Replacing Riley will be a tough chore

I’m going to dig into the meat and potatoes of this column in a minute, but before I do, I want to personally top my cap to former Nicholls men’s basketball coach Richie Riley on his new job at South Alabama.

I consider Coach Riley a friend and I’m happy for his successes. I know that he’s going to go to South Alabama and do for them exactly what he did for us – turning that program from a pretender into a contender in short order.

But my job isn’t to talk about South Alabama’s future prospects, it’s to talk about Nicholls and what lies ahead now that the coach is in the rear view mirror.

I wish I had warm, fuzzy news to share, but I don’t have a ton of it at this time.

Coach Riley raised the bar for Nicholls, yes. And that’s a wonderful thing for sports fans in the community who like to root on the Colonels.

But the roster the new coach is inheriting is not very good, which will make immediate success awfully tough for the eventual replacement.

Riley knew exactly the right time to leave.

Anyone who thought he would be with Nicholls for the long haul was fooling themselves. This was always a rental and never a 20-year purchase.

Riley got to Nicholls, lured transfers late in their careers to Thibodaux and always had eyes on a big, quick explosion and then an early exit to the next step.

And for he and his family, it worked like a charm.

The Colonels won 14 games last season with several key players either injured or sitting out the season per transfer rules.

That wasn’t enough of a tsunami to make a move to the next gig, but the 2017-18 season was.

Nicholls made a huge splash this year, winning 20 games and a share of the regular season Southland Conference Title.

We will never know for sure, but I still say that they’d have won the league if Tavon Saddler had stayed healthy and available.

But either way, the team’s successes were more than enough to get Riley offers at bigger, more prominent schools and he bit. Personally, I was surprised he didn’t go to Eastern Kentucky, which is his alma mater.

Instead, it was South Alabama – a Sun Belt program with great facilities and lots of resources. They are a program that’s been dormant but which can explode with the right guy at the controls.

But for Nicholls, they’re now left without a coach and the cupboard is almost completely bare.

Nicholls had eight seniors this past season and the only primary returnees are freshmen Kevin Johnson and Ryghe Lyons and junior Daniel Regis.

Certainly, Riley and his coaching staff were working on getting signatures and signees in their final days in Thibodaux, but none have been announced at press-time, which means that the new coach will inherit a team with three players – all while the vast majority of the high school senior players around the country have already made their collegiate decisions.

That’s not good.

But what is good is that the Colonels now have a blueprint for what they need in their new coach because they’ve now seen the type of guy who is capable of coming in and winning in Thibodaux.

The Colonels need to again look to hire a younger, energetic coach who is willing to overlook everything that Nicholls does not have in favor of what it does.

They need to acquire the best recruiter who applies in an effort to try and find that quick-hitting magic that Riley struck in the program.

For me, it’s a no-brainer. The first call I’d make would be to Alexandria to LSU-Alexandria coach Larry Cordaro.

I endorsed Cordaro for the job when Riley was hired and I think he’s even more ready to take the job now than he was before.

The guy has done nothing but succeed during his tenure at LSU-Alexandria – a program that he’s started since its existence.

Look, Cordaro is eventually going to be a D-I head coach. He was a finalist at Nicholls the last go-round and he also was a finalist at Grambling recently. Someone is eventually going to give this guy a shot and I think right now is as good a time as ever.

Cordaro is a good recruiter who is passionate about his craft. He could get top-flight local players into this program and I think he’d be more inclined to build and lay down roots here for the future – something that Riley never was going to do.

The challenge is that the Colonels have limited resources and limited talent on the roster. Whoever is hired will need to be given some time to turn the ship around.

But as we’ve seen with Riley, it can surely be done – if the Colonels make the right hire.

But that’s easier said than done, because guys like Riley aren’t exactly a dime a dozen.

Those guys don’t come around Thibodaux very often.

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