Pending review: Cougars' Penders rises from trashing
By Mike Freeman | CBSSports.com National Columnist Follow MikeThis was written about Houston coach Tom Penders last year by a blogger who wanted Penders tarred, feathered, broiled and served on a hot plate with fries and a slice of lemon.
"Tom Penders has long since reached the plateau of what he can accomplish here at Houston," the blogger wrote in March 2009. "It's time for him to retire and for UH athletics to move on."
"The fact is we will NOT be a tournament team next year," wrote another blogger in March 2009, this one for the Houston Chronicle, "or if Penders sticks around even longer [God forbid]."
On and on went the blasting of Penders by bloggers and fans alike. Message boards grieved for the children, especially after Houston lost in the College Basketball Invitational last year. There was a piling on, jumping knees delivered to the sternum, kicks to the midsection.
Now as someone who has been wrong more times than there are people in China, I feel the wrongheaded pain of Penders' former critics, but there remain few better examples of when mass idiocy, groupthink buffoonery and impatient fan bases with unreasonable expectations are proven incorrect than in the curious case of Tom Penders.
What Penders represents -- possibly -- is one of the best coaching jobs of anyone in this year's tournament. The fact that Houston, with its high school facilities, dismal attendance and sinking morale, made it to the NCAAs is a bit stirring. The fact that the Cougars made it with so many people previously wanting Penders' head is shocking.
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"It became so bad, so apparent that Penders' end was here, that reports that he'd retire [in no small part to save face] started making the rounds," wrote another Houston blogger, "with some of them reportedly coming from unknown sources within the University of Houston's athletic department. SNY basketball commentator Adam Zagoria tweeted that former Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie was a leading candidate to replace Penders."
Exactly what did Houston fans and the administration expect from Penders when he took over in 2004? It's Houston. It would take a hot tub time machine piloted by Hakeem Olujuwon to discover the last time the Cougars were a good program, let alone a competent one.
Penders isn't perfect. He's a typical college coach who ran a scandalous program at his last stop, George Washington. He's typical in that each time a college basketball coach opens his mouth you expect to hear: "Do you want the extended warranty or the TrueCoat?"
But he's a stubborn son of a gun and here he is yet again. Penders ended Houston's 18-year NCAA tournament drought when the Cougars won Conference USA over the weekend and earned an automatic bid. This means Penders has taken four schools to the NCAA tournament, putting him alongside a unique orbit of just eight coaches in history who've done the same. His stops as a head coach include Tufts, Columbia, Fordham, Rhode Island and of course Texas.
His nickname is The Tan Man (I prefer that one over Tournament Tom) because of that golden tone, but it might as well be because his skin is as resilient as the firmest piece of leather.
Few men in the sport have been left for dead as many times as Penders. Yet like one of those slow-walking ghouls from the horror movies, he stumbles a bit, gets up off the ground and guides another program to the NCAAs while taking a bite out of history.
He's an apparition that sculpts a different ending just when it seems he's a dead man walking.
"This is the most gratifying because, you know, in many ways when I came to Houston it was almost considered Mission: Impossible," Penders told the media after the Cougars' C-USA title-game victory.
It's likely Houston will get its doors kicked in in the first round of the tournament. If Penders' critics went too far in bashing him last year, failing to understand just how decrepit the Cougar program had become, it's just as easy (and wrong) to anoint Houston favored-nation status for the NCAAs.
Still, what a story.
It's nice to see Penders quiet the fans and others who think they know how to run a program when the only thing they really run is their mouths and keyboards.
