Fred Hoiberg is dead.
Relax, not literally. I meant the figurative kind. The college basketball version of Fred Hoiberg, if you will. Or, more properly, the idea of what a coach like Fred Hoiberg can do to help make college basketball a better, more exciting, and supremely enjoyable product.
No matter. The “Five Freds System” Hoiberg implemented with the Iowa State Cyclones is no more. He’s gone now. To a better place? Probably not. Nevertheless, a man who turned an Iowa State basketball program around using a foundation built on transfers, up-tempo hoops, and a charming smile is gone. Gone baby… gone.
There’s not a non-Iowa State alum or Ames resident who has been more infatuated with Fred Hoiberg than myself. I’ve written about him, approximately, eleventy-billion times. However, it wasn’t simply the man I adored — it had as much to do with the idea of him as it did with his ability to eerily resemble Aaron Eckhart.
College basketball is a game built from the insides of coaches’ craniums. It is a micromanaged game. Media and fans complain about it often: Coaches call too many timeouts, design too many poorly structured (and time consuming) offensive sets, and take away from players’ abilities. Basically, most college coaches dictate the college game and they do so to the detriment of the game.
Not Fred Hoiberg.
He let his players’ skills help build his system. What we will most remember him for at Iowa State, which is a large reason the Chicago Bulls were interested in him after firing a defense-minded Tom Thibodeau, was his up-tempo, three-point heavy, and ultimately entertaining offensive style of play. But it needs to be pointed out: If Hoiberg had a differently structured roster, he likely would have built an entirely different offensive system to best utilize his players’ talents.
It was my selfish, blind, and unrealistic hope that Hoiberg would continue to shy from returning to the NBA, I hoped he would show the world that coaches who called timeouts four seconds before a scheduled TV-timeout weren’t the only ones who could enjoy success, and that coaches who didn’t bury their players in forced systems could also make multiple runs deep into the NCAA tournament.
Everyone has to move on now, though. Despite the affection I have for him, I have publically acknowledged that going to Chicago wasn’t ideal for Hoiberg. That was before we even knew that the Bulls’ front-office have a set of expectations for the franchise that would even crush someone with Herculean shoulders. Now, not only is Hoiberg going to a team which had wild success under its previous coach (who got fired anyway), but people are going to anticipate the Fall of Fred — because lord knows, as much as everyone bashed Thibs for the last few seasons, as soon as he was fired everyone was acting like he was America’s golden child coach.
Iowa State has to move on as well. No more of us fans lusting over Hoiberg, the program, and the consumability that came with putting the Cyclones on our picture-boxes. Instead, we don’t know what is next. There won’t be a “name” coach out there who will take the job and satisfy the Iowa State fan base. Especially not this late in the game, in June.
The medical department at the university can conjure new formulas, reanimate the corpse of some long forgotten state hero, and that wouldn’t be enough. Hell, the world’s most famous carpenter can float down from the heavens, wearing the most dazzling edition of the new Nikes, declare himself new Cyclones coach, and we’d still be left with a bitter taste in our Fred-less mouths.
That is not to say both parties will be without success. Hoiberg can go to Chicago, possibly (magically even, if we are to believe how hard it is to) get along with management, and deliver the goods. Maybe his opposite approach and player-friendly system will help get the Bulls over the hump.
For Iowa State, who knows? Hiring one of the current assistants on staff seems like a logical move. Keep the Hoiberg philosophy, try to showcase the notion that it was the program, not Hoiberg, which made the Cyclones perennial darlings in the realm of college hoops. Jim Calhoun, and now Kevin Ollie, have long convinced young people to go play a winter sport in Storrs, Connecticut. Stranger things have happened.
As for general college basketball fans, as well as those who simply want the sport to be better, this is a huge loss for the game. We lost a good one: Maybe not a guy who was going to win multiple national titles or even make regular trips to the Final Four, but a coach who would let the game be played in a way which wouldn’t need to be fixed by a shot clock alteration, some rules change, or anything else that fans of the game argue about to the point of nausea on the mean streets of Twitter.
Fred Hoiberg, we will miss you. We will miss your coaching style, your smile, and your ability to turn doubters into believers, skeptics into people who praise, and NBA fans into hypocrites who turned the “he plays them way too many minutes” Thibs into a sympathetic figure.
Most of all, Fred, we will miss your ability to be a major hand in helping the game — if not evolve into a better game — at least not revert continuously to an era when coaches subjected viewers to the “The Coach X Show.” It was a fun, quick, and pleasurable few years, Fred Hoiberg.
Selfishly, and oddly enough, I hope you fail in the NBA — not because I want you to, but because your impact on basketball will be far greater at the college level than it will or could ever be at the NBA level, no matter how much success you can possibly have. We NEED you to fail.
Goodbye, Dreamy Fred Hoiberg. All the sad faces.
:*(