GrandGreen

Great news. Congrats softball team. This should at least give them a tie for the championship.

Obviously, you are not familiar with Joe Hamilton. Way before your time, but Hines doesn't compare.

Yes I remember, your point is? If you are inferring that JJ has improved the team from the Trilli era, then that is definitely true. However, improvement from one of the most pitiful coaching performance in NCAA history is not setting NT's standards very high.

JJ is RV's man. RV had a lot of confidence in JJ, rewarded him against all logic with a contract extension and secured the Belt tournament for what must have been envisioned as a venue for a strong NT team. Never give up hope, but this team does not look like a team that is building. JJ recruiting thus far as been below average for a Belt team. Anyone notice that the only all conference mention for a NT player was for a Trilli recruit. JJ has yet to recruit a high school player that could remotely be called a difference maker. His juco recruiting has been a little better finding sucess with lightly recruited Jerome Green and Jeffrey Simmons, and a good HInes. But it is difficult to build a program with mid to lower level juco recruits. Next year unless Hopkins gets an extra year has to be seen as another rebuilding year. NT will have a good senior point guard and Simmons who could be very good if he can control his foul tendencies. The rest of the squad and the incomming freshmen won't excite many. The transfer Davis maybe some help but obviously wasn't good enough for Arkansas.

Congrats to women. Great win. However the men's finish of 8 out of 9 negates any positive Bubbas Cup effect. What has happens to our men's team?

Thanks for your input. My post was not to be critical of the athletics, who must be really dedicated. The team is improving but breaking team records does not have a lot of weight when the team had only one swimmer in one event good enough to place in the top 3 in the conference meet. Sometimes results in the non-revenue sports are misleading because of resource levels. For example, a few have talked about how bad NT's last baseball team was. I actually think that team was amazing in some ways. The team had less than 2 ships and was coached by a retiree who limited his salary to the amount that was allowed and still draw full social security. They did win a few games and once beat the number one team in the nation. Great results in my mind versus the resources allocated. Hence, the question on resources. Good luck to our swimmers and I hope they continue to improve and actually challenge in the Belt in the near future.

See that NT placed fifth in the Belt in swimming. With highlights being a second and fourth place finish. It just seems like the team has not substantially progressed and I am wondering why. I know that they are on their 3rd or 4th coach in their brief history. Is NT slow progress, at least in my mind, due to low budget relative to other Belt teams or just a lack of emphasis. Does anyone know the number of ships that can be offered and the number at NT?

NT with everything to gain lose to Denver (5-19) by 56-74. NT never in the game.

The men's game was great. Great defensive effort. But being one of the few at the lady's game, I think a great effort by the lady's is going almost unnoticed. Bobo and Sanders had great nights. ULL's big Russian post who is supposed to be the best player in the conference, was handled very effective mostly by Sanders' defense. I was somewhat puzzled by ULL's coach seeming to give up the game in the last 5 minutes. No timeouts, fouls and seemingly no effort by the ULL team once they fell behind 10 points. I do not understand why this lady's team plays so bad on the road, but they do have a lot of young talent. I am generally a critic of Slinker but she has recruited well. The 3 high school guards coming in next year plus the return of two injured players 6'3 Ajekwu and 6'2 Jackson combined with the whole current team comming back less little used Klat should make NT a very formible team in 2005-2006. Hopfully this NT women's team is beginning to gel and will be a major factor in the tourney.

So far in tourny action , NT has been shutout by Centenary (1-6 before tounament), UTEP (0-5 bef tour), and UTSA (0-5 bef tour). Not exactly a great start to the season.

As an old alumni, who has 35+ years of following mean green basketball, I don't understand some of the posts pointing fingers. What purpose does that serve? How about 15,000 students that live within 5 minutes of the superpit? I will once again go on my tirade about why do the games start at 7:00 on weekdays? I have season tickets to both men and women, and I have made I think 3 weekday games this year. It is just not worth 2 hours in bascially stalled traffic to get to a basketball game from the metroplex. Also the practice of having the women and men play at the same time though not as much this year has to hurt attendence for both. I do wish the students and most of the alumni were as lucky as I was to be a student in the Joe Hamilton, Crest Whitaker, Lee Winfield MIssouri Valley days when the snakepit was rocking and you had to make an effort just to get a ticket for the game. It had to be as good a basketball experience as there ever was available to see the nation's best teams get clobbered in the loudest venue in college basketball at the time. I appaud anyone's efforts trying to improve the NT basketball experience. Since leaving the MVC interest has slowly declined and Trilli just about killed what little interest there was in the program. Slinkers programs have been medicore at best. Her only real success was based on her recruitment of the heart of a championship AAU team that included Reades, Mitchell, and Thomas. That class accounted for 4 of 5 of Slinker's winning seasons in sixteen years. In fairness the women's teams do play a very tough oc schedule but have also a losing conference record. JJ's team has only two recruits from Trilli's era, Barnett and Hopkins. I don't think any reasonable person would think that they are inferior to JJ's own recruits. JJ is certainly better than Trilli but in reality who would not be. I still think JJ is a good bench coach but I fail to see how he gained his reputation as a great recruiter.

I was not referring to before NT joined the belt. NT has only had five winning years in the last 20 or so. I was referring to when NT joined the Belt and was a better team than most of the Belt. You are right I was not aware of WKU's great historical record, but I can assure you there are few programs that are not historically better programs than NT's. My question to you is why where WKU's big three players playing all those minutes in a fifty point blowout? Don't really care but it did seem unusual.

Lady Mean Green embarrassed by Western Kentucky 91-40. I must be the only one insane enough to listen to this. WKU was up 41 to 15 at half and coasted the second half WKU did find it necessary to leave their best players in for most of this blowout. . NT in their first year in the Belt along with Denver and FIU were on another level from the rest of the Belt. The rest of the teams were mostly really bad. Well MTSU and WKU have quickly bypassed the Mean Green and most of the others have at least caught up.

Anybody else get the impression that Hopkins in the first half and second half are two different players?

Being almost every competitive team is made up of foreign players, it will be interesting to see if NT changes it stradegy. Personally I would prefer a reasonable limit on foreign players.

Well luckly the only thing that really matters in Belt basketball is the tournament. Therefore there is hope, but the women losing by 19 to a 7-8 team and by 14 to a 7-10 team, and the men providing the first road victories for both ASU and ALR is not the way to build confidence.

Link

Link

"But Flanigan has received no calls from Division I-A programs about becoming a coach, and he has not even been sought out for a coordinator position at a bigger university. The seeming lack of opportunity for a black coach like Flanigan is one of the big issues hovering over college football as the A.F.C.A. holds its annual convention in Louisville." I hate the use of terms like "a bigger university" to refer to I guess football programs with much more exposure. Unless the reference is to schools with enrollments of over 31,000. I think they can use better termology.

Hope he makes the game in Denton were NT fans can show our appreciation for a first class person.

Talk about hops, 6'5 player for Eastern Washington in Canada slam dunk contest Link

If you are going to agrue with stats at least get them correct. First you stated Slinker teams had been in the NCAA tournament. Now you disreguard a year of her record. Here is her record: 1989-90 (16-11) 1990-91 (6-20) 1991-92 (8-18) 1992-93 (9-17) 1993-94 (10-17) 1994-95 (10-17) 1995-96 (11-16) 1996-97 (5-21) 1997-98 (10-17) 1998-99 (20-8) 1999-00 (17-11) 2000-01 (19-11) 2001-02 (21-9) 2002-03 (12-16) 2003-04 (11-17) 2004-05 (5-7) I doubt that anyone is advocating changing coaches during the season. Most likely Slinker will not be terminated no matter what record she has and if she wins 17 games this season she will be given a life time contract if she already doesn't have one.

As probably Slinker's biggest critic on this board, I hope NT turns it around and at least seriously competes for the Belt title. I am just tired of the continued overall mediore performance. A team that in many games cannot hit fifty percent in point blank range under the basket shots and averages 20 turnovers a game is not progress. It just seems to me that slinker's teams are always less then the sum of it parts. But hope is always there and I will be listening to the A$M game today and hoping for a NT turnaround that will carry through the conference tournament. The players on this team do have the talent imo to be a force in the conference.

Well first Slinker has had no NCAA appearances. Go to the NT official site and view women's bb game notes and you will find Slinker's record. I am not sure it is going to be to difficult to find someone with as good a history as Slinker who has had 5 winning teams out of 15 years and an overall losing conference record.

From generic uneducated UNT fan, you are complainting about someone making generalizations. I am quite aware of UTA basketball program and have been quite impressed with both the mens and womens programs based on the resources and facilities that UTA has. IF you were a UNT fan I think you may be a little upset at losing to a UTA program at home with all the advantages NT has over UTA at this time. I have nothing against UTA , and in fact have seen many games at UTA. Speaking of sterotypes, how pitiful is it for some opponents' fan to comment and insult someone on another school's board that you have never met and know not one damn thing about based on your assumptions. I can only assume you are not quite the idiot that you seem to be.