Many fans of the Florida A&M University basketball team are overjoyed with the news of coach Eugene Harris being fired on Thursday.
His mediocre 46-80 record during his four year tenure at the university proved to be quality enough evidence for President Ammons and Athletic Director Derek Horne to pull the trigger on his termination.
To be honest, the general Tallahassee community seems to be excited about the opportunity to see the team head in a different direction.
After three consecutive 20-plus loss seasons, I haven’t found an adequate argument for him to stay.
The standard was set pretty high by his predecessor, Mike Gillespie a.k.a. “The White Shadow”, because of his two NCAA postseason appearance in six years. Harris had yet to make one, being bounced in the opening round of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference the past two seasons.
Hopefully, the school finds a more suitable replacement to take the reins of our team. The newly-designed Al Lawson Center deserves more of a leader for the team, instead of a guy walking up and down the sidelines, scuffing up its floor making random substitutions that go against the flow of the game.
Word of mouth has suggested that against the previous search committee’s wishes, president Ammons hand-picked Harris after the scandal that sent Gillespie away. Maybe one of the options for this not to become a reoccurring trend should be to keep this type of business in the hands of the athletics department.
I’m not a good candidate to represent the portion of the Rattler community that feels the move was unjustified seeing as I was never a Harris fan. I am, however, a fan of basketball-good basketball- and nothing would make me happier as a fan, student, and sports editor than to see our team be competitive.
One of the things that I will say though, a four-paragraph letter stating the reasoning behind your being let go is not the optimum way to go out. They could have taken the FCAT approach and used an intro, three reasons why and a conclusion to let me know that he was inadequate.
He can walk away holding his head up high though. The school terminated him in the fourth year of his five-year contract, so they still owe him $150,000.
Now if I am to be fired in my future, that’s the way I want to go out.