Marquette’s basketball season starts on Friday, and you don’t need Steven Speilberg’s imagination to picture how it will end.
With speculation about Buzz Williams leaving Marquette for a bigger school. Or for a school near his home state of Texas. Or for a school that offers him enough money to buy a tropical island with sweet tea waterfalls.
Because if Williams’ latest team lives up to expectations, if the Golden Eagles reach yet another NCAA Tournament, his fourth trip in four seasons as head coach, some other school will assuredly make a run at him. And reporters and bloggers will write about how much sense the move makes. And Marquette fans, so familiar with this script that’s starred so many different coaches, will get nervous about it all over again.
But to hear Williams tell it, there’s one simple way those fans can avoid the whole circus act.
They can believe him.
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| Buzz Williams (middle row, far right) and his Marquette Golden Eagles. |
Seems like just yesterday that the circus was in town. The Golden Eagles were in the midst of their Sweet 16 run at the 2011 NCAA Tournament, and running right beside them was another round of widespread speculation about Buzz’s future. Word was Oklahoma, Texas A&M… heck, every school this side of Juilliard was interested in his coaching services. And Juilliard may have joined the fray, too, if not for Buzz’s karaoke tapes.
So a few weeks ago at Marquette’s preseason media day, I asked Williams what he’d say to people who are surprised that he’s still the coach at Marquette.
He gave a three-minute answer. Downright brief compared to the nine-plus minutes of autobiographical soliloquy he delivered during that NCAA Tourney run. And during those three media day minutes, he touched on moments of annoyance, incredulity, promises and homespun wisdom.
But the upshot of the answer was this.
“I’m not leaving.”
And nobody should be surprised that he’s still the coach at Marquette.
“I said the first time that I ever spoke in a microphone at Marquette … I don’t want this to be about me. And I still don’t.”
And he was just getting started.
“When all of that was swirling around as we left to go to [the tournament] last year, because I said to the media, ‘I don’t want to talk about it because we’re still in the season,’ I think everybody perceived that to be, ‘Buzz is leaving because Buzz won’t answer the question.’
“No,” he continued. “I answered the question the first day I was hired. It’s not me. It’s those kids. And it’ll always be those kids.”
He’s not the first coach to say such words. He won’t be the last. But those kids sure think he means them.
“Never asked him about it,” Jae Crowder said. “I just believed in him.”
“Didn’t think he was leaving at all,” said Jamil Wilson. “Buzz told us his kids are gonna go to high school here. Told us that flat out, and this is way before his contract was even brought up.”
His youngest child, if you want to do the math, is 2.
Maybe by the time young Addyson reaches elementary school, the landscape will have changed. Maybe by then, Williams can point to a long enough track record of ignoring the coaching carousel that it will convince others to ignore it, too. Yes, even when the carousel spins through his home state of Texas.
“I don’t ever want to be labeled, and just because I’m from Texas doesn’t mean I should work in Texas,” Williams said. “I’m not leaving Junior Cadougan. I’m not leaving Chris [Otule]. I’m not leaving Jae. I’m not leaving DJ [Darius Johnson-Odom]. And no dollar amount is gonna make me leave them.
“And that may mean we get our ass beat all year long this year, I don’t know,” he continued. “But like momma says, ‘Don’t mess with happy,’ and I’m happy.”
And with that, Marquette fans, the equation is easy. You either take the man at his word or you don’t. You either believe Williams is just another college coach, or you believe that he’s your college coach until the Williams home is filled with caps and gowns.
As for those who don’t believe?
“People will constantly say ‘they’ don’t believe you,” Williams told me last week. “And I always tell our guys, here’s the hardest thing: You have to identify who ‘they’ is.
“I have to be accountable in my relationship with Christ, with my wife, with my children and with our program. So when you say ‘they,’ who is ‘they’?
“I don’t mean it as a jerk, but ‘they’ is not in the world I live in.”
No, come Friday night, that world is still Marquette.
Believe it or not.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter, where I tweet as howiemag. And listen to me chat sports with Mitch Teich once a month on WUWM’s “Lake Effect.”
