Columnist Dean Juipe: Forget title, Good is just filling in

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2000 | 9:51 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

Supposedly out of respect for Max Good -- and to keep media speculation to a minimum -- UNLV didn't insert the "interim" tag in his updated title. He is, according to the university, the new men's basketball head coach.

But don't be fooled.

Upgraded Tuesday from assistant coach to head coach after the school fired Bill Bayno, Good is very much the interim coach of the Rebels. As of this writing, few if any Las Vegans or friends of the UNLV program will be satisfied with Good as the team's permanent head coach.

From all accounts, Good is a decent man and he may qualify as a basketball expert and authority. Yet his performance as an assistant with the Rebels under Bayno is open to question (given the team's poor performance this season, if nothing else) and, maybe more importantly, he does not qualify as the big-name coach the team's fans so badly want and desire.

They want a known commodity.

They want someone they've already heard of.

They want a coach with star power, one who can get into a recruit's living room on his reputation alone.

Good is none of the above.

As such, he is arguably lacking a significant portion of the criteria necessary to succeed in the very position he currently holds. The UNLV administrators can say what they want, but the appointment of Good leaves the impression that he's merely holding the wheel until someone better comes along.

In addition, it's said Bayno was supportive of the administration's decision to name Good as head coach of the Rebels for at least the remainder of the season, yet one has to wonder about that, too. After all, the way we remember it, Good was added to the UNLV staff for two reasons: He was labeled a solid X's and O's man, and he was going to bring one and maybe two prominent recruits with him from his Maine Central prep school.

Well, the Rebels don't look any better at X's and O's than they did before Good arrived and, worse yet, he failed to deliver the recruits. As such, a true skeptic could maintain that Good hasn't brought anything positive to the program and Bayno could privately feel that adding Good to his staff was a wash or that it maybe even backfired.

Of course Good could prove to be a godsend and he has the remainder of the current season to show his abilities on the floor. But questions pertaining to his recruiting prowess cannot be answered for some time and, the less patient of us can say, UNLV can't wait around to see how it plays out.

Coaches with far superior resumes and backgrounds than the one Good possesses are already available and still more will be looking for a new challenge by the end of the season. Good -- whose only collegiate head coaching experience was a nondescript 1981-89 stint at Eastern Kentucky -- comes up short in comparison to many of the men who will be available next spring.

Only a long, long, long winning streak by the 3-4 Rebels is apt to save Good's job as head coach -- and such a streak seems unlikely given the team's disjointed showing thus far.

Good deserves everyone's thanks and support for stepping in and helping out, but, titles aside, he's only a short-term solution.

He's an interim head coach.