http://www.nypost.com/p/blogs/vaccaro/role_wednesday_whacks_and_joba_john_RHghUTOjponL1avF1V6s2IBy now, it has to be abundantly clear to the men who run St. John's basketball what needs to be done. Nobody wants to see Norm Roberts , a good man who rescued the program from the depths of shame and indignity, lose his job. Everyone would have liked to see him author a fairy tale story here, the Queens College kid who used to scrimmage against the great St. John's players of the '80s restoring the Red Storm to glory.
It would have made for a hell of a story.
But we're not getting that story. And it becomes clearer to everyone who cares about this program that under Norm, we're never getting that story. It's been almost six full years now, time for Roberts to get a full class and a half under his belt. If it was going to get turned around on his watch, it would be turned around by now.
Instead, what we get is what may well be the most dispiriting loss of Roberts entire tenure last night, an 84-72 schooling at Rutgers that confirms every pessimistic suspicion about the Johnnies, now 12-9 overall and 2-7 in the Big East: that their pre-Big East record -- though fortified by nice wins against Siena and Temple -- was mostly built on sand. And that right now, the only school in the entire league that the erstwhile Redmen can truly look down upon is their fellow Vincentians at DePaul -- which, by the way, has already fired its coach. When even Rutgers -- where the general assumption is that Freddy Hill is a fired coach walking -- can beat you, you know you've reached a genuine nadir.
There are larger issues at stake here than simply firing the coach at St. John's, of course. At the top of the list is the question of whether anyone can get it done on Utopia Parkway any longer, whether the appeal of New York and the Garden even exists anymore, if the very notion of elite big-time basketball is even possible at a school that lost its greatest recruiting advantage -- the housing stipend -- years ago. At some point, we're all going to have to stop blaming the reign of error of Mike Jarvis and wonder if the problems aren't too great for any one man to solve.
But first the men who run St. John's have to try and locate that one man. They simply cannot keep hoping that Roberts is the answer. His teams play very, very hard -- although a sure sign of a losing program is when the best thing you can say about it is that the players don't quit. He has made small recruiting inroads -- but, again, this is six years now. St. John's will never have to face the public scorn of having lost patience too quickly.
If anything, they've erred repeatedly on the side of patience. To the growing chagrin of the fans, alumni and local basketball junkies who used to follow this team as an extension of their own personal theologies. These are the people who've been all but shooed away as St. John's keeps bringing Norm back for more. It's beginning to border on athletic malpractice.
There will be no shortage of candidates to ponder. Some will call for Mark Jackson , short on experience but long on local roots. Jim Baron , a son of Brooklyn who's performed miracles at Rhode Island, was the best candidate when Roberts was hired and remains the best candidate still. Tom Pecora has been saddled with a maddening eligibility issue all year with one of his top recruits, which has probably kept Hofstra out of the CAA race, and he has a thousand local ties that would surely stabilize the listing ship. And whatever you may feel about the Ivy League, it's impossible to see what Steve Donahue has done at Cornell and not understand that someone is going to soon give him the chance to see if that transfers to a power conference. There are others.
Norm did what he was hired to do. He restored a measure of honor to St. John's, dissolved the dark clouds that for so long hovered over the program. He has some money coming to him, and a great reputation in the coaching community; he won't be out of work long. But the time has come for St. John's to tell him what saloon patrons have been told at closing time for years: you don't have to go home. But you can't stay here.