11 Years Ago Today The College Basketball World Was Altered By The Sudden Death Of A Head Coach

July 26, 2007 may not mean a lot to most people, but for those that are Wake Forest fans and really die hard college basketball fans it marks an important and incredibly sad day. It’s the day that Skip Prosser died suddenly from a heart attack. He was just 56 years old and really had Wake rolling during the six years he was there.

He was rebuilding after losing Chris Paul and a loaded team that was upset by West Virginia in the 2005 NCAA Tournament. When he died, he left a roster with Ish Smith, Jeff Teague, James Johnson and L.D. Williams all as freshmen or sophomores. The following year the roster included Al-Farouq Aminu and Tony Woods, where Wake was a top-10 team for a large portion of the year.

That team remains a pretty big what-if for me in the world of college hoops, mostly because of the after-effect. The 2008-09 team won 24 games and the following year won 20. However, they weren’t able to advance in the NCAA Tournament, losing to Cleveland State in 2009, which ultimately led to the firing of Dino Gaudio, Skip’s assistant coach.

This is where Wake completely messed up its future and ultimately its program. Athletic Director Ron Wellman decided to hire his friend Jeff Bzdelik, who drove the program into an absolute disaster. During his four years at Wake he had one winning season (17-16) and an overall record of 51-76. This was a program that was a consistent NCAA Tournament team and talked about making a Final Four every so often. They were able to land big time names like Chris Paul, Ish Smith, Jeff Teague, James Johnson, Al-Farouq Aminu. That’s all NBA talent that was essentially landed by Skip.

Now, I’m not saying that Wake would be Duke, Kentucky or Carolina right now. But, they’d consistently be a NCAA Tournament team assuming that Skip didn’t take a blueblood job. He was only 56 when he died, meaning he was going to coach for at least another decade. You never would have had the Bzdelik era. You likely would have had more success with those 2008-10 teams. The ACC would have another big time program as Wake finished in the top-3 of the conference 4 of the 6 seasons that Skip was there.