All first-year head coaching situations are not created equally.

When Bob Tallent's tenure was close to coming to an end, out the door went arguably his three best players in Brian Magid, Mike Zagardo and Tom Glenn.  A talented juco transfer in Wilbert Skipper was brought in but this wasn't nearly enough to prevent GW from making a change.

Gerry Gimelstob came in with his first-hand Bob Knight training and a forthcoming NBA player in Mike Brown.  Despite adding Mike's high school teammate a season later in Troy Webster, GG was never able to attract the overall talent and depth to complement Brownie's game.  

John Kuester's regime went downhill fast, all the way down to 1-27 before given a year to redeem himself.  While Kuester could not keep his job, he did recruit both Sonni Holland and Dirkk Surles, each a cornerstone of GW's sole Sweet 16 team.

That team was led by Mike Jarvis, who supplemented this class with players like Yinka Dare, Nimbo Hammons, Kwame Evans and Bill Brigham, only to reproduce his successful efforts with players such as Alexander Koul, Yegor Mescherikov, Shawnta Rogers and Mike King.  All but Koul would go on to play for Tom Penders, where the three combined for 53.4 points per game, 16 rebounds per game, and 11.3 assists per game.  That team would reach the NCAA's but the subsequent TP teams, with King the only one of the three remaining, went .500 and below .500 respectively.

Karl Hobbs took over a team whose second leading scorer after Chris Monroe was Greg Collucci.  Still, TJ Thompson played as a freshman on that team and then the major Hobbs recruiting classes brought in Pops, Mike, Omar, Carl, JR and Maureece within a two year period.  The result was a highly successful four year run until Omargate came crashing down on the program.  After some disastrous years, KH showed some signs of building back the program with players like Tony Taylor, Lasan Kromah, David Pellom, and Dwayne Smith.  However, Kromah would miss his entire sophomore season which turned out to be KH's final season as a head coach.

Mike Lonergan stepped in fairly late in the game to replace him but the first year match of KH recruits with ML strategies was, shall I say, less than ideal.  ML set out to build back the program and successfully brought in a combination of transfers (Zeke, Creek, Tyler) and high school/prep school players (Joe, Kethan, Kevin, Pato, Yuta) to make this happen. 

When ML departed, MoJo was brought in even later in the game than ML had been.  MoJo essentially coached 100% ML recruits in Year 1 and won 20 games.  Each year got progressively worse as the talent wasn't being adequately replaced.  Enter Jamion Christian who made wholesale changes from the onset but could not truly establish his footing in three seasons (one, an abbreviated one) relying largely on transfers from LSU, Nebraska, Maryland, Virginia Tech, Vanderbilt and UCONN.

So, some common denominators.

Hobbs and Lonergan hit paydirt with large recruiting classes where most players stayed with the program for four seasons.

Penders and MoJo were able to win some games in their first seasons largely as a result of the talent level they inherited.  The losses mounted as more and more talented players left the program.

Kuester and Jamion inherited fairly bare cupboards to start.  Each was able to coax some talent to play for them but luck was not on either of their sides.

Jarvis came in with some but not enough building blocks in place but proved right away that he was able to coach effectively enough to attract even greater talent.  And then, repeated the cycle, resulting in the most sustained period of on-court success in this program's history.

So which situation is Chris Caputo most closely walking into?  I can envision three scenarios and two of them are not too shabby.

a) Gimelstob...CC proves he can attract some talent but not enough to be successful.  His coaching acumen isn't what it was cracked up to be.

b) Jarvis...CC has some building blocks in place but now, he needs to prove his mettle as an effective coach so that he may bring in even more talent.

c) Hobbs...There is little available to him right now but we get to see what kind of difference coaching really makes.  Hopefully, enough to bring in a major recruiting class within the next 1-2 seasons.

I am optimistically falling somewhere in between the Jarvis and Hobbs scenarios.  Like Hobbs, CC has never been a head coach.  It will be fascinating to see what he is able to accomplish with very few of his own recruits on board.  While the won-loss record always has a role in determining success, arguably just as important will be how the team plays as well as does it look and play like a team (from sharing the ball, to shot selection to team defense to optimizing the usage of players, timeouts, and game strategies).  And, maybe like Jarvis, there is a more talented nucleus already here than meets the eye that will benefit from improved coaching.