Congratulations to Mike Miller. Hopefully wins will pour into Eastern’s program; Lantz Arena is rocking and rolling next year and our players continue their current academic success rate. But I can’t help but wonder if we acted like the majority of college athletic departments, this Monmouth native would not be the final result.

The search committee had a number of difficult decisions to make in a short process, and, eventually on Saturday morning, they unanimously came up with our new leader of the men’s basketball program. My claim is that Bud Fischer, committee member, and company shouldn’t have been stressed with the decision at all. Because the job I just described is solely the responsibility of the athletic director, or at least it should be or is everywhere else credible.

“I can understand (Illinois Athletic Director) Ron Guenther being the only man in the decision-making process but that is Illinois, and that’s not how we do things here,” Eastern director of athletics Rich McDuffie said. “We like to incorporate all aspects of the university into the hiring process.”

That’s all fine and good if academics and community image was a problem with the Rick Samuels tenure at Eastern. It wasn’t, and we all know the conflict was Rick simply didn’t win enough basketball games.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I saw two people speak at the press conference today, our AD and our new coach.

When Ron Guenther messes up, he takes the blame and attempts to make it his personal goal to solve the problem (hello my name is Ron Turner and to a certain extent Bill Self). When he succeeds Bruce Weber, he is able to say that’s not only our guy; that’s my guy.

I’d like to think the university would trust the leader of the department with personnel decisions seeing as how it is part of the job description.

“I’d like to think of myself as being medium when it comes to intelligence, but the more input I can receive is a great thing for everyone,” McDuffie said.

Part of what we pay McDuffie to do is fire and hire people, and it seems to me that by using the search committee, he only completely accomplished 50 percent of the deal.

Quite frankly, it’s not the job of Fischer, Mike Bradd, Brenda Ross and certainly not Bobby Catchings to find a basketball coach.

Not that the players shouldn’t have a say but the players attempted to hold the Indiana basketball program hostage unless Mike Davis was named coach.

“If coach Davis isn’t named head coach then I guess Indiana won’t have a basketball team,” Indiana senior guard Dane Fife said in a ESPN interview.

It worked, and I can’t see Hoosier fans seeing that move as anything but questionable. I can guarantee the ability to pick my boss would result in a great decrease in productivity.

When asking people inside the world of either athletics or academia why we conducted the biggest hire in recent Panther history this way, the only answer I get is, “Well, that’s how we do things here.”

Yes, because that’s a logical and proficient reason for doing something.

I can’t see him doing it simply for the public relations hit he would immediately suffer, but McDuffie can literally say after three years that Miller wasn’t a true fit and he wasn’t really one of my guys.

Faculty can protest along with raising hell; students can charge the AD with running an unfair process; and minority organizations can attempt to sue the university for illegal practices (they wouldn’t win), but McDuffie was hired to make decisive decisions as an executive not farm decisions out to people who hold no ramifications either way.

If you would like to contact Matthew Stevens he can be reached at [email protected].