By Aidan Joly
One thing you can say about the Memphis Tigers basketball program: it knows how to generate a headline.
You can say a lot of other things about the Memphis program and head coach Penny Hardaway since the program legend was hired in 2018.
The program generated another pair of headlines this week, the first being when Hardaway fired four assistant coaches, including lead assistant and former Western Kentucky head coach Rick Stansbury, two months before the season begins.
Later in the week, the program acknowledged to Sports Illustrated that it had received a letter from the NCAA alleging multiple rules violations, including improper payments to a player in 2022.
This is the latest in several issues for the program since Hardaway has been running it. That includes an 18-month investigation into the recruitment of James Wiseman, who played all of three games at Memphis, served a seven-game suspension, and then left the school in 2019-20. Hardaway was suspended for three games himself at the beginning of the 2023-24 season for recruiting and head coach responsibility violations. That came before Malcolm Dandridge was held out of the final five games of the season for academic reasons.
In the Wiseman case, Hardaway was cleared of any wrongdoing because he helped Wiseman with moving expenses before he became the head coach and did it as a philanthropist to Memphis, but the program was placed on probation (which lasts until September 2025) and fined.
More recently, the program had successfully recruited Mikey Williams, a top-ranked recruit who never played a game for Memphis after he was arrested on a gun charge. He is now a felon and will play for UCF this season.
According to The Daily Memphian, the program has churned through 41 employees, 17 of them in coaching or operations, since Hardaway was hired in 2018.
And all of this is for middling basketball. In six years with Hardaway at the helm, Memphis has only finished in the top two in the American Athletic Conference one time, has only made the NCAA tournament twice, and has only won one tournament game. He has an overall record of 133-62 and a league mark of 69-36.
He had replaced Tubby Smith, an honorable man whose integrity was never in question during his three-decade career, but who was simply not the right fit at Memphis. He was fired after two seasons and a 40-26 record (19-17 in league play).
The hiring of Hardaway, a native son and a beloved figure in the city, was supposed to generate excitement and fill the arena. At first it did, and the program had some juice for the first time since John Calipari was the head coach and Derrick Rose was the star player. The brand was nationally relevant again. But then weird thing after weird thing happened and the glamor went away as the embarrassing headlines started to take over.
That glamor on the court is still not there six years later. For Memphis, the headaches off the court should no longer be worth the mediocrity on the court.
AJ Hoops 