Its one of those unknowables though. Coaching hires are such crapshoots that even when you have the right guy, sometimes it doesn't work out. Maybe things keep rolling and we never miss a beat from the Hoiberg era. Maybe in that alternate universe where TJ gets hired then he gathers a different staff that is less successful. Maybe he grew as a coach during his stints elsewhere during the Prohm era in ways that allowed him to be more immediately successful here, and without that experience he makes some missteps here that cause things to not work out (I'm sure he'd say he was a better coach in March 2021 than he was in June 2015, every successful coach is working to improve themselves). We'll never know, obviously.
Plus there's the benefit of not being 'the guy after the guy'. If TJ had come in here straight after Hoiberg, with no head coaching experience, and without the absolute crater of Prohm in between he'd get much less patience from the fanbase whenever we hit a rough patch.
This is all true. All of this is informed speculation at best. Counterpoints --
-- TJ has basically had to rebuild the roster three times in three years in the modern transfer world. He turned the smoldering crater into a Sweet Sixteen team (even if a plucky, overmatched one) in one offseason and has now managed to assemble the most talented Iowa State roster since at least the Shayok year if not since Fred left. TJ has done as well as he had with nothing else to sell but hope up to this point. Imagine if he had the momentum of the late Fred era to build on and immediately started landing guys like Biliew and Momcilovic to replace the Morris and Niang generation once it aged out of college ball and made its way to the NBA.
-- TJ probably fills in the gaps in the 2016 roster better than Prohm did (e.g., one more quality guard as an insurance policy for the Naz injury and a depth big man, like Max Bielfeldt... that roster was great but very top heavy with six
dudes but
nothing behind it... just needed a little more depth that year).
-- From what CW and others have told us, TJ isn't just a great recruiter of players but also a great recruiter of coaching talent and one of the most-liked men in the business. I'm sure he would have assembled a killer staff then as in now. Kyle Green was already sitting there waiting for him in Cedar Falls.
Most of my points are relatively short-term ones, though. Your points kick in the longer TJ is in charge, like Prohm resetting our expectations to give TJ time and leeway to build the program and TJ having a chance to learn in Brookings and Paradise in a lower-stakes environment before taking over in Ames. We'll never know if it is better this way (even if we had to suffer through the bad Prohm years along the way) compared to Fred's plan coming to fruition. I just found it interesting that was indeed the plan until Leath.
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