I’ve been saying here for a while that I think with Mooney there’s more involved and a level of politics than with other coaches. Meaning, Mooney is well liked by the administration and big donors that play a hand in decision making. Factor that in with the higher cost of a buy-out for a contract and the fact that we’ve had recent seasons that were good enough in the eyes of the administration, even last year that didn’t result in an NCAA appearance, and you can see why Mooney hasn’t been let go. Like I said in a previous thread it’ll either take a noticeable drop in fan attendance for consecutive years or the more likely option of big donors (and BoT now with NIL from school) not happy with the results.
I think Hardt has been great as an AD. So far he’s hired one phenomenal coach in Roussell and hopefully one soon to be phenomenal coach in Aoki with baseball (won’t quite move him up in that category yet without winning an A10 championship). I agree that men’s basketball carries the most weight out of any of our sports in terms of markers of success for an AD. Keep in mind under Hardt we’ve won 2 A10 trophies while his predecessor had 0.
With MBB there are a lot more layers to it as it is the face of our athletic department, than all the other sports where Hardt probably has more free rein to make decisions without as many hoops to jump through. I do think if he is tasked to hire our men’s basketball coach, he has shown me enough ability to make good hires for UR, that I think he will do a great job for that too.