Staff shake-up solves nothing for Ole Miss

By By Will Bardwell / sports columnist
March 18, 2004
Something smells fishy in Oxford.
Ole Miss assistant basketball coach Wayne Brent resigned earlier this week in the first and maybe not the last shake-up of Rod Barnes' staff following the Rebels' second-straight losing season.
Typical of these sorts of announcements, no one is doing much talking. Barnes released a short statement in a school press release, but has so far dodged interview requests by the media. Brent is also keeping a low profile, and did not return a phone call left at his home on Wednesday.
First of all, it seems unlikely that Brent didn't have at least a nudge out the door. After another losing season, a shakeup was inevitable. Barnes certainly didn't ask Brent to reconsider.
And the timing makes one wonder about why Barnes ever brought Brent to Oxford in the first place.
Rewind your memory to 1998, when Barnes took over at Ole Miss after Rob Evans left. Barnes hired Brent, who had been head coach at Provine High School for the previous six seasons.
In his final season at Provine, Brent led the Rams to a 37-1 record, the Class 5A state championship, and a ranking in the USA Today Boys' Top 25 poll.
Among the standouts on that team were college prospects David Sanders, Aaron Harper and Justin Reed. Coincidentally, all three ended up at Ole Miss.
Last week, the last two members of that trio Harper and Reed played their last game for Ole Miss. Coincidentally, now Brent is history. Or maybe not so coincidentally. Internet message boards and rumor mills have always speculated that Brent was hired to lure the three prospects to Oxford. Now that they're gone, is it any surprise he is too?
Brent and his Provine prodigies were a part of the greatest seasons in the history of Ole Miss hoops. In 2000, the Provine Posse helped lead the Rebels to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament. The next year, Ole Miss went back to the Big Dance for the fifth time in six years.
Since then, things haven't been nearly as pleasant in Oxford. Two losing seasons in a row have Barnes on the hot seat, and apparently firing or encouraging to resign, whatever you want to call it assistants as a last resort.
The problem facing the Ole Miss program isn't its assistant coaches it's the players being brought in. Yeah, I know, recruiting is primarily left up to assistants like Brent, but he's not the only one to blame for the way the roster looks today. Even when the Rebels were winning 20 games a year, the recruiting classes never reflected the team's success. Now, the sub-par signings have begun to pile up.
Think about it. Other than Harper, Reed and Sanders, who is the top recruit to sign with Ole Miss since Barnes took over? It's probably Trey Pearson, the former Mr. Basketball in Tennessee, who played the point for Ole Miss in 2003.
Pearson left Oxford after that season. Several other players exited as well.
Is Wayne Brent to blame for that? I don't think so. Is he to blame for the sub-par replacements brought in? Maybe partially. But if so, why didn't Barnes encourage him to resign or just come out and fire him last season?
Easy. After the departures of Pearson, John Gunn, Jonathan Loe, and others, Harper and Reed represented Ole Miss' only shot at respectability and Reed hadn't decided yet on whether to declare for the NBA Draft or come back for his senior year.
It's a bit of a conspiracy theory, but think about it like this if Brent had been fired a year ago, would Reed have returned for the 2004 season? I doubt it.
Brent probably hammered his own death nail earlier this month when he called in unannounced, mind you to a Jackson radio show and criticized his own program's recruiting efforts. Brent told the live audience that after he was passed over for Jackson State's coaching job, he quit recruiting for a period of time. He also said the mass exodus last season forced the Rebels to sign low-caliber players.
After the impromptu interview, Barnes told the Ole Miss media relations office that Brent was not to speak to the media anymore.
Granted, mouthing off against your own team probably isn't the best way to earn job security. But it's easy to understand the frustration Brent must have felt. Besides, on the brink of another below-.500 finish and the graduations of Reed and Harper forthcoming, he may have sensed his days were numbered.
If he did suspect it, he was right. And while Wayne Brent may be gone, the problems that brought about his departure still linger in Oxford. Recruiting is still nothing to brag about, and how Barnes plans to replace Reed and Harper is unimaginable.
Should those problems result in another disappointing season, Barnes will likely join his former assistant in the unemployment line.