Ron "Chin" Coleman has only been at Nebraska for six months and already he’s on the move. It was confirmed today that Coleman has accepted a full time assistant coaching job at Bradley in the Missouri Valley Conference. Head Coach Tim Miles brought in Coleman to be what was hoped to be a much needed tie to coveted Chicago area AAU talent having been a former coach of the legendary AAU program Mac Irvin Fire. That connection is now gone and the search begins to fill his spot on the coaching staff. Let the speculation about Erick Strickland once again.
For Miles and the Huskers, this will be viewed as a blow on the recruiting trail as NU no longer has an evident connection to Chicago-land talent. It was unlikely that immediate recruiting results would occur with Coleman’s hire but it wasn’t long before some of the top recruits on the Mac Irvine Fire team and some of the top recruits in the country over the next couple of years showed up in town during the weekend of the spring football game that wasn’t. What will become of those relationships and NU will remain to be seen. It is unlikely that they will be maintained in a fashion that will result in a commitment for the Huskers, at least in terms of the most elite prospects that made that trip.
There had been some questioning of Miles not installing as a full time assistant which would have also garnered him the responsibility to go out on the road and recruit and now that Coleman has indeed taken the Bradley job, that questioning will only increase. What impact it will have may be revealed with time or perhaps we’ll never know what could have been, but the current commits that Nebraska has secured did not have connections to Coleman, including the transfers that came in this fall. On paper, the current class, which still has two scholarships to fill, is already shaping up to be one of the better classes in the past 20 years of Nebraska basketball, so if the current coaches can keep up that pace, the loss of Coleman can probably be mitigated to a certain degree.
Expect Miles to move quickly to fill the spot vacated by Coleman as the first day of practice is less than a month away.