The Stanford basketball program has now gone 10 years since their last NCAA Tournament appearance, and on Thursday they decided that head coach Jerod Haase was no longer the right person to end that streak as the program fired him.
The decision comes after their second-round loss to Washington State in the Pac-12 Tournament by a score of 79-62.
Haase was an elite recruiter for the Cardinal, but when it came to on-the-court product, Stanford was average at best. Five-star recruits have come and gone during Haase's tenure which started in 2016-17 with nothing to show for it, and this season was no different.
Haase was hired following a 26-7 season at UAB in 2015-16, and a tenure that saw him accumulate an 80-53 record. He was unable to replicate that success in Palo Alto, accumulating a record of 14-17.
With two top-55 freshmen on a team loaded with experienced upperclassmen and the Pac-12 as weak as ever, the Cardinal found themselves near the bottom of the conference standings. While they could shoot it with the best of them, that was about all that was good on offense and they often fell cold down the stretch. They struggled to get consistency, never formed an identity, and they were also frequently dominated on the boards, while struggling defensively.
Heading into the season, athletic director Bernard Muir made it clear that progress needed to be shown, otherwise, Haase's time was up.
The timing of Haase's firing is one that has fans frustrated as many felt the decision should have been made following last season, with many hoping the program would hire Mark Madsen. The former Cardinal star instead was hired by Stanford's rival, Cal, which improved dramatically under Madsen following a 3-29 season the year prior.
With Haase no longer at the helm, the Cardinal will now have to find a new face of the program as they look to join the basketball powerhouse that is the ACC in 2024.
Names such as Washington State's Kyle Smith and Princeton's Mitch Henderson have been thrown out as possibly candidates, but Stanford needs to nail this next hire. The program that was routinely in the tournament in the late 90s and early 2000s, has appearend in just one NCAA Tournament since the 2008-09 season.
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