -- a poor recent record and departures because of Wolff's notoriously obstinate ways -- are legitimate cases for the former UConn letterman's job to be in jeopardy. Many past basketball players don't take kindly to a sometimes aggressive, tough disciplinarian unwilling to step off the gas pedal.

If the consistent winning comes along with that type of coach, then no complaints can be made. But unless you're winning like pugnacious perimeter-preaching pedagogues Bobby Knight, Tom Izzo or Kelivn Sampson, then it grows tiresome, banal and just downright idiotic not to adjust. Though Wolff's record at BU is now respectable (216-167, which translates into a .564 winning percentage), if you take away a stellar 23-4 season that resulted in a disappointing first-round conference tournament loss, Wolff's record would be an even more pedestrian 193-163. Bad record plus an inflexible attitude equals a coach under pressure. That coach has to be Dennis Wolff.

Andrew Jones

COM '09