Is it done?
- Thread starter chito_and_leon
- Start date
Unfortunate.
Perhaps our structural issues were enough of a problem through the latest recruiting cycle that Moore feels we can do better in recruiting this year.
That's the only rationale I can come up with.
Perhaps our structural issues were enough of a problem through the latest recruiting cycle that Moore feels we can do better in recruiting this year.
That's the only rationale I can come up with.
He might say that but deep down he knows what we all know - whatever resource level Konkol has, he will underperform. Give him $10m a year and he'd give us a $5m/year team. You're literally flushing money by having Konkol as coach.
I assume the real reason is that for whatever reason, we can't fire him. I see no reason at all why we wouldn't if we could.
Honestly I'd prefer to give Konkol $0 NIL next year and save that money for the new guy who will come in 2026, who might not squander whatever limited money we have.
There may be “ donor fatigue” after the poor return on their NIL money last spring.
Unfortunately, this could be seen coming a mile away. There’s no way that we were going to give the guy an extension then release him less than 6 months later.
I am glad they came out with it this quick. I'd rather know quickly if he was canned or not. I don't know if there might be room to bargain with his payout when he gets canned. But that bargaining power would be gone, (if it ever existed) if we didn't give him nil this year. That wouldn't look too kosher to the coaches interviewing to replace him if we did that to him. I realize it sounds good on the surface, but players would all transfer this year if we did that, and the next coach would have to start from scratch if we did that.
I juat hope he can keep players like Smikle, and is ready to give players like Reed & Behrend a ticket out of here. I would hate it if players like smikle were the only players to transfer, and we were only replacing decent transfers out, and nobody like Behrend. Memphis better not get anywhere near smikle after this season.
The bigger question is if he is given more NIL , can he spend it wisely on the best players ....this is still a recruiting talent job. We also know there are staggering deficiencies in the offense and getting the players ready to play for 40 minutes......money can't cure that..........
If we can recruit 3 or 4 good Jr/Sr/Grad players and hope they've been successfully trained in the basics of D1 basketball maybe they can be ready to compete despite our coaching staff's deficiencies.
The thing is, only part of our issue is personnel. There is just as much of a coaching deficiency as there is a player deficiency.
Our bigs are basically inept on both ends of the floor, our offense is painfully unproductive (unless we’re just on fire from 3), physicality is lacking in a big way, little to no meaningful in-game adjustments, weird rotations, inconsistent starting lineups, non conference scheduling is absolute trash (and we still lose some of those games), and we play hard for only about 25% of most games.
There’s a reason no one is excited about TU basketball…
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for Konkol and crew to pull off some miraculous turnaround next year and get us in the bubble conversation, but I think the chances of me digging a gold bar out of my ass are more likely at this point.
Our bigs are basically inept on both ends of the floor, our offense is painfully unproductive (unless we’re just on fire from 3), physicality is lacking in a big way, little to no meaningful in-game adjustments, weird rotations, inconsistent starting lineups, non conference scheduling is absolute trash (and we still lose some of those games), and we play hard for only about 25% of most games.
There’s a reason no one is excited about TU basketball…
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for Konkol and crew to pull off some miraculous turnaround next year and get us in the bubble conversation, but I think the chances of me digging a gold bar out of my ass are more likely at this point.
So.... extend the crappy guy you have?
I could hire Rudy Garcia from Union and have roughly the same performance on the court for 1/2 the money. (If money is what' you're worried about)
The problem isn't his recruits. He's a bad coach.
We can crown Konkol as Jim King II. He’s that bad and he isn’t even an alumnus of the university. No reason not to cut him loose. Retaining him is ridiculous and inconsistent with cutting Wilson after two horrible seasons and supposedly “demanding excellence”. The only difference between Wilson and Konkol is that Konkol seems to be less of an a-hole.
Penny is a bad coach, but he bought Cisse, Dainja, Haggerty, Hunter, Rogers, and Carter for about 5 million . Look how much FedEX improved his "coaching".
Cue conversation about bringing back baseball, on-campus parking garages, and/or urinal troughs at skelly!!!
You sir are a close student of our program.
Viewing the situation wholly inside the building there isn’t a single reason he should be kept. But not everything happens just inside the Case Center.
FedEx also built the Forum with help from the taxpayers. They also don’t have the perception of being a difficult school academically, though on the margins the schools are basically the same if you schedule it right and there’s little difference between who they recruit and who we recruit. Memphis is a great town for kids who want to play pro basketball even before we talk about payroll. We could spent $5 million and could get players. We could get them but we wouldn’t see a return on investment. More importantly, the location, the state of the program, the coaching and facilities means we won’t be getting the same players at the same price as Memphis. If you don’t believe me, ask any Indiana, Louisville, or Kentucky basketball student wondering why they go to a football school now despite throwing millions at their basketball players the last five years and seen the best go elsewhere. Or UNC is throwing money at an NFL coach instead of that big man from Europe or whatever.
A silver lining of bad things at TU is we see old friends who don't come around much anymore, carrying buckets of official, administration-sanctioned water. Let the powers that be know I appreciate them showing enough respect to admit this decision is not based on past performance or expectation of future success, I guess that's too absurd for them to try at this point.
The official theory is like a twitter post, sounds good until it's exposed to facts. Many schools that should be bad under this theory are actually good. Indiana, Louisville and Kentucky are strange examples. Indiana has been bad for ages, their problems pre-date the modern world. Louisville and Kentucky are better than Memphis. UL is having its best season in more than a decade. Kentucky's issue is coaching, as Arkansas is learning. How about Iowa St., which is better than OU but OU plays next door to an NBA team and ISU is 3 hours from one, and OKC, sucky as it is, is not as sucky as Ames. Why mention Indiana but not Purdue, other than the obvious reason that Purdue should be bad w this theory but is good? I'm afraid this theory has as many or more outliers than accurate predictions.
There are people who would prefer to live in Tulsa over Memphis. I'm hoping the official theory is from the crisis PR firm and not what the admin actually think because it reflects a misunderstanding of the challenges we're up against and our strengths and opportunity. Tho none of that matters as long as we keep the current staff.
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You are always good for a laugh. I have few fans amongst the few TU administrations the last forty years. They take my money but certainly don’t appreciate me pointing out facts. Like the fact that 70% of the NIL money in college basketball that isn’t controlled by institutions is controlled by two firms. So unless TU has $5 million to find talent amongst the players not signed with those two companies, they have to negotiate with those two companies. And those firms want their players worth $5 million to play in leagues, venues, and time slots TU does not and will never qualify for. They are trying to get a return on their investment and a pay day for the players and their agents. So they want their players at Purdue in the Big 10 and not Tulsa or San Diego State or Princeton or countless other schools who could attract talent in the past.
So if you persist in the money game, you are by definition spending your five million on high risk investments. Or at least riskier than what five million will buy you at other schools like Purdue. A name coach or a favorable location can move that up a bit, but that’s the lay of the land.
I disagree with the TU admin nearly every day on countless things totally unrelated to athletics - don’t get me started on football or soccer, but if they kept Konkol to manage cost and risk, then that makes short term sense if you have to find $1.1 million you didn’t have last year to pay for payroll next year. If the difference is making NIL payments for three years sufficient to stay in the AAC through the next round of football reorganization scheduled for … checks notes… three years from now, OR paying Konkol’s buyout and a higher coaches salary and starting over on a roster that will inevitably ask for more money, I’ll take losing in basketball at least long enough to be certain we keep making at least $7 million a year off football. Which is what you are talking about. If it takes $5 million in payroll to be a legit tourney team, you are taking spending our entire media rights proceeds on just basketball coach and player over head. To lose in the second round in Madison or Charlotte. Will never happen. Ever.
And there’s little PR to justify it. One or two tourney games isn’t worth $7 million. It’s pocket change for SEC schools paying $100 million for Mississippi State to lose at football … for now. Unlike football with four or five several hour infomercials every fall when parents are visiting campuses and trying to decide on schools with their kids.
So yeah. Stand pat. Do our best to support Konkol. The empty seats and slow suffocation of this program is a crying shame but perhaps both necessary and justified from a macro point of view,
Or we could throw $250,000 at soccer and win a national championship and actually reach roughly the same viewers we want to reach over the course of the season as a Thursday afternoon basketball tourney loss in Spokane. The soccer program certainly loses a lot less money. And graduates more players.
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I am with ya and against ya here. Hopefully we can keep smikle, Barnes, carrington, Garcia and Archie. If we can keep at least three of the 5 I will be happy. Reed had a really good freshman year. He had a sophomore slump. It happens. If they keep him I hope he works on his game and get back to the form he was his freshman year. We can let Behrend go back to Cincinnati lol.
We have to replace Odom and Willis as they were grads and hopefully they can get a couple of good transfers for them. I for one think he has recruited good players. He can get the grads but with everyone paying for them now, we either need to give someone a tractor or something so we can attract a couple of good players to stick around.
What we need is better scheduling and that is where I wil fault konkol. We played a SWAC schedule. We can’t be doing that. Get our ass in a holiday tournament to play decent teams.
"Tulsa is the little Harvard of the Southwest" is the biggest lie ever told...
It’s significantly better than it was three years ago. TU is still not selective like it was up until around 1998. They now accept every one who applies who they believe will succeed. So when they publish a 45% acceptance rate, it’s not 90 to 100% of the people applying will succeed and they only take 45% of them. It means 55% of the people applying won’t succeed if they were admitted. That’s not a good look and something you have to turn around.
Similarly, you can accept 75% of the people who apply, as we did during the Levit era, and then get burdened with skyrocketing costs tutoring them through or stand by while they fail out in droves and the ratings people start asking questions. Also not a good look.
You don’t have to spend much time talking with faculty until they vent about the serious decline in the quality of students, particularly from Oklahoma and Texas. Even strong publics like the Edmond system aren’t preparing the kids.
Still, the free school for national merit semi finalists has proven to be an exceptionally effective marketing strategy. TU was down to barely a handful of national merit scholars per year several years ago and we will soon have a significant plurality of them in classrooms. Enough to cause noticeable gaps between them and their classmates. The days of making a 19 on your ACT and having a 3.25 in high school then making the Dean’s List at TU as a freshman appear to be over.
The overall under performance of athletics notwithstanding, it’s been a miracle over the past three years. At the time, I put the reputational damage of the Levit years at a cost of at least $30 million and at least 10 years to recover, if ever. It’s cost more than that but they are well ahead of schedule of turning it around which is a miracle in a business environment that measures success in 6 year blocks and decades.
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I went to TU from 1987 to 1993, didn't graduate... I went back to college in 2017 and finished. The difference between the two experiences was orders of magnitude. Todays college graduates have is WAY easier. If you cannot make it in college today, well... you know where this is going.
AAC football is going to rot. We’ve already missed the last life rafts off the sinking ship.
I’m to the point that I almost say just cut football entirely. Become Creighton or Gonzaga. No one watches college soccer casually. Many people pay attention to March Madness year over year… especially when you pull an upset.
I had a bit of a different experience. Many of the folks I graduated with have gone on to be comparatively successful in business. Lots of people moving into mid-level executive management who I know from TU right now. Several more doing well in Washington DC.
My best friend at the time graduated TU and is now worth millions and lives on an island. We all have our small set of real winners, middle executive management isn't winning...
