Gophers Fire Tubby Smith

Minnesota fired Tubby Smith on Monday.  I kind of saw it coming, Tubby has been a bit of a disappointment since coming over from Kentucky 6 years ago.  From my outsiders perspective it just seemed like Tubby was on cruise control and that the program had stagnated, I personally think it was the right call, it was time for a change.  I know some of the national basketball pundits won't like this move, Tubby has a great track record (124-81 at Minnesota; a national championship at Kentucky), he runs a clean program and he's reportedly a real class act, but the fact is he was getting paid a lot of money and he just wasn't earning it.  I also think those pundits are doing a lazy bit of analysis, they see 20+ wins, an NCAA bid and first round win and think that should be enough for Tubby to keep his job, but that's not really the whole story.  Looking a bit closer and you see a 46-62 Big Ten record, you see that's he never finished higher than 6th place in the conference, you see a rather mediocre recruiter, you see a number of players transferring away (Justin Cobbs, Royce White, Colton Iverson to name a few), you don't see any of his Minnesota players in the NBA (high school recruits notice this), you don't see one first team All B1G performer, you don't see a great deal of improvement in his players (see Ralph Sampson III & Rodney Williams are 2 prime examples), you do see him throwing his players under the bus rather than blaming himself, you do see a rather questionable rotation of players in games, you do see assistant coaches who aren't pulling their weight (Saul Smith I'm talking about you), you do see his teams struggling down the stretch year after year, and finally you also do see diminishing fan support.  Bottom line, why shouldn't the program aspire to more?