TheTastyGreek

Stop thinking small. Should have opened the checkbook and hired Saban to fill the special teams job.

No paperboypete (or whatever) means this is no worthwhile signing day special. Step yo game up, podcast.

I'm happy to hear it. Hopefully, the surprise recruits work out as well as all our other past stealth recruits. And any new facilities are as effective as Apogee and the athletics center have been in rocketing us to the top of the recruiting game.

Congrats to 3 in state programs that we ought to be competitive with and two other out-of-state conference mates for making this list. Maybe next year! (P.S.: I'm willing to package "Maybe next year!" with "Hopefully it works out better this time!" in a very reasonably priced package deal. Seriously, hit me up on the PM, UNT licensing, and we can make a great deal here.)

Then screw him. He's dead to me.

I haven't been this excited since we won the battle for Dunham's deep snapping kid.

I don't think that actually happened. We would have had to go on an upset conference tournament run and probably knocked off a favored and better rested team in the finals to make the NCAAs, and we never got any upset wins. Sorry. Must be your mind playing tricks on you. On me, too, since I thought I had fond memories of it.

Which Top 25 opponent did you feel we ought to have beaten?

I'm not sure how many people saw the Simmons documentary on Showtime... Eye opening, to say the least. Simmons basically cops to completely bailing out on class as soon as fall semester ended. Meant he wasn't eligible for the Wooden award, and he didn't give a crap about it. Later, when they're a bubble team, he flat out says (paraphrasing from memory) "I'm from Australia. I came here to play in the NBA. I don't really care about a college tournament; we never knew or cared about it where I came from." Simmons flat out, stone cold, 100% did not give a damn about anything but staying healthy and going pro. That movie was fascinating. I don't remember JJ having any in-depth screen time, but just seeing how a guy in Simmons's stratosphere operates and deals with the unique demands of that weird, not-pro limbo.... Definitely worth watching.

You need to stop this sort of stuff. Immediately. Non negotiable.

Chipotle sells beer and wine, too. Maybe Benford can go work there instead.

Firing Benford mid-season is a bad move. The only possible worse move is keeping him through the end of the season. Sucks that those are our options, but here we are. So, fire him already.

This one. Depending on when we name him.

So, last year, I started doing capsules/breakdowns for viable "ideal hire" options (meaning, an experienced D1 head coach with a track record of success). Here's the full writeup for some of the "why", but the 4 qualifying factors for a current D1 head coach were: 1) Not already interviewing for Power Conference jobs or better paying jobs at bigger basketball leagues than CUSA 2) Base salary under $300k 3) Total contract guaranteed money is under $2 million 4) Not qualified/active in the 2016 NCAA Tournament (for a hire this year, it would rule out anyone that qualified for this year's tourney instead) Those are criteria completely of my own creation, but I think/hope I did a pretty decent job of explaining why I chose them in that post and the responses further down in the thread. Dooley, in addition to making almost $300k with his "easy" incentives (even though his base is only $275k), was a finalist (not just an interviewee) for two different head coaching jobs last year. One was at Wright State, which ultimately hired Scott Nagy for a base salary of over $500k guaranteed for 5 years. The other was at St. Louis, which hired Travis Ford to replace a guy making over $1 million per year. Dooley may once again be two months away from a shot at a $500-700k per year job at a multi-bid league. And that's if he doesn't make another tournament and win a game, at which point he's an easy hire (like Enfield before him) for a low level power conference job at $1-1.5 million, minimum. He already took almost a six-figure pay cut to leave Kansas and take the head coach job at FGCU. He almost left last year to take an assistant gig at NC State (for a 50% pay raise... ultimately taken by the UT-Martin head coach instead). If he wants to coach and win at a mid-major, he's already set up and winning at a place where basketball comes first, and he's guaranteed there into 2020 at least. If he wants to move to another mid-major and potentially rebuild, he's already come close twice, and for more money (potentially more than double) what we could expect to pay him. If he's out for money, he could have left to take an assistant job at a power conference (like Buzz Williams did when he left UNO), gotten a fat raise once again in line with what we pay Benford, and set himself up as a hot name assistant in a year or two. If he's holding out for a power conference gig, he's not going to consider us anyway. I don't mean to crap on the idea, because I agree with Side Show Joe that he's a good coach. I'd love to have him. But he's not in a situation right now where we can realistically get him.

Disagree. I still love you, Vito. Parking make a man say and do crazy things.

Yes, but part of that was him being an assistant (Kansas) at the time. I don't think we could poach a guy in his current situation even if it we were fresh off JJ leaving us healthy.

I'll write it up when I'm not thumb typing. A follow up non-rhetorical question: Why would a guy leave a successful program running exactly how he likes it with 4 or 5 more guaranteed years to come to a rebuild with only 3 years guaranteed?

On mobile, I'll do a write-up later. But, Dooley is not a realistic option for us. Based on guaranteed money, based on other midmajor jobs he considered and withdrew from ($500k+), based on other jobs he's been rumored around... There's no way.

I'd hand it to Scrappy if he'd agree to put some damn pants on.

Question marks are like Lay's potato chips.

Maybe he's always dreamed of coaching basketball, and God's opening his window?

I briefly had Sister Helen Prejean there, but it didn't go over well.

I hope you're wrong. The biggest mistakes RV made were pretending to have standards while bringing Dodge back for year 4 and pretending to take a hard stance on results while keeping Benford for years 4 and 5 (I'd also say year 3, but then again I'm bitter and angry). If Baker wants to wait for the end of the season to make a change that obviously needs to happen and obviously needed to happen before he ever even came to work here... Then that's a huge red flag to me. I can understand giving Benford a shot at this season, because a July-September hire wasn't likely to be a good non-interim replacement for him. And Baker had (and has) a lot of work to do in making this place his own. But Benford has already screwed up his most recent last chance. So, move on already. Don't wait for the absolute last second. Just get it over with already.

National signing day is February 1st. After that, the focus is off football until spring practice. We have four games between now and then, and one other the Saturday after (Rice on February 4th). If we don't win at least three of those five games, it's impossible for us to finish above .500 in conference, meaning it's impossible for us to finish better than .500 on the regular season. If we're not at least 9-13 (3-7) on Monday, February 6th, Benford better be finally, finally fired. If we have 8 or more conference losses and Benford is allowed to coach our road trip to Florida that starts on February 9th, then this new regime is just as horseshit as the last one, and I'm never buying season tickets for another season of any fucking sport this school ever pretends to take seriously, ever again.

However many you have in your office. Wouldn't want to lose them when Wren changes the locks.