A day after Arkansas State men's basketball Coach John Brady announced that this would be his last season, Athletic Director Terry Mohajir said he has the benefit of time in finding Brady's successor.
Brady announced after his team's 81-37 victory over NAIA Lyon College on Monday night that he would not pursue a contract extension at the end of the season and his tenure in Jonesboro would end after eight seasons.
Mohajir said Tuesday that he was not surprised when Brady told him earlier Monday of his intentions, but complimented Brady, who is 111-110 leading the Red Wolves, a tenure that has included two Sun Belt division titles but no NCAA Tournament appearances.
As for finding a new coach, Brady's Monday announcement means Mohajir's search can officially begin now. The job is officially accepting applications, and Mohajir said his target date for a hire is April 1, one day after a contract Brady signed in 2011 is set to expire.
Mohajir, who at this time does not plan to use a search firm, said it's possible he could make a hire before April 1.
"There's no urgency at all," Mohajir said. "I can't give you a real timeline right now. I can tell you I have someone zeroed in, and in a month it could be different."
Mohajir has already done a handful of coaching searches in three years at ASU. He hired football coaches Bryan Harsin and Blake Anderson, but this search won't be nearly as rushed as those, when Mohajir had to beat a clock to get a coach in for a pivotal recruiting season.
Mohajir has experience with basketball searches. He was on the teams that hired Dean Demopoukos and Rich Zvosec, now an associate athletic director at ASU, while an assistant athletic director at Missouri-Kansas City. While he was an associate athletic director at Florida Atlantic, Mohajir helped hire Matt Doherty and Mike Jarvis.
While some of the core traits Mohajir sought in a football coach lead him to Harsin in 2012 and Anderson in 2013, some of those traits won't apply in the search for a basketball coach. For instance, one of Anderson's strengths when hired in December 2013 was his knowledge of the regional recruiting base. In basketball, Mohajir said he doesn't think such knowledge is as important.
What won't change, Mohajir said, is what he thinks ASU men's basketball can become.
"We will hire a guy with the intent to compete immediately for the Sun Belt championship," he said.
ASU has been to only one NCAA Tournament in its history -- 1999 -- and hasn't been to the final of the Sun Belt tournament since 2007.
Mohajir said improvements to the Convocation Center will be used in a pitch to potential coaches. Since Mohajir's arrival, improvements have been made to seating, the weight room and locker room, and new video boards have been installed.
As for Brady, Mohajir said he is a "very accomplished coach" and Mohajir has "nothing but respect for him." Mohajir said he had not yet made a decision on whether to extend Brady's contract, but that evaluation was ongoing.
"Everyone was under evaluation," Mohajir said. "He was in the last year of his contract, and I had no preconceived notions of what we were going to do. We were going to see how it played out."
Brady, 61, said Monday night that Mohajir did not pressure him to make the announcement and that he decided to make it known that this season would be his last in part to avoid putting Mohajir "in any kind of position where he feels like he can't do what he wants to do."
Brady is 392-326 in his 25th season overall. He went 192-139 in 11 seasons at LSU, which included a 2006 Final Four berth and ended in his firing in 2008. He was hired at ASU a week later. His best seasons came in 2012-2013 and 2013-2014, when both teams won 19 games. The Red Wolves fell a game short of reaching the Sun Belt tournament final in both years.
Brady, whose team plays at Savannah State tonight, said that he'll go about this season "business as usual."
"I'm going to coach them, I'm going to fight it, I'm going to do whatever I think is necessary based on the experience I can draw from to make this team the best it can be," Brady said. "That's the road we're taking."
Sports on 11/18/2015