It has been nearly six years since Wake Forest "parted ways" with former head coach Dino Gaudio. We all know what has transpired in Winston-Salem since that event, but what we haven't heard a lot of (really anything) is something from Gaudio about the situation.
The firing of Dino Gaudio was interesting at the time considering he went 61-31 in three years, had what appeared to be a pretty decent recruiting class, and had just won an NCAA Tournament game over Texas a month earlier. While there are certainly cases that still can be made as to whether or not firing Gaudio was the right decision, obviously the hire made afterwards was the problem that set back the basketball program 5-10 years.
Gaudio has been a commentator on ESPNU for the past few years, and has refrained from making any comments about Wake Forest. Fast forward to last night, when he was speaking about some of the committee decisions with regards to the poor seedings, and teams left out who should not have been. These were his comments:
"There are only two basketball guys total on the committee and eight for the football playoff. I was in a room with four people in a campus office. A gentleman said 'I don't know much about basketball, I know a lot about organization, management, and budgets. Four years later he is on the (NCAA) committee, and four years after that he is the chair of the committee. He was right, he doesn't know much about basketball. You have to have basketball guys on the committee."
Now it's always possible that this quote had nothing to do with Ron Wellman, but based on the timeframe, and what we know about Wellman being the head of the committee, it is highly likely that Gaudio was in fact referencing his former boss.
Most Wake fans probably already came to the same conclusion that Wellman is a better businessman than he is selector of coaches, but this is a fairly unique view of how Gaudio, and likely a lot of coaches around the country view Wellman as well.
This tends to back up the frequently talked about notion that there was a large disconnect between Wellman and Gaudio in terms of how to run the program and who knew how best to make Wake Forest good at basketball. We will likely never know the entire story about what transpired and what led to Gaudio getting fired, but having a less disharmonious relationship with your boss is usually not conducive with keeping your job.