Wake Forest fires coach Danny Manning after losing stretch
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) Danny Manning never built a winner at Wake Forest. Now the school is looking for a new coach and direction.
Wake Forest fired Manning on Saturday after losing five of his six seasons with one NCAA Tournament appearance. The move came more than six weeks after the Demon Deacons lost to Pittsburgh in the opening game of the Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament, ending the season shortly before the coronavirus pandemic led to a shutdown of college and professional sports.
The decision came after what athletic director John Currie called an “overall evaluation” of a program with two winning seasons in the past decade going back to the days of Jeff Bzdelik.
“As time goes by, we’re able to resume things,” Currie said Saturday in a video teleconference. “We never stopped working on this particular program because it is so important to all of us, just like we haven’t stopped with the day-to-day duties. … But certainly the onset of the pandemic played a role in the timing of today’s announcement.”
Manning, a former No. 1 overall NBA draft pick, went 78-111 in Winston-Salem with a 30-80 mark in ACC regular-season games. Those league struggles included a 6-49 mark in league road games and a 1-6 record in the ACC Tournament.
Currie said he and Manning notified the team earlier Saturday in a video teleconference. Associate head coach and program great Randolph Childress will lead the team in the interim.
Currie declined to discuss details of Manning’s contract or financial obligations tied to the change. Manning received an extension after his lone NCAA Tournament trip in 2017, though the private school typically doesn’t make terms public.
“Ultimately, this is a basketball decision,” Currie said, adding later: “In this particular decision, if you look at the overall program and where we are right now, the economics support the decision.”
Manning had said after the Pitt loss on March 10 that he “absolutely” expected to return, as well as in subsequent interviews in recent weeks.
“I wish the program nothing but success going forward,” Manning said in a school statement Saturday.
The Demon Deacons appeared to be trending upward in 2017, when sophomore John Collins led the Demon Deacons to a 19-win season and a.500 league mark, along with a spot in the NCAA’s First Four.
But Collins left to become a first-round NBA draft pick, while junior Dino Mitoglou left to play professionally in Europe. And over the next few seasons, key players such as Bryant Crawford, Doral Moore, and Keyshawn Woods left with eligibility remaining to pursue professional careers or play elsewhere in college.
It happened again in the past two weeks, with junior Chaundee Brown announcing he would enter his name into the NBA draft as well as the NCAA transfer portal.
