The U will have some decisions to make this offseason, what is the best path forward?
If you had asked any reasonable Minnesota basketball fan on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025 about the likelihood of Ben Johnson coaching another year at the U, the likely response would have been “absolutely not.” The Gophers were 8-9 on the year, 0-6 in the Big Ten and looking they they might not win more than a couple games during conference play. Dire times.
A flip switched after that Maryland loss, as you well know, and the Gophers have turned the season around from “abject failure” on the Suck-O-Meter and put themselves in position to finish somewhere around “respectable.”
I shared my thoughts earlier this year about the NIL/transfer landscape and how it has ruined the sport, which I still feel strongly about. However, this midseason turnaround got me thinking about Ben Johnson and his performance, now in year four, among all of the new external factors that impact on-court success. And then, in a recent tweet, Seth Davis called Johnson an “elite coach”, which really raised my eyebrows. In short, my question has been, “are we sure that Ben Johnson isn’t actually doing a good job?”
It’s a topic that could get me laughed out of the room, and I understand that. BUT I’M JUST ASKING THE QUESTION SO HOLD ON A MINUTE [Tim Robinson ITYSL voice]. Here we have a coach who is basically given nothing to work with each year, while his peers are sitting with tons of goodies. NIL spend is lacking, fan support is lacking, good players are transferring somewhere else for more money, etc. Is this team, at 7-11 in the conference, actually exceeding expectations?
It’s a question I posed to GopherNation, and I thought we could have an open conversation about it. Here we go:
Zips: I have complicated feelings about Ben. On one hand he has been objectively bad for much of the time he’s been here. But I feel like there is a lot of fine print. This team has no business being 7-11 in the conference and still winning games after the start they had. And players seem to like playing for him. In other words, I’m stunned that he has turned around a team as lifeless as the Gophers were, and that should be getting some attention. I mean, look at Rutgers.
Is he continually getting juice from a juice-less orange and we should actually be giving him credit?
GopherNation: The problem really isn’t talent or how much juice he’s getting out of his roster, the problem is that Johnson’s teams routinely struggle to execute on offense (both during long stretches of games as well as in critical end-of-game situations). And they have never really established a system of being particularly good at anything. None of his teams rebound well, none of them defend the three, none of them demonstrate any offensive efficiency and they all finish near the bottom of the NCAA in free throw percentage.
In short, his teams have no identity.
Zips: Here’s where this is coming from. I look at his first season, 2021-22, and he had a team of low-major grad transfers (big ups Luke Loewe) legitimately receiving AP Top 25 votes well into December, though they ran out of gas. I look at ‘23-’24 and he was clearly on the upswing, and even won a game in the NIT. Now they are picking off good teams with suspicious regularity, Dawson Garcia is one of the best players in the conference, and guys like Lu’cye Patterson and Frank Mitchell are playing much better than they did earlier in the season. This is after his roster was absolutely decimated by transfers (again!) and with a relatively limited NIL war chest. We’re clearly seeing in-season growth for the second year in a row, with basically a completely different roster.
Doesn’t that count for anything? Could a different coach have done better in that scenario?
GopherNation: I would agree that over his four seasons Johnson has done more with less in two of those seasons. Certainly the expectations were extremely low for his first season and this current season, and expectations have been surpassed. But let’s not forget that in year two he was bringing back an All-Conference player in Jamison Battle while adding Dawson Garcia and a rather talented freshman class. That team was 2-17 in conference with the lowest KenPom rating since it has been tracked. And last year’s team was easily his most talented team, with the most continuity from the prior year and an NBA talent in Cam Christie, and yet they had some confounding losses en route to a 9-11 Big Ten season.
Too many times this season the offense disappears. Not because of missed shots or good defense by the opponent, but often because the team’s best player goes multiple possessions without a touch and the team is passive until the shot-clock is winding down.
Zips: I’m not trying to put lipstick on a pig here and suggest that this basketball program is in good shape, because it’s not. I guess my point is maybe it’s not the coach, but the system he’s living in. Heck, even Tony Bennett, former head coach of Virginia suddenly retired this year because, “he wasn’t suited to navigate the current landscape of college basketball.” And that was at Virginia — a healthy program!
We’ve given Johnson a box of IKEA materials with no instructions and one Allen wrench to work with, and I’m wondering if we’ve failed to notice that he’s actually finding a way to put it together after some trial and error.
GopherNation: You are completely right that the system is a mess right now and it makes things very difficult for a program like Minnesota. We are not putting in the necessary resources to field a competitive Big Ten program.
It is the age-old chicken and egg question. Do we need to field a winning team to generate some excitement that leads to more investment into the program? Or do we need to invest heavily and expect that the results will come?
Personally, I think we need to find someone who is really good at building things without instructions and can do magic with an Allen wrench. Give me a coach who runs a program with an identity. A coach who has a record of establishing a strong culture, a specific system and he can build his program around those two things. I really like Coach Johnson, but I don’t think has an identity or a strong culture for this program.
Zips: Let’s say this team finishes at 8-12 or 9-11 in the conference. Given where they started, that would be a pretty strong finish. Should that buy him another year? His records, if we are being honest, are not that dissimilar to Richard Pitino’s.
GopherNation: I’m not sure that Johnson and Pitino are putting out similar teams, even if the record is relatively close at times. Pitino’s teams finished in the top 52 five different times over his nine seasons. Johnson has never finished higher than 78th. KenPom ranking isn’t the only metric but Pitino had better recruiting classes and made two NCAA Tournaments in his first six seasons.
Pitino had some issues, but he was essentially one bad recruiting decision away from being a pretty successful coach at Minnesota. I have not seen any indication that Johnson is close to turning this around.
Zips: Of course you can look at this from a different angle. Maybe a coaching change would be welcome simply to shake things up. Where do you stand on that?
GopherNation: I have seen recently the discussion about if it would be better to buy-out Johnson for nearly $3 million or to stick with Johnson and invest that much back into the program (or straight into NIL). It is expensive to fire a coach and considering that this program is already working with limited resources, maybe it is worth it to give Johnson another year and some NIL money to spend.
But I think the peripherals are too strong against Johnson and it is time for a change. There is no guarantee that the next hire will be any better, but I believe that Coyle will have learned his lesson and will make a better hire this time around.