Chris Walker | Just do it already!

I have always been one to want Chris Walker hired as our head coach at Texas Tech since midway through our season. He has what it takes to coach the players. It seems as though the Tech players respond to his ways of coaching. When Billy Gillispie resigned from Tech the program was left in a hot mess. Walker took the situation on his shoulders and gave the team legs to stand on. He helped guide the squad to be positive and keep practicing hard. He made their future bright again.

He has now had one full season as interim head coach in the Big 12 under his belt to go along with his 17 seasons of experience as an assistant at Tech, Loyola Marymount, Vanderbilt, Pepperdine, Villanova, UMass, and New Mexico. I think he has had enough time and been around enough basketball programs to figure out the intricacies that a basketball head coach faces while running a program.

He was a terrific point guard at Villanova and helped lead his team to the NCAA tournament twice. He also helped lead Nova to the NIT twice. He knows a thing or two firsthand as a player about postseason tournaments. He can relate to the difficult situations that D-1 basketball individual players encounter in their college career. He can continue to keep helping them throughout the entire process.

We have all heard a lot of names come through the media recently since the end of the Big 12 tournament in regards to the head coaching position at Texas Tech. We know that Tech has fired most all the basketball coaching staff with exception to Chris Walker. It seems that everyone is perplexed by the events that have taken place, because why would we retain Coach Walker if we weren’t going to hire him? Most of the names that have been mentioned by the media have come back and basically nicely said that they were not interested in the job. I’m sure the wheels have been turning behind the scenes of the program to keep this interview process alive, but why keep moving them if you can stop it already?

I know that Tech is in the running and media news broke that 5-star shooting guard recruit Keith Frazier had verbally committed to Tech. Today there are reports that he will delay his decision until after the McDonald’s All-American game. Regardless of his decision, what we had been hearing all along is that Frazier would not come to Tech unless Walker is named head coach. It is speculated that Frazier’s coach at Kimball High School (Dallas), Royce “Snoop” Johnson, will accompany Frazier to Tech and be placed as part of the assistant coaching staff if Walker is named head coach. There has been some discussion amongst Tech fans that Snoop Johnson has a somewhat dirty past… check it out. The other question that arises is should we take a high school coach to get a 5-star recruit as part of a “package” deal?

I’ve thought about for a while and I can say that I’m okay with it. I will take a “package” deal to get Keith Frazier. Other much more prominent D-1 basketball schools have done similar things in the past and it seems to have turned out fine for them. Is it no coincidence that Larry Brown, the SMU head coach and the other school in the running to get Keith Frazier is around this whole thing? Remember, Brown is the one when coaching at Kansas who hired Danny Manning’s father to be an assistant coach to get Manning on his squad back in the day. I have no evidence, but I would bet a million VTM bucks Brown and SMU have told Snoop Johnson and Keith Frazier that they would love to have them in a “package” deal. So, is it wrong for us to do it if SMU is probably going to do the same damn thing? No, it’s not in my opinion.

Back to my main point, with or without Keith Frazier… or even Wannah Bail in the picture for Texas Tech basketball hoops I think Chris Walker is the right man for the job. Why don’t we just go ahead and hire him already? Is Tech trying to save face and not let it seem like one recruit can control the outcome of the situation? Is it the AD or someone in the administration at Tech holding up the process? I really don’t care about all the crap going on, I just want Chris Walker to be named the head basketball coach so we can all move forward and start preparing for next season. Walker wants the job, he is the best man for the job, he seems to be the only one interested in the job, and everyone knows that he will most likely get the job. I wish it would happen already!