The downfall of Avery Johnson’s tenure as Alabama’s basketball coach was precipitated by the absence of the very same characteristics he promised would define the program he had been hired to lead four years ago.
“Our fans can expect a team…that’s well-prepared and plays with passion, with high energy,” Johnson said in a statement on April 7, 2015, the eve of his introductory news conference.
Juxtaposed against the stinging indictment Norfolk State’s Steven Whitley delivered Wednesday, when he noted the Crimson Tide was “lagging around” in pregame warmups before its shocking one-point loss to the Spartans in the first round of the NIT, Johnson’s words now seem sadly ironic.
The coach who arrived at Alabama with so much enthusiasm that he proclaimed he wanted to make the Tide “the leader of the college basketball world” looked defeated as he left the Coleman Coliseum floor for what figures to be the final time. AL.com reported Thursday night that Johnson and the university are negotiating a buyout that would end his tenure in Tuscaloosa, which will be remembered as a disappointing chapter in this program’s history.
In the shadow of the comatose Anthony Grant era that featured one NCAA Tournament bid, Johnson was tasked with making the Crimson Tide a March Madness fixture.
Yet he could only match Grant, taking Alabama to the Big Dance once.
Upon being hired, Johnson was also charged with improving the talent level.
But several of his best players left before their abilities could be fully maximized, including current NBA rookie Collin Sexton and Virginia transfer Braxton Key.
And as his time at Alabama was set to begin, Johnson was expected to capitalize on his fame and pro pedigree in a basketball conference that had attenuated in recent seasons.
But the same year he arrived at the Capstone, so too did Ben Howland at Mississippi State, Rick Barnes at Tennessee and Mike White at Florida. All of a sudden, the profile of the SEC was raised, the quality of teams improved, and Johnson was just another notable coach in a league full of them.
It was no surprise then that Alabama, like the former point guard appointed to lead it, remained lost in the crowded landscape of college basketball and beset by the kind of inconsistency that typically defines a team indistinguishable from the next. In the last four seasons, the longest SEC winning streak the Tide pieced together was five victories in a row back in February 2016. That was during Johnson’s first year, when Alabama was in the throes of transition.
But as the seasons went by, the Tide couldn’t build on whatever momentum it had accrued and struggled to free itself from the bonds of mediocrity. Johnson tinkered with his rotations, trying to find the answer. During the 2017-2018 season, when Sexton was the star attraction, he penciled in 13 different starting lineups.
It was a troubling sign that revealed deeper issues within a program that lacked an identity and was mired in the badlands between the NCAA Tournament and the NIT with its victory total always approaching a range between 18 and 20 wins.
Yet the most disturbing harbinger would come in the last few months as Alabama dropped games it shouldn’t have lost and squandered large leads due, in large part, to a lack of effort and discipline.
The Tide was ranked 243rd in the country in second-half point margin, which highlighted Alabama’s inability to author a complete performance.
“I feel like our energy be up and down,” senior forward Donta Hall said after the Tide was eliminated in the SEC tournament earlier this month. “That’s pretty much what our inconsistency is. Probably like attitude, stuff like that, commitment.”
It was a damning comment made by one of Johnson’s players and a prelude to the miserable final act of the coach’s run at Alabama.
In the end, Johnson couldn’t keep the promises he made. And now the man who told Alabama fans four years ago to “buckle up,” is preparing to do so himself once he climbs into the ejector seat and blasts off from Tuscaloosa.
Rainer Sabin is an Alabama beat writer for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @RainerSabin