When it’s all said and done, there are only so many ways to do an introductory press conference and even fewer things you can really say during them.
Penn State Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Sandy Barbour can only say she’s excited about hiring new men’s basketball coach Micah Shrewsberry so many ways. That is why she hired him after all, because she thinks he’s going to be good at his job.
“It’s important to note through those conversations, through those hundreds of conversations,” Barbour said of her months long coaching search. “There was no one, not one person that we talked to, that didn’t believe we could achieve our stated goals. We can and will do in men’s basketball at Penn State what we’ve done almost entirely across the board in Penn State Athletics, and that is to compete for Big Ten titles, and to get to the NCAA tournament consistently.”
[File this one away for a few years from now. As an aside, then AD Tim Curley made no such promises during the introduction of Pat Chambers. In fact the word NCAA in reference to the postseason was uttered twice during that press conference. Albeit in fairness to Barbour, her claims are more likely now than they were a decade ago.]
As for Shrewsberry he can only say so many glowing things about his new employer and express his excitement about his new job so many different ways. He can only promise so many times to bring in players that fit the school’s ethos and will ‘make everyone proud.’ One might run out of words to describe how the Nittany Lions will play tough and move the ball. All told, everyone promises great things in the future because nobody goes to an introductory press conference to sell the prospect of failure.
Everyone is excited, everyone is hopeful for the future, because that’s the whole point.
So it’s the little things in moments like this that stand out in an ocean of cliches and predictable streams of consciousness.
“I want to be an underdog type of team,” Shrewsberry said on Tuesday as he opined on the future. “[…]we’re going to keep that underdog mentality. We’re going to keep that chip on our shoulder mentality. And I think you succeed in that way.”
While this certainly falls near the Tree-of-Cliche, it’s a deeper understanding of the situation that lifts this statement to the surface of a half hours worth of talking. If anything it speaks to Shrewsberry’s understanding of the situation, the idea that simply having a new head coach won’t really change things over night. The Nittany Lions are still going to struggle at times, that they’re still going to have to fight on the court and on the recruiting trail to hang with the bigger names in the Big Ten. If he had been hired to coach Kentucky he might talk about national titles and flash and speed, but – as is well documented – the colors might be similar, but Penn State is no Kentucky.
It’s of course reasonable to assume Shrewsberry would have a good grasp on the job he just agreed to take, but new head coaches are often ripe to optimism and a certain unspoken expectation that their touch will change *everything* in an instant. If nothing else, who could blame Shrewsberry for jumping at the chance to coach in the Big Ten carrying along a polite amount of disregard for the pitfalls. There is a fitting paradox to Penn State basketball’s existence at this moment, hiring a coach that makes fans happy and simultaneously concerned success might result in losing that same coach. But not quite making good on promises has long been the program’s existential weakness.
In reality Shrewsberry takes on his new job with the knowledge he had from the vantage point of the opposition at Purdue, it’s not lost on him what his old program had – and what Penn State’s program didn’t or still doesn’t. And that perspective can be powerful, because if anything, the person who has recruited, coached and schemed Penn State might be the most apt to understand its shortcomings from a new angle.
There is also the matter of Penn State’s own universe, and the Nittany Lions’ place in it.
“First and foremost, his energy, his excitement,” Shrewsberry said of Penn State football coach James Franklin. “Like, I know my place in this university. I need him to help us recruit. And that’s huge for me I love it, I love college football. I’m a huge college football fan, and I don’t watch much NFL football unless it’s my favorite team, but I watch college football and being able to have a man like James Franklin to learn from, to pick his brain to the good and the bad of this place. […] I’m just thrilled to have someone like that, as well as the other coaches. I think it’s a huge family in this athletic department that we can all work together.”
There is something genuinely comical in a moment like this, not because Shrewsberry is wrong or that Penn State is at fault, but simply because it is a comment so incredibly accurate to the plight of the program. For better or for worse, Penn State football is the priority and Penn State basketball’s needs and whims are somewhere further down the line. It simply is what it is, a fact that will only remain true as Penn State continues to navigate the financial fallout and ongoing ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic. Should it be this way? That’s not the point, but an immediate understanding of the totem pole is nothing if not a nail-on-head moment right off the bat.
The challenge for Shrewsberry in this light will be operating from the standpoint of both acceptance and boundary pushing the status-quo, he will have to figure out how to make the most of his new world, one in which he is no longer at Butler, or Purdue or working the bench with the Boston Celtics. His job will be a grind, occasionally thankless, sometimes underfunded and often outgunned by virtue of circumstance. It just is what it is, and to a certain extent a result of financial pragmatism more than any intentional handicapping by Barbour or her predecessors. Shrewsberry will also have the ability to work with the benefit of the program’s growth over the past decade, the freedom of the transfer portal and the potential for early recruiting success to accelerate the timeline.
And in a moment full of optimism and looking towards the future, it’s Shrewsberry’s embrace of those two components – that it ain’t easy winning in the Big Ten, and that he isn’t the biggest fish in the local ocean – that might be the biggest sign that he understands what he’s getting himself into.
Which is good news for anyone hoping to see Shrewsberry succeed, because a man who signs up for a challenge he understands often has a plan for how he might overcome it.
