Whit Babcock’s Hires, and Justin Fuente’s Twitter Game

Whit Babcock, Kenny Brooks
Whit Babcock and new women’s basketball coach Kenny Brooks.

Whit Babcock swung for the fences, again.  And he hit a home run (on paper), again.  Kenny Brooks was his #1 target to coach the women’s basketball team the entire time.  While there is no proof that Buzz Williams and Justin Fuente were his #1 targets during those coaching searches, they likely were.

Will and I heard from a source a few weeks before the women’s basketball season ended that Kenny Brooks was being pursued by Virginia Tech.  Earlier this week, an industry source told us that Babcock pretty much had Brooks locked up a few weeks before the season ended, and that Babcock also had Buzz Williams locked up before the 2013-14 season ended.

If all of that is true (and from what I can tell, it’s all at least partially true), that means Babcock is out there looking for coaches before he even fires the current coach.  In the James Johnson and Dennis Wolff situations, towards the end it was pretty obvious that they were going to get fired.

With Johnson, the Hokies won just six ACC games in his two years as a head coach.  He was handicapped by the completely overrated 2011 recruiting class, but he also had two NBA players in his first season as head coach (Erick Green and Jarrell Eddie) and yet only won four conference games that year.  I liked Johnson personally, and in fact he stopped by our Spring Game tailgate one year.  However, it was pretty clear that he wasn’t going to work out.

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