Our long national nightmare finally came to an end on Friday, when St. John’s announced that Mike Anderson was their newly hired men’s basketball coach.
Anderson’s hiring ends a disaster pile of a tire fire that was the coaching search. Chris Mullin stepped down on Tuesday, April 9th, and in the next nine days, at least seven guys were attached to the job search in a serious way. The seemingly most obvious choice of Iona’s Tim Cluess was in the picture from the start but that never seemed to go anywhere with the St. John’s administration. The most publicly humiliating responses came from Loyola-Chicago’s Porter Moser who interviewed for the job and then turned it down, as well as UMBC’s Ryan Odom who was connected to the job and then immediately got an extension from his athletic director.