Hardaway's Memphis tenure has had its moments. But for a coach who talked the talk, he never fully delivered and this year's team is off the rails. He may serve as a lesson to other schools who want to hire a former legend as head coach.
Penny Hardaway’s tenure at Memphis will not be remembered like the eternal farce of Clyde Drexler’s misadventure at Houston or Patrick Ewing being completely in over his head at Georgetown.
Over Hardaway’s eight years as head coach, despite coming to the job with no real translatable experience, there have been some real wins, a few legitimate highs and moments where it felt like he might have a chance to deliver on a variety of outlandish boasts that made many of his veteran colleagues wonder privately if he had any clue what kind of shark-infested waters he was swimming in at the highest level of college basketball.
Now, as Hardaway winds down his most disappointing season – Memphis is an unfathomable 12-18 and could fail to qualify for the American Conference tournament despite what is believed to be the most expensive roster in the league – an old truism of college sports is bucking and roaring in Bluff City.
Even legends get no immunity from results.
With one game left in Memphis’ season, university officials and boosters are engaged in serious conversations about Hardaway’s future, sources told Yahoo Sports, with the school weighing a variety of factors including the political ramifications of telling Hardaway — a local icon who is desperately fighting for another year to right the ship — that his services are no longer needed.
But ultimately, another factor may trump the potential of a broken relationship with the most beloved player in school history. Earlier this week, athletic director Ed Scott told the school’s board of trustees that Memphis basketball was going to fall $1.2 million short of budgeted revenue as a result of cratering attendance. Scott then declined to talk to local reporters, deferring his thoughts until after the season — perhaps a sign that an ultimate decision hasn't been made.
It would be an ironic end to the Hardaway tenure. Eight years ago, as Tubby Smith was sleepwalking Memphis to a fifth-place finish in a version of the American that was much stronger than the current one, Hardaway and his local media allies seized on fan apathy and the promise of assembling one of the nation’s top recruiting classes as a quick fix to the program’s troubles.
But on Thursday night, after Memphis’ 96-89 loss to South Florida in front of a mostly-empty FedExForum, Hardaway was reduced to hollow spin, calling this season a “one-off” rather than an indictment of a program that should never be this broken.
“If I wanted 20 wins every year, I’d just play a cupcake schedule,” he said. “But I’ve had 20 wins every year playing a hard-ass schedule so with the negatives that come along with that, that’s just a part of the process this year. We finally got caught with non-conference beating us up and then we got into conference and didn’t take care of business.”
It’s true that Hardaway has always scheduled ambitiously, a model John Calipari perfected two decades ago while bringing Memphis to four straight Sweet Sixteens and within a second of a national championship: Recruit elite players, load up the nonconference schedule to get in the NCAA tournament seeding conversation and then dominate an overmatched league.
Expecting Hardaway to have the same results was always unreasonable. Even for a program with a rich history of success dating back to the 1970s, the Calipari era was an anomaly for Memphis that set an impossible standard for every subsequent coach.
It’s also a different job these days.
Though Memphis tried desperately to buy its way into the Big 12, it remains stuck in a league weakened significantly by the departures of Houston, UCF, Cincinnati and SMU. Meanwhile, the NIL landscape has made it almost impossible for a school outside the power conferences to compete for even some of the top-end talent Hardaway landed in his early years like James Wiseman, Precious Achiuwa and Jalen Duren.
Though Memphis has the resources and boosters to fund a winning basketball product within the context of the American, it’s hard to envision Memphis as a job that would attract anyone but an up-and-comer most of its fans have never heard of. That’s part of the calculus, too.
But ultimately, if Hardaway is pushed out, it will come down to this: Even in his best years, when he put a legitimately good product on the floor that could compete with and beat the likes of Houston on occasion, he has just one NCAA tournament win to show for it.
The what-ifs? They’re almost endless. None were bigger than the first round of the 2023 NCAA tournament when Memphis had Florida Atlantic all but defeated in an 8-9 game with a bracket that opened up after Farleigh Dickinson shocked No. 1 seed Purdue. Instead, a controversial jump ball call went Florida Atlantic’s way, the Owls won on a layup with a couple seconds left and ended up in the Final Four.
If Hardaway wins that game, perhaps he has enough goodwill in the bank to survive this season where — like so many programs that rely heavily on the transfer portal — he did not build the right mix of talent and chemistry.
Instead, the questions have begun to boil locally about Hardaway’s coaching priorities (his teams annually rank among the worst nationally in committing turnovers), his staff (outside of 65-year-old former Indiana and UAB coach Mike Davis, it is heavy on longtime Hardaway friends and associates, short on actual college basketball experience) and whether his penchant for martyrdom will stand in the way of fixing what’s obviously broken.
To wit, after a noncompetitive loss last Sunday at East Carolina, he told the Daily Memphian, “Whatever’s being said — it’s easy to kick me, I’ve been getting kicked since I’ve been here and nothing’s going to stop me from fighting.”
Maybe that’s just the old athlete being fueled by doubts still entrenched in the 54-year-old Hardaway’s soul. It’s also nonsense.
Eight years ago, Memphis gave him what was widely considered a top-25 job at the time despite a coaching résumé consisting of a few years of middle school and high school games. He rode in with a wave of fanciful promises (“We’re going to win a national championship,” he told The Athletic in 2019) and unearned bravado (“We want all the smoke,” he said after landing the No. 1 recruiting class) and was cheered for it at every turn. Hardaway was so maniacally supported that he even convinced his then-school president David Rudd, who should have known better, to pick a fight with the NCAA it was never going to win over Wiseman’s eligibility. It ultimately led to a long, unnecessary and intrusive investigation that never had to happen, even if the resulting penalties were minor.
Of course there have been occasional Hardaway critics. That’s the job of being a high-profile coach. But until now, as the bottom slides out from underneath his feet, Hardaway’s support has been firmer than what his record would otherwise command for one reason: He’s Penny Hardaway.
It’s also why hiring program legends — particularly those with no real coaching track record — is a risky proposition. The passion is always greater at the beginning, but the fall hurts more on impact.
If this is the end, Hardaway’s tenure will not be remembered as a failure like Ewing’s or Drexler’s or even Chris Mullin’s at St. John’s. For a decent stretch of years, he got big-time players, filled the building and generally did a solid job on the sideline. You could even argue that winning the American a year ago and making the NCAA tournament three of the last five years isn’t such a disaster at Memphis in the aggregate.
But Memphis fans won’t see it that way — in large part because a tradition of players like Hardaway set a standard that Hardaway the coach hasn’t lived up to.
Category: General Sports
