Checkmate
- Thread starter NYShoreGuy
- Start date
26 double digit losses (with good teams) in seven years is a lot.
17 in two is twice that much.
Sorry now I had to do it.
Willard’s first 5 seasons has a total of 35 double digit losses.
So 61 during his tenure. About 5 a season.
And the board pretty much went off on each and every one. Even though things change, some things with our fan base never do.
I’m included in that group. No one likes getting their a** kicked.
The die hards will come here and complain, sulk, ask for change, or take the other side of the fence.
The rest of our fans stop watching, don’t show up to the arena, or find an excuse with the traffic patterns, their bedtime, or the cost of pretzels. Bottomline when things are good fans jump on the bandwagon. When times are tough we complain and everyone else checks completely out.
Right now when we need engagement to be high, we are hitting one of those points where fans have already checked out 10 games into the season. Get run out of the building on Saturday and Carino will be able to hand count the number of people at the Rock for his game recap.
One coach was hired to take us out of drought and from being a big east embarrassment. The other was hired to build on the success of making the tournament and advancing in it. To ignore that is just silly. The expectations were not the same at the start and because of the different starting points they shouldn’t even be compared. There wasn’t anyone on social media saying Kevin Willard will take seton hall to a final four.
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Who was saying Shs would take us to the final four? I would like to meet this delusional fan and take them for a lot of money. 😂
His name is John Fanta. I don’t have the Twitter but that tweet I do remember reading on here. Let me know how taking his money works out for you. It received more than a few likes. You might be able to take money from more delusional fans.
April Tweets
setonhall.forums.rivals.com
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A split with the eventual national champion is better than practically all of the league did. There's no sense in replying to you any further, because you are a master at being a contrarian. Nothing you say is going to diminish what was a good year for SHU basketball, in Holloway's second year at the helm.
The comment wasn't from me, but here's how I actually see it: It was a bitter disappointment not to make the NCAA Tournament last year. A team that wins 13 Big East games should be a no-questions-asked NCAA team. It burns a little more because we have a coach with a track record of tournament success, which is not something we've had since P.J. Carlesimo. Thirteen wins is a significant accomplishment at Seton Hall. Even P.J. himself only managed it once (14-4 in 1992-93) and between then and last year, it only happened once (13-5 in 2019-20, a year that ended with a thud on the court and off). I don't care what happened in the nonconference season; they earned their way in.
But I have to say -- and I'm sure many here will reasonably not agree with this, and that's understandable -- I enjoyed the NIT championship more than I do a first-round flameout in the NCAA Tournament. It's not something I realized until it was just about done, and it came as a major surprise to me, but that was a lot of fun last April. Did it ultimately matter? No, of course not. But neither, I maintain, does being sent home by dinner time on the first Thursday of the NCAAs. The hype and the anticipation leading up to the first NCAA game is always great, but it is the pits losing it, especially as a matter of habit. You're done before the thing even really starts. In the end, neither thing really raises your program's profile, which really demands a Sweet Sixteen before anyone but the hardcore fan notices. And that would be great. We seem a long way off from that now, but then again, it's been a long way since it happened previously. An entire quarter century, now, assuming it doesn't happen this year (which, come on...).
I think everyone wants to see Seton Hall be good. Any program that is good believes in NCAA or bust. You can't find a good program that says NIT championship sounds awesome. Well this was fun doesn't change that for me, while others it may, I get that. My only question is if we flipped the switch, if loyal son Sha had us in the dance every year and Amaker, Orr, Gonzo or Willard took over, didn't make it to the dance either year, in year 2 won the NIT and was having a year 3 like this, don't you think the seat would be boiling or would everyone be saying damn that NIT run was fun? My opinion, there would be so many threads about how far back we've gone from Sha. I think people want Sha to be awesome so bad, they've given him a hometown discount lowered bar. Otherwise it would be NCAA or bust. 13-7 with 0 good road or neutral site wins on selection Sunday is a tough sell.
I cringe at what the board would be writing if our coach was Louis Orr (RIP) right now. Man, did he take a beating from fans at times.
But make no mistake about it, what we have seen so far is worse than anything anyone has done in 40 years. We’ve got 22+ games to go and I hope it improves, starting Saturday with payback.
But make no mistake about it, what we have seen so far is worse than anything anyone has done in 40 years. We’ve got 22+ games to go and I hope it improves, starting Saturday with payback.
Mostly fair, I think, but a few things: No, I don't think we should be in the habit of saying NIT championships are awesome. But my human reaction, after the bitter of pill of being snubbed at 13-7 that included a 15-point win against the runaway best team in the county, was that it was surprisingly fun. Fun after we thought we had nothing to show for it all. And it was novel enough after not winning what, one NIT game in the last 65 years, or whatever it was? Is it going to work every year? Nope. Not even close. But the circumstances, such as they were, provided a surprisingly warm reaction -- at least in me.
Yes, I desperately want Sha to be successful, for the program and for him, but I'm not going to delude myself. This year has been an unmitigated disaster. There's no getting around it. Seasons aren't static things, and there is still the possibility this team improves over the course of the season -- even greatly -- but there's no shot at an NCAA short of winning the Big East Tournament, and that's dispiriting. We know that.
But one thing that makes the early Holloway tenure different than that of any other coach we've had is that he is having to step up to a major conference from a low-major and have to figure that out while at the same time figure out how to navigate this new world of paying players and unrestricted transfers. That is a major, major handicap that Willard, Gonzalez, Orr, Amaker, Blaney and Carlesimo never had to confront. Yeah, there were bags, but there was nothing like this, and the transfers would have been unthinkable to any of them early on. So while I never give up on a coach before five years, I willingly admit I am also trying to calibrate my evaluation of of Shaheen Holloway under unprecedented circumstances, and that's hard.
I do truly believe he is a very good coach and if he would've taken over this program in, say, 2017 instead of five years later, I think he would've hit the ground running and we wouldn't have missed a beat. I might even suggest we would have broken through the first-weekend glass ceiling in March, though that's speculative.
Right now, I think Sha is trying to reconcile doing business the way it's done in 2024 with the style that he has always employed and that he is comfortable with, and those two things are not working in harmony. Not this year, anyway. It was important to him to have a deep team that he could use to roate players in and out, as he did at Saint Peter's. I think that can work well, but there are a lot more variables when you have to take ten new players every year, and your "NIL" budget requires you to take lots of flyers on high-upside but unproven and undeveloped kids from other programs. A LOT has to go right. But I think he wanted to try it after wearing out his top five or six guys last year. His style also works better when he can hold onto guys for a few seasons and develop them -- their skills and their mindset. I'm not sure if that is possible here in this new world. If he can ever have access to the funding, he's got a shot, but I'm not bullish on that. So it might not work. He might have to keep adapting and evolving until he finds that balance that will allow his teams to succeed here, and I hoep that's possible. If not, it's a shame, because I have no doubt he would've been successful here not too long ago. It's impossible to say for sure now.
