March 28, 2016
Vanderbilt athletics director David Williams held a press conference at 3 p.m. CT Monday afternoon to discuss the men’s basketball program. 
WATCH
Athletics Director David Williams
Opening statement:
Thank you all for coming. As you know yesterday morning, the University of Pittsburgh announced that Kevin Stallings would be their new basketball coach. Kevin spoke to me about three hours before that very early Sunday morning. He told me that he had been offered the job and was going to take it. Pitt had reached out to us earlier on Wednesday or Thursday to ask permission. Our general position is that we don’t stand in the way of people talking and so we were aware that they were talking to Coach Stallings. So as always Coach Stallings did everything in the open as it relates to us. I want to thank Coach Stallings as I did in our statement for his 17 years here. That in and of itself is remarkable to be 17 years anywhere in this business. He was a great coach. I think he was a great guy and ran a clean program. He took us to seven NCAA Tournaments, two Sweet Sixteens, two NIT appearances, and won an SEC Championship, which was the first time in basketball since sixty years. We never had problems with his kids. His kids graduated and did well in school. And so we are indebted to Coach Stallings for his to this university and we wish him nothing but the best.
“We have already begun a national search for our next men’s basketball coach. We will use Eddie Fogler as a consultant. We will not hire a search firm as we have done in football, but we will use Eddie as a consultant. Eddie was a former basketball coach here as many of you know. He (Eddie Fogler) understands that aspect of Vanderbilt. Eddie also had a son that was a student-athlete here who graduated and played golf for us. So he understands Vanderbilt. I have been on the phone with Eddie about three times today and he is already hard at work for us. We will do a search. We will try to do it in effective time. I never like to put speed ahead of quality. I have had a long conversation with our chancellor. Our chancellor will be apart of the search, interviews, and decision-making as he has been with our last two football searches.”
On what parameters were given to Eddie Fogler about the next head coach:
“I think we are looking for someone with head coaching experience. I don’t know if we are isolated to college experience, but certainly head coaching experience. We consider Vanderbilt to be very special place. One of the reasons we are going to use Eddie Fogler is because not only do you think about coaching experience, but you also think about fit. This is not the right place for everybody. So we do spend a lot of time making sure people understand what Vanderbilt is about and what Vanderbilt expects. So we will keep working through this. We will look at people and some will move up and some will move down. I can tell you already and I know you will ask for names and I won’t give any, but we probably had over 100 to 125 names thrown out at us. I will give you one. My cousin from Birmingham who has a chicken store called me and offered the name of one of his cooks. He will not be hired.
On the expectations of winning at Vanderbilt:
“It would be wrong for me to say that this is the standard that you have to meet. Those things are a byproduct of a lot of different things. There were great coaches that didn’t have good years this year because they might have had a key injury. So what we do is we evaluate and so we are not going to sit here and say you have to do a, b, c, d, or you’re gone. But we will say our expectation is to win. Our expectation is to win the right way. Our expectation is to graduate student athletes. Our expectation is to run a clean program and also to win.”
On preparing to find a replacement for Stallings before the news on Sunday amidst all the rumors:
I think Saint Louis was a rumor. Coach Stallings heard the rumors and made sure that we understood that no one from Saint Louis had contacted him and that no one contacted him about Saint Louis. This is a business where you are always ready and you are probably never ready enough. But you always have to be ready no matter what the case is because if you have good coaches, people are going to be interested in them. It’s hard for me to remember a year when there wasn’t a school that was not interested in Kevin Stallings. So you always try to prepare for that. You watch a lot of games, you talk a lot, and you look at coaches. I just met with the players explain to them that it’s not the thing you want to wake up every morning wanting to do, but it’s part of the job.”
On what improvements you want to see in the basketball program moving forward:
“I think that there are things that we want to maintain and things that we want to get better at. If you ask anybody, they would say that they want to do better than they could. If you were 28-3, you’d probably want to be 31-0. So obviously we won 19 games this year and we would like to win more. We would like to go further in the NCAA Tournament. I think those things are obvious, but at the same time make sure that we have good kids who are good Vanderbilt students and they graduate.”
On marketing becoming a factor of deciding the next head coach:
“I think that marketing has a factor in it. I always try to look at what we need at any point in time. Certainly our marketing people will be involved in vetting some of this stuff and what would be the right strategy to market. But obviously marketing is part of it because it is a sport in which we are concerned about making sure that we sell tickets.”
On monitoring other schools who are looking for a new head coach:
“Yeah we always watch that. Georgia Tech is open and I’m sure they are looking. Stanford hired their coach. So we will keep an eye on it. I think that what you will find is that there are people on the other side of this is you don’t have any idea of who those people are, but there are coaches out there that are trying to gauge that same thing. They are trying to figure out do I have a chance at Vanderbilt before I take a job at another university. And so we have to move efficiently, we can’t just sit around here and we won’t and we have already started. But, I’m not going to really worry about what is happening somewhere else. We will do it on our time and we will get a good basketball coach.”
On who is running basketball operation with the departure of Kevin Stallings:
“We still have all of our assistant coaches here. I will be meeting with them directly after this. We still have our sports administrator. We have our strength coach. Everybody is still here. I don’t know if Kevin is thinking about offering any of those coaches a job, but like I said I’m going to talk to them right after this.