The Butterfly Effect - Nova, Rutgers & The Hall

[GumbyDamnit!]

A long but really interesting read from a national writer (it's beyond a pay wall so I didn't want to call out too much), discussing how Jay W arrived on the Main Line. Interesting to think about whit ifs... Rutgers, Nova and SHU all put a series of events in motion that literally reshaped each of their fates over 20 years. To say we feel very fortunate things fell as they did, is a HUGE understatement. I didn't know the SHU angle before but feel extremely fortunate as a Nova fan and can genuinely express some empathy to our Hall bretheren. Randy Foye, Allan Ray, Curtis Sumpter and Jason Fraser as Pirates? Yikes... that would have sucked.


Olga’s Diner welcomed the hungry more than the hustlers, its red neon sign beckoning the suburbanites rolling around the traffic circle where Routes 70 and 73 meet in South Jersey. Owned for more than 50 years by the Stavros family, Olga’s was historical by virtue of its longevity and landmark status, but it was not necessarily known for making history.
Yet on a March day in 2001, in what reads more as the start to a bad joke than an event that changed the course of college basketball, a coach, an agent, an athletic director and a lawyer (a university legal counsel representative, to be exact) walked into Olga’s and, over early morning mugs of coffee, they hammered out a deal that would catapult one program to the top of the sport and further torpedo another. An entire league would be lifted by the decision, and dozens of careers made or ruined.
Nearly 20 years later, Bob Mulcahy offers a rueful chuckle when he’s asked about that day. He was the Rutgers athletic director at the time, but alas, not the AD at the diner. He sat in his office in New Brunswick, N.J., a mere 40-minute drive away, waiting while unbeknownst to him, Jay Wright had agreed to become the next basketball coach at Villanova, jilting Mulcahy and Rutgers at the altar. What was it Clarence, the kindly old angel, told George Bailey, in “It’s A Wonderful Life”? About how, if a man isn’t around, he leaves an awful hole?
Wright left not merely a hole at Rutgers, but also a career-sucking crater of flattened earth, engorged with scandal, and festering with the ruined reputation of an entire athletic department. Only now, nearly two decades later, have the backhoes started to refill the thing and pull the Scarlet Knights up to decency.
In the meantime at Villanova, Wright this year embarks on his 20th season, two national titles tucked into his well-tailored pocket and enough talent this season to vie for a third. He was rumored to be a candidate for the 76ers job in August. He turned them down. The earth on the suburban Philadelphia campus blooms more lushly every day, unicorns prancing about giddily while rainbows sprout overhead. Finances, reputations, careers, they all grow like wildflowers, the blessings sprinkled around like pixie dust. Or actually more like Oprah. Now you get a wonderful life, and you, and you, and you.
“I’m the biggest donor in Villanova’s history,’’ says Mulcahy, who, ironically, happens to be a Villanova graduate. “Nobody has done more for that school than Jay Wright, and without me, none of it would have happened.’’
Except it’s never quite that simple. Life isn’t that linear; X might lead to Y, but it has to stuff the whole alphabet in between. A big decision rarely is an either/or, but rather a collection of little choices, even ones that seem inconsequential and unrelated, that lead a person to his fork in the road.
And the what-if game is never the clean swap people think it would be. Insert Wright at Rutgers and poof! Rutgers is a two-time national champion? “Hell, no,’’ Wright says. “Hell, no. That’s not guaranteed. Who knows what would have happened?”
No one does. But it’s sure fun to ponder how things might have ended up differently.

To properly reimagine the future, you first have to understand the past. The question in these sorts of what-if scenarios is where to start, identify the decision that gave the boulder its first push? A lot happened to get things moving downhill. Way back in 1992, a wounded Rollie Massimino bolted Villanova for UNLV, hurt that Philadelphia had blamed him for the demise of the Big 5, angry that his administration wouldn’t set up a succession plan with him as future athletics director. A lifelong Villanova fan who had spent five years at the school as Massimino’s assistant, Wright played the good soldier and went to the desert with him. Steve Lappas took the Villanova job, earning him a decades-long banishment from La Familia, Massimino furious his ex-assistant would replace him. Odds are Massimino only hastened the end of an already strained marriage, but who knows what might have happened had he stayed a little longer and found a way to coexist peacefully. Maybe Wright grows into the heir apparent. Maybe Lappas gets a fairer shot.
Instead, Wright, the East Coast boy with his Jersey girl wife, reluctantly made the move to Vegas, lasting two years before Hofstra called with a chance to move home — and take arguably the worst job in college basketball. The Pride had won a combined 18 games in the two years prior to Wright’s arrival, and he didn’t seem to have the easy fix: Wright won 19 in his first two seasons.
“Hey, you want to talk about what-ifs? Start with Speedy Claxton,” says Joe Jones, Wright’s former assistant and the current Boston University coach. “If Speedy Claxton doesn’t go to Hofstra, maybe none of this happens.’’
He’s not wrong. Claxton is the heel spur to the boulder, the guy who got Wright’s career moving. The coach became desirable to big programs only because he turned woebegone Hofstra into a winner, and he turned Hofstra into a winner only because a diminutive point guard honored a promise. Wright’s other assistant, Tom Pecora, first spied Claxton at a camp. Impressed with his tenacity and toughness, he begged Wright not to get spooked by his size. Plenty of other schools already had, the big-name city programs showing little interest in the 5-11 point guard. But after struggling through three losing seasons at Hofstra, Wright wasn’t in a position to be picky. He kept after Claxton, and as these things so often go, by Claxton’s senior year, the guard had become a coveted star. He had a chance to go to St. John’s, but turned it down, rewarding Wright for his loyalty. In his senior year, Claxton led Hofstra to its first NCAA Tournament. When the Pride matched that effort after Claxton left, Wright cemented his place atop the hot young coaches on the rise list.
His status fed by a New York media hungry for a good college basketball program, Wright turned into the most coveted coach on the market. Four days after Hofstra lost to UCLA in the 2001 NCAA Tournament, athletic director Harry Royle fielded his first call seeking permission to speak with his coach about a job opening. It came from Bob Marcum of UMass, who was looking for a replacement for Bruiser Flint. Less than 24 hours later, the Wright sweepstakes officially was on, the outside influences on this story beginning to show their hand. That year Holy Cross and Iona both earned NCAA bids, two seemingly unimportant and unrelated occurrences. But the NCAA Tournament gave Josh Sankes and Earl Johnson, both Rutgers transfers, a public forum.
Two years earlier the pair had filed a lawsuit, contending that Rutgers coach Kevin Bannon forced them to run naked after missing free throws. The school never denied the incident, but Bannon brushed it off as a joke, insisting no one was forced to do anything, and the New Jersey Superior Court dismissed the suit. But given the microphone and the podium, the players painted a far more humiliating picture of their ex-coach, eliminating any chance that Bannon, who had finished 11-16, would keep his job. On Tuesday, March 16, the Associated Press reported Bannon’s dismissal. The next day, Mulcahy contacted Royle and invited Wright and his wife, Patty, to his home for dinner, the two sides agreeing to meet on Thursday night.
Sensing legitimate interest from Mulcahy, Wright called Marcum to tell him he was no longer interested in the UMass job. Expecting the AD to be disappointed, Wright was slightly put off by Marcum’s indifferent reaction.“They were aggressively recruiting me at the time, and he wasn’t upset at all. ‘Oh, OK. That’s all right,’’’ Wright says. “I was like, ‘What’s that about?’”

Terry Mulcahy, Bob’s wife, made chicken. “It was really good chicken too,’’ Mulcahy recalls. Later, he and Wright adjourned to the sunroom, talking until almost midnight about the position. Rutgers had not been a destination job for anyone, a host of coaches failing to capitalize on the rich New Jersey/New York recruiting bed and establish any sort of success. But with his New York ties, Wright saw potential others didn’t. He already had connections with the high school coaches in the area and was wooing a bumper crop of local high schoolers already.
Wright didn’t think he’d have a chance to bring Randy Foye, Allan Ray, Curtis Sumpter and Jason Fraser to Hofstra. But to Rutgers? Maybe. “I thought it was a great job,’’ Wright says. “It was a great job.’’ He had just one reservation. He wanted to meet with Francis Lawrence, the university chancellor, to affirm from the top level where the school stood with taking Prop 48 athletes if necessary. The chancellor wasn’t available until the weekend, so Mulcahy set up a meeting at noon on Sunday. “He said, to me, ‘Look, the only reason I couldn’t come here is if Villanova was open,’’’ Mulcahy says. “I said, ‘Well, it’s not open, so let’s wrap this thing up.’’’ The Wrights left Mulcahy’s house in the wee hours of the morning, convinced and happy he’d be the next Rutgers coach. “Patty and I drove back to Long Island afterward,’’ Wright says. “It felt like we were on some kind of secret mission. Nobody knew about it. It was great.’’
Instead, Wright’s phone kept pinging. Tennessee athletic director Doug Dickey also was interested in talking with Wright, and after getting the OK from Royle to interview his coach, made plans to fly to New York early the following week.
What came next long has been a subject of debate. Mulcahy believes that Father Edmund Dobbins, the Villanova president, got wind of a pending deal between Wright and Rutgers and greased the skids for Lappas’ ouster. Villanova people, including Lappas, say that’s not the case, that Lappas was on his way out regardless.
Like Massimino, Lappas sensed it was time to leave Villanova. He had done well, steering the Wildcats to their first Big East title in his third season, in 1995. But that same year, Old Dominion upset the third-seeded Wildcats in triple overtime of the NCAA Tournament, Villanova blowing chances at the end of regulation and the first and second overtime to win the game.
The loss turned into a pattern, Lappas never able to get his team out of the first weekend. Equally troublesome, the Wildcats made the tourney just once in his final four years. His personality, zealous and demonstrative like his predecessor’s, wore thin with the home crowd. By the dawn of the 2000-01 season, Lappas needed at least an NCAA bid to save his job.
Here’s his what-if: The bubble might not have burst were it not for one controversial game. Johnny Helmsley hit a 3-pointer as time expired and Miami beat Villanova by one, official Tim Higgins signaling the shot good as he and the other referees ran off the court to a hail of debris. “We try to get them all right,’’ Higgins says. “We don’t always.’’ At the time, officials couldn’t review end-of-game plays. The loss came in January, and by March, with just 18 wins, the Wildcats sat squarely on the bubble. “Both Villanova and UConn were on the bubble,’’ says former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese, who chaired the selection committee in 2001. “Villanova had beaten UConn twice, but as it was, neither one got in. If they win that game, do they get in? Do they make a run? Who knows?”
Instead, Lappas felt that the support at Villanova was waning, so he looked for an off-ramp. “The timing was right,’’ Lappas says simply. When then-Boston College athletics director Gene DiFilippo, who was the AD at Villanova who hired Lappas, called to tell him about a job opening, Lappas decided to listen.
The job was at UMass, where Wright got the brush off after removing his name from consideration. “He was talking to Steve Lappas, the Villanova head coach,’’ Wright says. “Of course he wasn’t worried about me, but I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t know anything about Villanova.’’

Wright remembers hearing the report on WFAN that Lappas was leaving and immediately called him for confirmation. “He said, ‘Take the job. It’s a great job,’’’ Wright says. Villanova athletic director Vince Nicastro called Royle, who not only graciously granted permission but also told Nicastro how much Wright cared about Villanova. Shortly thereafter, Dobbins, who died in 2015, called Wright to see if he would be interested in Villanova. “Of course I was,’’ Wright says. “It was my dream job.’’ Wright and his agent, Carl Hirsch, agreed to meet Nicastro and the university’s legal counsel, Dottie Malloy, on Sunday morning. ”I think once we talked, Jay locked himself in a basement because of all of the speculation,’’ Nicastro says jokingly.
They planned the get-together early, before Wright’s noon meeting at Rutgers, and chose Olga’s because of its proximity to Hirsch’s house and its cover. Only one diner even recognized Wright, and not until he was headed out the door. “I don’t think he connected the dots,’’ Nicastro says. No one remembers if they ate. They definitely had coffee, and they certainly hammered out the details that would make Wright the next coach at Villanova. It was up to Wright to tell Rutgers. “I felt sick, sick to my stomach,’’ he says. “I was taking that job. Nobody thought Villanova was going to open. Nobody.’’
Mulcahy was attending a breakfast with his student-athletes and unreachable, so Wright hopped in his car and drove to New Brunswick. He tried to slip into the Rutgers Athletic Center unseen, but a reporter, hoping to get the scoop on the pending hire, saw him as he walked in. “I was like, ‘Oh *****, I can’t talk,’’’ Wright says. “He thought I was there to take the job, and I was there to turn it down.’’ Wright walked into Mulcahy’s office, greeted immediately not just by the athletic director but also by the new football coach, Greg Schiano, hired just three months earlier.
Wright tried to pull Mulcahy aside for a private conversation, but the athletic director talked over him, pushing him to a room to talk to Schiano. A Bucknell graduate like Wright, the football coach went into his pitch, selling all of the great things the two could do together at Rutgers. When Schiano finally took a breath, Wright stopped him, explaining he wasn’t taking the job. “Does Bob know?” Schiano asked. Exasperated, Wright said, “No! He won’t let me tell him.’’ Schiano ushered Wright out the door, where the coach finally came clean. “He was amazing,’’ Wright says. “So gracious. He understood.’’
All these years later, Mulcahy remains disappointed in the outcome, but understands it. “It was Villanova,’’ he says. “We couldn’t compete with that.’’

Randy Foye is laughing, but not for the reasons you might expect. He is part of the 2002 class that stands as both the foundation and the prototype for Villanova under Wright. As the year’s top recruiting class, Foye, Ray, Sumpter and Fraser served notice about what Wright could and would bring to Villanova in terms of talent, but their team-first and selfless personalities also established the sort of players Wright would both recruit and coach.
All four hailed from the New York/New Jersey area, so it’s easy to assume that if Wright had stuffed a red handkerchief into his suit pocket instead of a blue one, they would have fallen in line and trotted off to Rutgers. “No,’’ Foye says, leading this tale down another rabbit hole. “We were all about Seton Hall.’’
Fred Hill Jr. spent three decades in college basketball, all in and around the New York/New Jersey area, building a reputation as a savvy recruiter with deep ties to the local kids. As an assistant to Tommy Amaker, he signed Andre Barrett and Eddie Griffin, two McDonald’s All-Americans, and was close to earning commitments from Foye, Ray, Sumpter and Fraser. The four knew each other well, having squared off in the Gauchos gym and on the summer-league circuit, and Sumpter and Fraser made a near college pact. “I was going wherever Curt went,’’ Fraser says.
But after a first-round NIT loss, Amaker bolted for Michigan, leaving all of his assistants — including Hill — behind. Seton Hall interviewed a host of candidates but never considered Hill. “If Seton Hall had made Coach Hill the head coach, I would have been like, ‘I’m committing right now,’’’ Fraser says. “Curt would have gone with me. We were ready to sign on the dotted line. We were that gung-ho.’’
Instead, Wright hired Hill at Villanova, and the assistant coach essentially re-recruited the foursome.“It was Seton Hall, Seton Hall, Seton Hall. It’s the best thing since sliced bread,’’ Foye says of Hill’s pitch. “And the next thing you know, it’s Villanova, Villanova. You’re going to come in here and have a chance to start.’’
The commitments of Foye and Sumpter were pretty straightforward. They visited, liked Wright, liked his pitch. With Ray and Fraser, it gets a little more interesting, a little more fated, if you will. Earlier in his high school career, Ray flooded college coaches with letters, asking them to recruit him. Someone on the staff — Lappas swears it was not him — replied with thanks but no thanks. Ray pinned the note to his bedroom wall for inspiration. Now here was Ray, with a host of college choices, including Villanova. “That letter, it made me want to go there even more,’’ Ray says.
Considered the best big man in his high school class and maybe a better pro prospect than Carmelo Anthony and Amare Stoudemire, the deeply spiritual Fraser visited Villanova with an open mind. It lacked the bright lights and fanfare he had seen on his other visits — at North Carolina students spelled his name on their chests and fans chanted his name during their midnight madness event — but he kept remembering his first encounter with Wright.
As a freshman in high school, Fraser was cut from the Empire State Games team because the coach, playing a little politics, wanted to reward a senior with the last spot, even though Fraser was clearly more deserving. “I was so mad,’’ Fraser says. “I didn’t come with a background of a lot of resources, so it echoed the idea of something being taken away. It was like someone walked into my house and took my furniture. It felt so wrong to me.’’ Wright, then the coach at Hofstra, happened to be in the gym that day. He didn’t know Fraser, but he knew his high school coach, Jack Agostino, and Agostino thought maybe a college coach might offer the young kid some kind words. “All he said was, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ standard stuff,’’ Fraser says. “But this is my first interaction with a college coach. I never forgot it. When I got to Villanova, it just felt comfortable.’’
Who knows, maybe Wright would have brought Hill with him to Rutgers and that core four follows along, starting the Scarlet Knights on the same road to success as the Wildcats. Mike Nardi, Kyle Lowry, Will Sheridan, they all were Northeast kids too, and might have joined Rutgers and created the same pipeline that fed Villanova’s success. The challenges of the place — the dumpy RAC, the fan base inertia — were all equally difficult at Villanova at the time. Before Wright, there was no practice facility at Villanova, the Wildcats going through their sessions inside the Pavilion while the track team ran laps and the baseball team sliced dingers on the other side of the bleachers. And Wright memorably went to the university dining areas, standing on tables to persuade otherwise apathetic students to show up. He could have done the very same at Rutgers.
So maybe it happens at Rutgers, at least to some degree. Except there’s always more to success than just facilities and fan interest, more even than just players. With the Nova administration, Wright was given room to grow and make mistakes. In his first two seasons, that vaunted recruiting class had two NIT appearances, a phone code scandal and an NCAA investigation to show for itself. Itchy fans thought the coach might have been an empty suit. The brass stuck by him, convinced that Wright’s fit outweighed his early failures. They got their reward, of course, Wright taking the Wildcats to the Sweet 16 in 2005, beginning a run of 14 NCAA berths in 15 seasons. “I’m going to be honest, and not just something good and easy,’’ Fraser says. “As much as a visionary as Coach Wright is, the environment and spirit and character of Villanova has a lot to do with his success. He works there. If he goes to Rutgers, is there pressure to get good character guys, or just get good recruits? Do people start saying, ‘If you don’t get a great class or don’t do this, you don’t get the next contract?’ Who knows? It could be totally different.’’
Instead, the two schools diverged. Villanova keeps rearranging its trophy case, what with the two national titles, seven Big East regular-season crowns and four league tournament titles overcrowding the shelves. Wright twice has been named national coach of the year and earned the league’s honor six times. Six of his former assistants have moved on to head-coaching jobs, and 10 of his players have been drafted into the NBA. (Saddiq Bey will be the 11th this year.) And the Big East, having survived its own death and rebirth, hopped on Wright’s coattails to ride Villanova’s coattails to legitimacy as a major basketball league again.
Rutgers, in the meantime, has crashed and burned its way through a spin cycle of coaches, administrators and scandals. Gary Waters lasted five seasons before resigning. Hill replaced him, but his tenure ended in a mess after the coach got into a verbal altercation during a baseball game. Hill begat Mike Rice, who was fired after an ESPN “Outside the Lines” video showed the coach physically and verbally assaulting his players, and Eddie Jordan, a three-year folly, was announced as a Rutgers graduate, even though he didn’t have a degree.
Caught in the quagmire are a slew of players whose careers were beset by fits, stops, starts and resets. Some of them are in a text chain, and from time to time, play the what-if game themselves. Just recently they talked about Wright. “Man, guys were not happy. I mean, can you imagine?” says former Rutgers guard Mike Sherrod, who left after three years and now runs youth programs at a YMCA. “Just playing devil’s advocate, you can see now the way he developed guards. You can clearly see that track record.
“But it’s easy, especially with hindsight, to see where all of the pieces might connect. I mean, it’s crazy, but when you’re making those decisions, you might know there will be some dominoes attached, but you can’t see far enough out. No way you can see all of this.’’
There is one more side to this story, one occasionally overlooked.
What if Wright said had no to Villanova? What would have happened to Villanova?
Like any good athletic director, Nicastro had a backup plan, another good coach at a small school (Richmond) who he thought could make the jump.
His name?
John Beilein.

[Hall2012]

Never knew the Seton Hall angle to this story - but my biggest takeaway is the first 2 words of it being "Olga's Diner" - wow - I grew up not even 5 minutes from there.

[GumbyDamnit!]

Never knew the Seton Hall angle to this story - but my biggest takeaway is the first 2 words of it being "Olga's Diner" - wow - I grew up not even 5 minutes from there.

Yeah, I worked for a company that had an office in Marlton and used to go to Olga's. That was before the "circle" got bull-dozed and replaced with something more sensible. Good place...

[Hall2012]

Never knew the Seton Hall angle to this story - but my biggest takeaway is the first 2 words of it being "Olga's Diner" - wow - I grew up not even 5 minutes from there.

Yeah, I worked for a company that had an office in Marlton and used to go to Olga's. That was before the "circle" got bull-dozed and replaced with something more sensible. Good place...

ugh - that circle was brutal!

[Novachap]

knew about the rutgers angle, but did not know that first class was so close to going to Hall... crazy. I always thought Fred Hill could have been a really good head coach. He could certainly recruit, sometimes there just isn't the right fit. Hope he gets another chance at some point.

[Novachap]

knew about the rutgers angle, but did not know that first class was so close to going to Hall... crazy. I always thought Fred Hill could have been a really good head coach. He could certainly recruit, sometimes there just isn't the right fit. Hope he gets another chance at some point.

Met him once, seemed like a good guy. How do you guys like him Hall?

[Xudash]

Gumby, posts like that are what make this site so enjoyable.

What a great read. Forgetting the parties involved, and given what is involved in achieving success in sports at this level, it certainly makes clear how things don't develop on a linear basis, and it reveals just how amazing certain decisions impact events down the road.


Really enjoyed it. Thanks.

[Hall2012]

knew about the rutgers angle, but did not know that first class was so close to going to Hall... crazy. I always thought Fred Hill could have been a really good head coach. He could certainly recruit, sometimes there just isn't the right fit. Hope he gets another chance at some point.

Met him once, seemed like a good guy. How do you guys like him Hall?

I don't honestly know much about him as far as coaching goes - recruiting was clearly his bread and butter, though he wasn't quite as successful in his second stint at the Hall. His one head coaching stint was obviously disastrous, but it was at Rutgers so it's hard to say he was really given a fair chance. It's still a tough job, but prior to the recent facility upgrades it was a tough a job as any place in the country. Just a career graveyard for basketball coaches. Mike Rice is another one who may be a successful head coach right now if he never took the RU job.

[DeltaV]

Interesting article; although I don't remember the students at least being apathetic (I showed up in 2001, just like him). We still tried to get any ticket we could, and snuck in when we couldn't get tickets. Then again, I was raised on Nova Basketball, and most of my friends were big ball guys as well, so that probably had something to do with it.

He did start with a splash; I'm pretty sure my freshman year was when they knocked off a ranked UCLA team in the Pavilion. That was my first time (of many) on the court as a student. Used to always try and sit behind the band...we never got there quite early enough for the front row student section seats, but if you were behind the band sometimes you ended up on TV.