Penny Hardaway has a vision for Memphis basketball's March Madness breakthrough | Giannotto

They were going through what Penny Hardaway can and can’t do to start his sixth season as the Memphis basketball coach, and they were doing it live on the postgame radio show last week after the program's final exhibition game.

Hardaway can’t be in the building for the first three games of the 2023-24 campaign due to the suspension handed out last year by the NCAA for careless – but otherwise mundane – recruiting violations. But he can still take part in practices with the team, so long as it’s not a game day

Hardaway said he can’t travel with the team when the Tigers play a road game at Missouri on Friday. But he can pay his own way there, so long as he doesn’t communicate with the team on game day or actually go to the game. Hardaway joked that perhaps he’ll just show up at Missouri’s practice.

This last part made everyone chuckle, the absurdity of the hoops Hardaway will have to jump through trumped only by the reality that he’s invested too much of his life in this program not to jump through them.

“I’ve never been in this situation before. It’s going to be weird and tough,” he eventually said, and perhaps that’s the best way to frame the season Memphis is about to embark upon, beginning with the season opener Monday (7 p.m., ESPN+) against Jackson State.

It’s time for Hardaway to go on the sort of run he’s never been on before, to pull together the kind of season that puts the Tigers in a better position to push past the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament like all the best Memphis coaches of the past.

Not because his job is on the line, or will be on the line if he falls short of that goal. His standing and celebrity in the community gives him uncommon job security.

There are actually no coaches left in the American Athletic Conference that have coached in the league as long as Hardaway has at this point. No coach in the league has a better career winning percentage than Hardaway does over his first five seasons at Memphis (.681). No coach in the league has a more desirable job, which also means no coach has quite the same roster.

That's why the circumstances of this season are particularly intriguing. There are only two returning players from last season's AAC Tournament champion – Malcolm Dandridge and Hardaway’s son, Jayden. There’s a decent chance the starting lineup Monday will be five transfers, none of whom experienced how heartbreakingly close Memphis got to pulling off the kind of postseason everybody around Memphis is hoping for now.

“I think realistically this is an NCAA (Tournament) team,” Hardaway told The Commercial Appeal. “How far we can go will depend on our guards, and I think we have some really good guards. I’m not trying to speak out of turn because that always gets me in trouble, but I’m talking about the talent I know that we have. Anyone can get hot going into the NCAA Tournament, and we could be one of those teams.”

He can admit now to being worried whether he was going to be able to put together a team like that during the initial months of this offseason, to having gone on a recruiting journey that was unfamiliar to a man who put together No. 1 recruiting classes two times in three years.

“We tried early and really couldn’t get anything,” Hardaway said. “Guys wouldn’t sign, took NIL deals and went and signed different places.”

It’s why, even without DeAndre Williams, Hardaway sometimes catches himself marveling at how this came together. How David Jones, Jahvon Quinerly, Jordan Brown and Jaykwon Walton all committed to Memphis after the initial wave of the transfer portal, transforming what this group’s ceiling might be.

But Hardaway was also steadfast, armed with a vision built upon what had happened in March the previous two years.

He wanted guards that could pressure a defense like Kendric Davis did last season. He wanted to lead the country in free throw attempts and lead the conference in offensive rebounding. He wanted to emphasize offense. He wanted the players filling those roles to be older. He didn’t allow distractions, like the ongoing legal drama of high-profile Memphis signee Mikey Williams, to deter him from that.

“I was trying to build a team with guys that can score, that can get around you,” Hardaway said. “I really wanted to get a veteran group, and I feel like I got better than I thought I was going to get, especially later in the summer.”

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In Year 6, Hardaway has become the program’s constant – through NCAA investigations, roster and staff turnover, and the near misses of the past two seasons.

He doesn’t want all the smoke anymore.

He just wants to coach his team.

You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Mark Giannotto via email at mgiannotto@gannett.com and follow him on X: @mgiannotto

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Memphis basketball: Penny Hardaway's vision for March Madness success