Add Warlick at Tennessee. Any coach in men's D1 hoops at a school with a proud tradition, who recruited that well but had that relatively poor of results would've been gone years ago. The 6 game losing streak probably would've brought about an immediate firing. Steve Alford was let go from UCLA mid season this year. This is a very good point, expected and acceptable results is VERY different comparing men's college bball to women's, regardless of gender of the coach.
I think this suggests that there are really two issues involved: 1) whether gender makes a difference in how fans evaluate and/or respond to coaches
within a given sport, in this case women's basketball; and 2) whether ADs tend to have lower standards/expectations for, and/or place less value on, women's sports than they do men's. (The latter has to be limited to non-revenue producing sports, since most institutions depend upon football and men's basketball to help cover the cost of all non-revenue producing sports.)
From what I can see, there is evidence that the standards/expectations/responses for the two are reversed: higher standards for/greater criticism of women
within, in this case, wbb, but, on the part of at least some ADs, a tendency not to value women's sports as much as they do men's (again, with men's basketball and football typically being in a different category because of the revenue they produce).
But all of this is obviously very complicated. For example, Warlick, Aston, and Close get the "can recruit but can't coach" label in part, I believe, because they are associated with schools that many believe should have a leg up in the sport (and in part because they really don't seem to be very good coaches). Bruno isn't associated with such an institution, so he gets praise rather than criticism. And when someone like Scott Rueck builds a strong program at an institution where the odds are very much against him, then he gets enormous praise and very little criticism--and rightly so, I should add. So context matters. On the other hand, although there was a lot of criticism of V. S.'s behavior when Mississippi State visited Eugene last fall, it seemed to me to fall well short of the comments that are often directed agains Kim Mulkey's behavior on the sidelines, and she is an equally talented coach imo. So maybe what we're are talking about involves the effect of gender on expectations regarding public behavior as well as (or more than?) those that have to do with results on the court and x's and o's.
As for #2, I can only provide an example from Oregon, where the extraordinarily successful coach of a softball program with a passionate following just left because the AD here wouldn't pay him a salary approaching the one currently given to the school's baseball coach, who has not been very successful, whose program runs a bigger deficit than softball, and has nothing like the following (and attendance) that softball has. In both cases the coaches are men, so issue #1 isn't relevant, but the disparity between the treatment of these two non-revenue generating programs suggests that gender--in this case the gender of the student athletes--has, unconsciously or not, led to a fairly clear bias in favor of an unsuccessful men's sport over a relatively similar and very successful women's one. This may, of course, simply be an Oregon problem, but I suspect it doesn't end here.
