In this the second week of looking for a new coach to head the Razorback basketball program, a lot has been printed about the kind of coach Arkansas should get or look for.

Just what makes a good coach anyway?

Razorback coach John Pelphrey, who came in with an impeccable pedigree and who by all accounts is a fine person as well as coach, was fired after the Hogs lost the first game in the SEC tournament recently. While no one really faulted his coaching ability, the fact was that the basketball Hogs just have not been very good these past three years. With nearly 10,000 seats left vacant at Arkansas home games, when you multiply that number by the price of tickets and the number of games played at Bud Walton Arena, Arkansas was suffering boat loads of lost revenue with the state of the basketball program. Pelphrey will probably go on to be a success someplace else, something I hope will happen to such a class act as was his tenure at the university.

He publicly disagreed with his firing, but also announced publicly his respect for theschool’s decision. He felt he was a year away from a breakthrough season with a banner signing year of new recruits.

To his credit, he was urging the signees to stick to their commitment to the U of A and not let his departure affect their decisions.

The hottest name on the rumor board is Missouri’s Mike Anderson, a former 17-year assistant coach under former Hog boss Nolan Richardson.

Anderson was there for the glory years and plays the kind of game that Arkansas fans grew to love during the Nolan era.

Anderson wanted the chance to apply for the job when Richardson was fired but was denied the opportunity. Instead he went to Alabama-Birmingham and took a relative new basketball school to outstanding heights. His tenure there led to the Missouri job where he has led the Tigers to national rankingsalmost as soon as he arrived on campus.

Several news outlets have claimed that have “information” that the U of A and Anderson are working on the final details for his coming to Fayetteville. On the other hand, Anderson has denied having any interest in the Arkansas job and has stated several times that he was a Missouri Tiger and intended to retire there. On the fourth hand, there are Missouri Tiger players who claim to know that Anderson is leaving, and on the fifth hand, Anderson’s own son replied with expletives deleted “*** not ***,” which translated meant “my dad isn’t going anywhere!”

When it comes right down to it, the ability to successfully coach collegiate basketball probably depends more on your ability to recognize and obtain talent in the recruiting process than it might be in actually running the team.

Pelphrey, I think, recruited the wrong players. There were numerous players who came in highly touted but who had attitude problems. I liked Pelphrey’s approach to the game of basketball but his players couldn’t or wouldn’t cooperate. After watching a few games this past season on TV, I quit watching after watching one aggravating loss after another. It wasn’t so much about the losing per se, but rather how they were losing.

The interesting thing about Pelphrey’s predecessor, Stan Heath, was that he could recruit well but wasn’t especially good at running the team. The year that Pelphrey coached the players Heath recruited was his best year. If they could have kept Heath to do the recruiting and Pelphrey to do the game duties, now that would have a winning combination.

Track fans have noticed the precipitous decline of the Razorback success in track and field in the very first year following the retirement of Hall of Fame coach John Mc-Donnell. Having worked with coach McDonnell as one of his meet officials for almost 20 years, I had chances to ask him how he kept getting the quality athletes to feed his consistently championship teams. He said he looked at a student’s character as much as he did his talent. I saw that at work when there was a runner from the Springfield, Mo .,area who was probably the best high school runner (4:02 mile) since the days of Jim Ryan in the 1960s. Knowing the kid’s coach and knowing that the kid’s family was hoping to get an offer from Arkansas, I thought it was a done deal that he would be at Arkansas. When I asked McDonnell about that particular kid, he said he wasn’t interested as he thought the kid’s character would probably wreck his chances at collegiate success. The kid went elsewhere, got into trouble and was never a factor in collegiate track.

There was another kid from Virginia that McDonnell was interested in that wasn’t on the top of recruiting lists. Mc Donnell thought he was the best kid in the country but didn’t have a chance to show it in the track program he grew up in. Sure enough, in Seneca Lassiter’s freshman year, he was indeed a national champion. McDonnell could see a kid’s character and heart much better than maybe any other coach in history.

Another factor in successful coaching is getting your athletes to be better than they are. In McDonnel’s years at Arkansas, I witnessed athletic feats and heroics that while at the time seemed highly unlikely but were also somehow inevitable. Among the 42 national championships won by the Razorbacks, a bunch of them were upsets with sports writers predicting that “this is the year the Razorbacks lose”only to see some Hog athlete come through in the clutch.

In the last SEC meet held at Fayetteville with McDonnell coaching, Tennessee was the top-ranked team and with a big finish in the 200 meters, it seemed they had the numbers to just about clinch the title.

It seemed so much so, the Vol runners began a victory lap around the track to celebrate their title.

The 5000 was the next to last event in the meet. This particular year, the Hogs weren’t loaded with 5K runners and weren’t expected to score enough points to offset the Volunteer lead. After meeting with McDonnell and their observation of Tennessee’s premature celebration, the Hogs went out and scored five runners in the top eight finishers, scoring just enough points to erase Tennessee’s lead and claim another title.

In contrast, this past month Arkansas was projected to have the talent to finish as high as third in the men’s’ national NCAA indoor meet.

They finished 22nd.

Hopefully, the next basketball coach at Arkansas will have that rare ability to see an athlete’s true potential - and be able to coach it.

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Editor’s note: John McGee is the art teacher at Pea Ridge elementary schools, coaches elementary track and writes a regular sports column for The Times. He can be contacted through The Times at [email protected].

Sports, Pages 6 on 03/23/2011