GameForAnyFuss

The streak would be even longer than that if COVID hadn’t happened. The 2020 natty was in the bag with 1 race remaining when COVID cancelled it on the final day.

Good get!

Now, give me a concurrent announcement of a $12 million NIL fund specifically for men’s basketball and I’ll be over the moon.

Smith and Ainge have not exactly covered themselves with glory, but I would say the NBA itself has destroyed the Jazz just as much as those two have. Utah is a small market and a state with no “street cred”, making it hard to get free agents to come. That’s the result of the NBA doing what the NBA does, and it seems to suit them fine.

If you’ve ever been involved in the contract review process, and the attorneys who review them, you’ll know that it could easily take weeks. Having a contract reviewed and executed within 2 business days is pretty much unheard of.

Contract has been sent to Jensen.

https://x.com/AMarkhamRivals/status/1896729804633985142

Did we really expect things to change? We still have the caliber of players that we were willing to pay for last offseason.

Hmmmm…I’m not sure TBH. The evidence suggests the players liked Craig – they were playing hard for him – but I’m sure there was some animosity from some of the players who probably couldn’t understand how minutes were being divvied up. Can you imagine Keanu Dawes watching Zach Keller get big man minutes ahead of him?

I hope the effect is a net…[Read more]

Three possible reasons why you do it now:
1. So players don’t have a visceral reaction and hit the portal before you have a chance to show them the benefits of staying.
2. You want to lock up a good candidate before he’s in greater demand once the firings begin at season’s end.
3. You have someone in mind already but you’re afraid he’ll cool off…[Read more]

I’m pretty ambivalent about this news. Craig just did nothing for me. Didn’t love him, didn’t hate him.

All that matters now is:
1. Who do we get?
2. Will some booster step up and give us some damn NIL?
3. Will any of this make a difference, or will we still remain the same 40th-percentile team we’ve been for the last 6 coaches?

There’s no scenario in my mind where I can even contemplate either Gonzaga or SMC having the ability to outbid Utah.

I guarantee you that Gonzaga is deploying more NIL money in men’s basketball than Utah is. John Stockton’s NIL contribution alone is going to be more money than Utah’s total spend.

If only endowment money went to basketball…

Remember, Deivon would still be at Utah if we just injected average money into the program. What would having Deivon this year make our sorry-ass guard situation look like?

1. They play in a garbage conference.
2. They have more money than you think.

It’s a chicken and egg problem. We can’t get boosters to step up if we don’t have a better coach, but we can’t get a better coach if boosters don’t step up.

The evidence suggests we aren’t going to luck into a great coach who can turn around the program with subpar resources. We’ve had a half dozen chances to do that since Majerus without…[Read more]

It’s folly to think that we’re one coach away from greatness. Modern college basketball is about having financial resources and Utah doesn’t have them. Or more accurately, Utah has them but chooses not to deploy them this way.

Smith isn’t the problem. We’ve gone through a half dozen coaches and each one of them had basically the same level of success. That suggests the problem lies elsewhere.

We’re the Raiders of college basketball. We can go through every coach in the sport and we’re not going to get appreciably different results until we fix the actual root cause of…[Read more]

My point exactly.

Reminds me of some coach K teams picked low and end up middle of PAC12 and all one could say was, “well, I guess they exceeded expectations but still were mediocre.”

Hmmm…almost makes one think there’s something going with the program besides coaching, considering that almost every coach we’ve had since Rick has done basically this exact same thing.

Keller is flat out awful and should be getting zero minutes. I liked Lohner coming off the bench to spell Lovering. He’s not tall enough to guard a true center (like that corn-fed mule Kansas had) but he’s got heft and knows how to throw it around. That’s good enough for a backup. Mass kicks ass, after all.