Fund issue , strategy issue or lack of interest

[Pirates1991]

So which one is it or combo of all 3

1. What funds are we actually working with. Nice kid but we buying a bench player from a bad A10 team????

2. Sha strategy of low to mid major and he coach up.. has not worked so far

3. Players just don’t have an interest in Sha or SHU?

 

[its haLL baLL]

$$$ talks. Either we don’t have any or Sha is refusing to spend it. If Sha won’t spend it then he needs to take himself and his staff back to St. Peter’s where the amount the players get paid is more palatable to him.

 

[Pirates1991]

So reading other posts, it is not a fund issue as we have 6M+ per HallDan

 

[Fishjam]

There's definitely a disconnect somewhere. Is Sha reluctant to guarantee money until the settlement is official or maybe he is just terrible at the whole negotiation process? I wonder if both may be true.

You have to be aggressive, proactive and agile to adjust and make counteroffers. I don't see Sha being good at that and agents of players with multiple offers are not going to wait for Sha to figure things out. The agents are moving at light speed. The fact that we don't have a GM handling this is criminal.

The other part that may be an issue is that we put all of our money into the school to be used for Rev Share. P4 schools purposely left huge chunks of money from their Collectives separate from their Rev Share. They had to do this because they are up against the max $20M Rev Share limit because of Football. So they are using millions from their Collectives to pay players upfront Bonuses while Sha just has a promise to pay after July 1st if/when Rev Share goes into effect. Upfront guaranteed money will beat Sha's down the road promise every day of the week.

 

[shupat08]

So reading other posts, it is not a fund issue as we have 6M+ per HallDan

No one has come out strongly and said "we have 6 million right now to spend" which leads me to believe that number is including revenue sharing which we don't have yet. So maybe we only have 1.5 million to spend right now?

 

[Piratz]

Either we don’t have the money or the coach is in over his head trying to manage this new era.

I’d prefer it to be the money, that would be cleaner.

 

[hbkmyr]

Players are signing all over while we’re telling Bell to wait and adding backups from Fordham. It’s getting easy to figure out.

 

[connel]

Whoever entrusted Sha & Felt to "manage the budget" should demand a refund. You could see this trainwreck coming from a mile away. I wrote/posted about this months ago. College basketball today is very different than last year and 5 years ago and 10 years ago.

 

[Gohall129]

Strategy issue. Sha has proven he lacks the ability to put together a cohesive strategy when it comes to roster building. Imagine having no big men on your roster and playing Samuel out of position with Trey Jackson. What rational person would do that

 

[Bud Boomer]

I think it’s a combination all three factors with strategy being the biggest factor. From the very beginning this group (and I say group because I don’t think it’s only Shaheen) has seemed very lost when it comes to roster building and NIL.

I appreciate Shaheen’s statement that he would work harder than ever to rebuild the team this offseason - which I’m sure was sincere - but gone are the days when hitting the summer circuit and leveraging your network will result in a good recruiting class. Today it’s much more about working smart, not hard.

It seems like we had no clear sense of who we wanted, the market value of those players, and how much we would be willing to pay them. Now we are scrambling and will probably end up overpaying for lesser players.

 

[JoePeppitone2012]

I think it’s a combination all three factors with strategy being the biggest factor. From the very beginning this group (and I say group because I don’t think it’s only Shaheen) has seemed very lost when it comes to roster building and NIL.

I appreciate Shaheen’s statement that he would work harder than ever to rebuild the team this offseason - which I’m sure was sincere - but gone are the days when hitting the summer circuit and leveraging your network will result in a good recruiting class. Today it’s much more about working smart, not hard.

It seems like we had no clear sense of who we wanted, the market value of those players, and how much we would be willing to pay them. Now we are scrambling and will probably end up overpaying for lesser players.

Which is beyond unacceptable considering the season was done by November

 

[chickenbox]

Any reason to not conclude that we're screwed?

 

[connel]

Any reason to not conclude that we're screwed?

Nope - we are screwed.

 

[williaza01]

Which is beyond unacceptable considering the season was done by November

Yea this is getting to me a bit

The player I know..was being contacted way way before we called and our offer was laughable…is this happening all over? Why were we so unprepared?

If it makes anyone feel better the only other team he said that came off that weak was Rutgers

 

[connel]

Can Sha coach? Yes I believe he can. Can Felt administer? No, no he cannot.

 

[its haLL baLL]

There should have been a full-fledged evaluation of the program after the disastrous start. The writing was on the wall in early December that the approach to the portal and NIL was an abject failure. We were coming off a successful BE season and NIT Championship the prior year, but you could tell the program was nosediving pretty early on.

It would appear that nothing has changed other than the potential revenue sharing agreement and putting all of our eggs in that basket. No GM, no changes to the staff, no meaningful changes to fundraising, etc.

The NIL figure that's been mentioned here of $5-6mm must be entirely dependent on the revenue sharing agreement. If we have that sort of cash on hand and this current roster then everyone involved should be relieved of their duties (and that's not hyperbole). It would be shear incompetence and evidence that they cannot compete in this current environment.

Someone needs to wakeup and right the ship. People can say that we had one bad season and we've been here before but the game has changed. You cannot bank on recruiting a class like in 2014 or bringing in a Cale, Powell, Mamu, and Rhoden in consecutive classes and developing players for 4 years. All of those guys would have gotten poached by the blue bloods under the current rules and left for more money.

We need a strategy to compete as a small-budget school in this climate and it appears that we still do not have one.

 

[Section112]

Any reason to not conclude that we're screwed?

I think we were screwed the minute we were allowed to negotiate with players. Between our reputation of not having money, Sha being a control freak and us maybe or maybe not having money we did not hit the ground running and make the big offers right away. That is what the good programs do now. We are not in the same hemisphere with the good programs as we don't market, we don't tell our story etc. Lots needs to change for us to compete and its not just $. Those programmatic details are huge in this insane marketplace for players.

 

[hallgrad80]

There's definitely a disconnect somewhere. Is Sha reluctant to guarantee money until the settlement is official or maybe he is just terrible at the whole negotiation process? I wonder if both may be true.

You have to be aggressive, proactive and agile to adjust and make counteroffers. I don't see Sha being good at that and agents of players with multiple offers are not going to wait for Sha to figure things out. The agents are moving at light speed. The fact that we don't have a GM handling this is criminal.

The other part that may be an issue is that we put all of our money into the school to be used for Rev Share. P4 schools purposely left huge chunks of money from their Collectives separate from their Rev Share. They had to do this because they are up against the max $20M Rev Share limit because of Football. So they are using millions from their Collectives to pay players upfront Bonuses while Sha just has a promise to pay after July 1st if/when Rev Share goes into effect. Upfront guaranteed money will beat Sha's down the road promise every day of the week.

Those are issues that should not be issues that are exclusively ones for Sha but should be part of an overall strategy that is formulated berween the the AD , Sha and the Administration, lmcluding the BOR .

 

[LeftCoastPirates]

BINGO…This part of your statement (see below) is what I have been saying all along and highlighted in our last episode.

For all the people IN THE KNOW who support the fact that we have $6m to spend. Please speak up and clarify if all those funds have been directed to Pirate Blue for the purposes of revenue sharing.

“The other part that may be an issue is that we put all of our money into the school to be used for Rev Share. P4 schools purposely left huge chunks of money from their Collectives separate from their Rev Share. They had to do this because they are up against the max $20M Rev Share limit because of Football. So they are using millions from their Collectives to pay players upfront Bonuses while Sha just has a promise to pay after July 1st if/when Rev Share goes into effect. Upfront guaranteed money will beat Sha's down the road promise every day of the week.”

 

[SHUSource]

There's definitely a disconnect somewhere. Is Sha reluctant to guarantee money until the settlement is official or maybe he is just terrible at the whole negotiation process? I wonder if both may be true.

You have to be aggressive, proactive and agile to adjust and make counteroffers. I don't see Sha being good at that and agents of players with multiple offers are not going to wait for Sha to figure things out. The agents are moving at light speed. The fact that we don't have a GM handling this is criminal.

The other part that may be an issue is that we put all of our money into the school to be used for Rev Share. P4 schools purposely left huge chunks of money from their Collectives separate from their Rev Share. They had to do this because they are up against the max $20M Rev Share limit because of Football. So they are using millions from their Collectives to pay players upfront Bonuses while Sha just has a promise to pay after July 1st if/when Rev Share goes into effect. Upfront guaranteed money will beat Sha's down the road promise every day of the week.

The entire post is very good, but the last paragraph is perhaps the best one that's been written here on this subject. This is by far the most plausible explanation for what's happening ... or not happening.

 

[shu67]

I wrote a while back since we have little NIL money we should bank it for 2 to 4 years and not give any out. Then every 4 years we buy an NCAA team that can go deep. Granted it would maybe be for one year but if you have an NIL budget close to 20 million you can buy a number of 5 star players and build a winner every 4 to 5 years.

You may think that is crazy but the strategy makes more sense than spending marginal NIL money to build a marginal roster that is going to give you marginal results year in and year out ....if that. Catching magic in a bottle in this new era of college payroll is NOT going to happen.

 

[The Crows Nest]

BINGO…This part of your statement (see below) is what I have been saying all along and highlighted in our last episode.

For all the people IN THE KNOW who support the fact that we have $6m to spend. Please speak up and clarify if all those funds have been directed to Pirate Blue for the purposes of revenue sharing.

“The other part that may be an issue is that we put all of our money into the school to be used for Rev Share. P4 schools purposely left huge chunks of money from their Collectives separate from their Rev Share. They had to do this because they are up against the max $20M Rev Share limit because of Football. So they are using millions from their Collectives to pay players upfront Bonuses while Sha just has a promise to pay after July 1st if/when Rev Share goes into effect. Upfront guaranteed money will beat Sha's down the road promise every day of the week.”

And as I stated elsewhere, this could have, and should have, been avoided by having our donors backstop the up front payments, until such time as the court decision goes thru/July 1st. I am fairly certain our large, and loyal donors, of whom there may only be a few, would have stepped up for this, as it is only the "sign on" bonuses, or "initial payments" that are laid out now. I cant imagine they pay the full salary up front....then again, we are Seton Hall...but really, that is not the case. So the school needed to get creative and again, they just sat on their hands figuring "isn't this what all schools will do?" until, once again, we are left wondering what happened.

If this is in fact the case, the ineptitude keeps piling up; I was actually hoping beyond hope that Sha had some kind of strategy, waiting for the portal to close; For what reason? I dont know...but it was a hope that there was in fact a strategy to what we were doing.

If it is again SHU being....well SHU, then this program is finished.