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- Tom Crean’s days at Georgia may be numbered.
- His team terrible this season and he was recently caught on a hot mic bashing one of his players and assistants.
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University of Georgia men’s basketball is absolutely abysmal this year. The Bulldogs are last in their conference and currently hold a record of 6-21.
At the forefront of the program, of course, is the head coach. Tom Crean has been in Athens since 2018 after serving as the head coach at Indiana from 2008 to 2017.
His tenure in the Southeastern Conference may soon be coming to a close. There is a good chance that Crean could be fired at or even before the end of the regular season.
To make matters worse, he was recently caught on a hot mic.
After losing to Ole Miss by 17 on Saturday, Crean hopped on Zoom for a routine media session. When it came to a close, he presumably thought that nobody outside of the room that he was in could hear what he had to say next.
That wasn’t true. His Zoom feed was still live.
As a result, Crean spoke to an unidentified woman for about three minutes and 45 seconds before his feed was finally shut down. During that time, he teed off about Georgia guard Aaron Cook.
Cook, a super senior who transferred in from Gonzaga, was brought up by the woman that Crean was speaking to. At that point point, he went off— live, on Zoom, for everybody to hear.
“Aaron is just a — Aaron’s not close to as good as he thinks he is, and every time there’s a problem he wears down,” he said. “Like I said — I said, ‘If you played with as much edge as you’re talking to me right now, you wouldn’t be having any issues at all.’ But I said, ‘But you’re not going to talk like that, OK? You can play like that, but you’re not going to talk like that.’”
In addition Crean spoke disparagingly about one of his graduate assistants.
One of Georgia’s assistant coaches, Wade Mason, was recently suspended from the team with pay. He and director of player development Brian Fish were involved in a physical altercation during halftime of the Bulldogs’ loss to LSU on Wednesday.
Apparently the suspension was not supposed to be made public. After the Zoom call on Saturday, while still on hot mic, Crean addressed what he believes was a leak.
He proceeded to blame one of his GAs for exposing the suspension the day prior.
“There’s no question we’re concerned in there that our GA really — Rashaan [Surles] exposed it,” Crean said. “He’d have to have it organized, man. Somebody’s organized the whole thing. Somebody has. There ain’t no way that guy got some of the player’s numbers. Well, we’ve just got to keep figuring out what we’re going to do next.”
The feed was eventually shut off, but the damage was done. Georgia will play its next game on Tuesday against Texas A&M. There is a real possibility that Crean may not make it to that point.
If he does, it sounds like his immediate future with the Bulldogs is in serious danger.