UCONN by 58 today

[HuffyCane]

There’s a lot of truth in this post. I disagree that we shouldn’t look at someone else. Also, recruiting in women’s basketball is brutal and managing it from an athletic department perspective would be an effing nightmare. A lot of people on the intertrons act like they’d be the greatest manager/ AD ever, but they would run something like this into shouldering dumpster fire of medical waste and leftover sloppy joe meat from Ed’s Hurricane Lounge. (That’s meat, right?) Also, I don’t get why CL makes some things personal.

What’s funny is that many of the same people, and I know you are not in this category, would say move on from Mossman.

But then when we bring in someone else and things go south, they say we should bring alums in on staff and recruit the area more. Her staff is, to the best of my recollection, all Oklahoma natives, Oklahoma educated, and alums except Cole who played and was educated over in Norman/OKC. I sat with them at the Golden Cane awards one year so I’m pretty sure that’s true. The squad in the past had a good number of local players, the best of which is now a coach for her. If you want to recruit basketball in Tulsa, having a Mayberry sit down in the living room and talk about TU is an advantage I’m not willing to give up. Jesse or someone can go look and run the numbers but I’d bet a fiver she’s got the best percentage of coaches and players from Oklahoma compared to any other sport.

She told me she attends or teaches, I forget which, at so ultra elite women’s basketball invite only continuing education conference held back East each year. So she’s got respect. She knows the game. And her performance here and at Kansas State is roughly the same.

I just don’t know where we are going to get money if revenue is fixed. Does anybody want to take an extra $100,000 from the football recruiting budget to hire a better basketball coach? Because it would appear to me we have a competent staff who like being in a Oklahoma who will continue working for dirt. To do better means robbing Peter to pay Paula. But which sport? We cut Men’s Golf. So that tells me every other sport besides football and men’s basketball is cut to the bone. Does anybody want to cut those two sports to improve performance in the women’s sports without investing in major facility upgrades? We tried that in the late 90s and early 2000s. It took years and millions to recover. Burns was a symptom of many problems, not the cause of problems, including ill advised and uncalibrated spending on women’s sports before he got here.

I would love a mark next to your name, like the blue check “verified” symbol on Twitter, that tells posters on here that you’ve actually had a productive one on one conversation longer than ten minutes with a member of TU’s coaching staff in any sport in the last year. It’s a lot easier to call for someone’s head if you just sit in the stands or silently mail in your checks.

but they arent solely to blame either. TU might find resistance on here to be less venomous if they held a once yearly open event for posters to show up and ask questions. An ITS summit if you will. But I think we know that would be about 10 of us out of the 30 or so regulars, even if they could travel back to TU for free.

 

[goldenhurricane2]

There are several tribute accounts to Pats on the twitters if you know what you are looking for. Or something. I’m not sure which is the real one anymore.

you’re welcome

 

[chito_and_leon]

It’s difficult to respond to this post because your statements are confusing and you seem to be attacking me personally for a series of decisions I would not have made. I’m not sure why you say I make statements that can’t be verified.

Frankly, I speak more freely on here than I should. There isn’t a lot utility in discussing a lot of things about TU athletics from the past that are embarrassing. But i like to keep the discussion honest. For instance, tempering our self righteous reliance of dismissing defeats and recruiting losses due to academic qualifications when the reality is that we’ve admitted students who are functionally illiterate on multiple occasions over the years and gotten them the help they needed off campus while they stayed eligible as long as they could.

But since you want facts, and I know I’m right because I’ve lived it, so if you want stats or links you’ll have to go find them yourself. The reality is that TU has been paying for women’s basketball since the Carter Administration. We’ve had maybe 6 or 7 winning seasons in that time. So Mossman’s .500 looks pretty good to me. We’ve been to the tournament twice. One of those appearances was under Mossman. The other was under the previous coach, who had a 20+ win season and promptly was penalized by the NCAA a scholarship the following year for willfully failing to make adequate academic performance. I don’t want to even think how inadequately prepared those students were and how inadequate our academic support was for that to happen. There were a host of off field dirty laundry incidents. After several players left the team, the program was in chaos. All of the information in this paragraph is available from independent sources on the internet if you want to go look. And that’s not the worst period for that program — by far.

There currently is, and should continue to be, varying definitions of what constitutes success for TU sports when compared both to TU’s peers, particularly in conference, but also differences in the standard of success for the different sports at TU. And let me be emphatic that I don’t mean different standards of success between men and women or even revenue and non-revenue sports (which in the case of TU is football vs the rest). TU is not alone in this view. Not only is it difficult for a mid major to attract talent to compete in the tiny recruiting pool necessary to be nationally competitive, people that know what they are talking about know that women’s basketball is consistently across the board across the nation the lowest, or near the lowest, graduating rate of all the sports at the FBS level. Bringing talent here to win 20 games is not easy, typically not feasible given budget constraints, and too often not in the long term best interests of the students themselves who may stay eligible and graduate if they go elsewhere. None of that has anything to do with Janet Levit, TU’s current or future financial situation, or me. It has to do with the limited number of women in this country coming out of high school who are 6’4” and above who can shoot an outside jumper off the dribble AND pass biology. Few of these women graduate in the TU footprint and nearly all are scooped up by the Top 25. Most have no business at TU anyway. No amount of money is going to change that. No previous leadership team has done better, even during rosy times.

Nobody likes to see a result like this one. But you forget how beneficial it is to TU to be able to play UCONN at all in WBB. Mossman is doing a good job doing what is asked of her and she’s doing it better than anyone else before her and I’m confident she’s doing it as well as anyone coming after her and I personally don’t know anyone willing to come to TU who could do it better.

What I know for sure from interacting with you on a bunch of topics is that you will present "facts" to support your position that are very often just not true. Your opinion drives your "facts" rather than the other way around. I write it off as cognitive bias, hijacked by our own brains. But your posts are interesting because of your opinion, which I suspect is not exactly a direct line to the mouths of the powers that be but often is a good reflection of their thinking. That's useful.

And in that context, I'm worried that you justify almost every failure in TU athletics with money. I'm not saying that's untrue - in fact, it's scariest if it IS true, if we really can't afford to remain competitive in pretty much anything. Because TU Committed inherently will have a lower ceiling on our profitability. Slashing costs might get us out of losing money but it's not going to generate a lot of extra cash unless we can find a way to squeeze 25k students onto campus. So in some ways, this might be our peak, not our valley with current plans and leadership.

On the other hand, as the academic standards at TU drop and it becomes way, way easier to "make adequate academic performance", as inevitably will happen under TU Committed, I think WBB is a sport that can benefit tremendously if it has support.

 

[chito_and_leon]

Also, I don’t get why CL makes some things personal.

I don't know why you think disagreeing with you on the facts is personal. I'm not sure I've ever known anyone with thinner skin when it comes to being wrong. It happens to all of us. Even when I try really, really hard to be tender and gentle, you think it's personal.

But I admit that I can be a bit heavy on the sarcasm, and I'm not one to mince words when maybe mincing would be friendlier. And I apologize for that, both in the past and for what I will say in the future, which I'm sure won't be much better.

 

[HuffyCane]

Still waiting for you to show me what I said about WBB is untrue.

 

[chito_and_leon]

I just don’t know where we are going to get money if revenue is fixed. Does anybody want to take an extra $100,000 from the football recruiting budget to hire a better basketball coach? Because it would appear to me we have a competent staff who like being in a Oklahoma who will continue working for dirt. To do better means robbing Peter to pay Paula. But which sport? We cut Men’s Golf. So that tells me every other sport besides football and men’s basketball is cut to the bone. Does anybody want to cut those two sports to improve performance in the women’s sports without investing in major facility upgrades? We tried that in the late 90s and early 2000s. It took years and millions to recover. Burns was a symptom of many problems, not the cause of problems, including ill advised and uncalibrated spending on women’s sports before he got here.

Oh hey, I guess I should have read all the posts before responding Looks like we're making the same point on funding under TU Committed. Sounds like there will be tough decisions ahead for the admin. Especially if TU Committed comes in at anything less than 100% of its aspirations. Really, really tough when it comes to athletics.

 

[Gold*]

I don't know why you think disagreeing with you on the facts is personal. I'm not sure I've ever known anyone with thinner skin when it comes to being wrong. It happens to all of us. Even when I try really, really hard to be tender and gentle, you think it's personal.

But I admit that I can be a bit heavy on the sarcasm, and I'm not one to mince words when maybe mincing would be friendlier. And I apologize for that, both in the past and for what I will say in the future, which I'm sure won't be much better.

Case in point. Looks like Huffy touched a nerve. If you think I’m thin skinned or care about your attacks, you are wrong. It it’s fair to point them out. I enjoy debate. You have started some fights about nothing on here just to have fights about nothing. And make crappy comments. At least reserve those for people who earn them, like Zit.

 

[chito_and_leon]

Case in point. Looks like Huffy touched a nerve. If you think I’m thin skinned or care about your attacks, you are wrong. It it’s fair to point them out. I enjoy debate. You have started some fights about nothing on here just to have fights about nothing. And make crappy comments. At least reserve those for people who earn them, like Zit.

I do get frustrated with Huffy because I don't get paid to fact check him but you kinda have to if you want to engage with him on facts. I find that irritating.

I do think you say things are personal as a way to discredit points that you can't discredit otherwise, certainly a common approach to debate in today's world "2+2=3." "No, 2+2=4". "Why do you always make things personal? Why are you attacking me? Your point isn't true, it's just that you want to attack me personally." I don't think correcting someone on the facts is a personal attack but I know a lot of people think otherwise these days.

I don't start fights over nothing. ** YOU ** might not think my point is worth discussing but I don't bring things up that ** I ** don't think are worth discussing. Some of that is probably just different priorities. Some is I'm ok saying the things that need to be said but make people uncomfortable, which is a big part of the TU Committed discussion that I now so many people hate.