Maintaining Cardinal rule will be tough.(College Basketball)

Only four days passed between the announcement that Mike Montgomery would leave Stanford to coach the Golden State Warriors and the revelation that Nevada's Trent Johnson would replace him. But there was no rush to make the formal announcement. Perhaps that's as it should be. This is not some giddy marriage of ambitious coach and starstruck institution. The only way Stanford becomes a dream job is if it hands Johnson a nice, fat chunk of its stake in the Google IPO.

Of the powers that have reigned in college basketball during the past decade, Stanford is the most unlikely. It started with almost no tradition. Because of high admission standards, it selected from a smaller talent pool. Somehow, Mike Montgomery made it look easy. And that's why Johnson has such a tough job now.

The greatest challenge a new coach can face isn't building a program from wreckage, and it's not following a legend. It's following an aberration. It's trying to replicate a circumstance that defied logic. Replacing John Wooden wasn't unbearable because he was a Hall of Famer but because winning 10 NCAA championships in 12 years was so far beyond the norm. Fans came to expect the improbable.

Bruiser Flint had the same problem when he took over for John Calipari at Massachusetts. The Minutemen had been dreadful before Calipari came along. Soon after he was hired, they became a national power with 11 NCAA Tournament wins in five years. Though Flint posted five consecutive winning Atlantic 10 seasons, it no longer seemed like enough.

Stanford made just one NCAA appearance in the five decades before Montgomery was hired. He gradually got the program moving forward in his first half-dozen years, then elevated Stanford to a level of consistent excellence that seemed inconceivable until we were smack in the middle of it.

Stanford reached the NCAA Tournament every year from 1995 through 2004 and was seeded No. 1 three times. The Cardinal advanced to the 1998 Final Four. Last season, they were 30-2 and won the Pac-10 regular season and tournament titles.

So yes, there are important ingredients of success already covered. There are talented players, such as point guard Chris Hernandez and center Rob Little. There are assistant coaches who have watched Montgomery operate and have unearthed promising players who met the school's more challenging academic requirements.