Chris Datres

Given what we've seen with the inconsistency of this team, I don't know if you can really have any expectations. If you take, for example, the JMU game where there were 4 games in one, that sounds like a microcosm of this season as a whole. So we as fans truly have to take this on a game by game basis. If we play like we did in the first halves of the Drexel and Delaware games for all 40 minutes, we can beat anyone in this conference. If we play like we did in the first half of the Vermont game or much of the Charleston game, then we'd be 0-fer in the conference. I'm done figuring out if these guys can build on positive performances because other than the Drexel to Delaware games, that flow hasn't really been there. But the good news is that they have a nice little win streak going (doesn't matter who they beat or the quality of teams they beat, take the wins) and hopefully some positive vibes flowing throughout the team.

Which school doesn't it matter to?

First half was the best half of the season. It certainly helped that the shots were dropping from the outside but we took smart shots, we moved the ball on offense and were getting layups and stuff at the rim, and we actually pushed the pace. I found myself yelling at the TV after rebounds to 'GOOOOO' and beat Drexel down the court. These guys are athletes and they look like they really wanted to run so let's not hold them back. Tonight, it worked really well. Betrand is looking so much better with his shot and you can see that his confidence has grown over the last month. He and Fobbs could be a real dynamic duo the rest of the way.

This is incredibly dumb on so many levels. Why bother with this? Are we paying for Regent's travel? That's dumb. Do we really think that people are going to show up for a Wednesday night game against a college CYO team and that will offset the cost of everything involved? We're much better just having the extra practice time and not risking any sort of on-court injury. But hey, the walk-ons will get to play.

Good find on the 3s vs 2s stat. I think Skerry said something at the beginning of the season about making the 3 more of a focal point in the offense. The analytics people have often said that the 3 is a more preferable shot but what they likely didn't account for is that constantly missing them isn't gonna mean much for the analytics balance sheet. Basketball has changed so much to being a bomber's paradise, which I don't think is all that great and you see it a lot during the NCAA Tournament -- live by the 3, die by the 3. In our respect, we don't have anyone consistent enough to be a sniper, so this business of launching 20+ 3's per game isn't gonna be helpful.

You're not what prompted my response. Some are like the bitchy owner from Major League who wants to make sure the team tanks so she can move or sell the team. I know it wasn't pretty and I know it wasn't against an upper echelon team but a win is a win and it was a win where they had to gut it out in the final 2 minutes, something we ALL know has not been a strength of this program in the past. And you're right, we'll see how they build off this in a 4-game stretch that can very easily be 4-0. But I also hoped that they'd build off the Florida performance and they didn't. I also thought they'd build off the Tulane win after the way they choked on the lead and then pulled it out in OT. They didn't there either. TUTigers2012 is correct -- we're consistently inconsistent and that's the most frustrating thing about this team and really this program since the 10-1 start at the end of calendar year 2017. And TUTigers2012, don't you dare try to loop me into that line of thinking you have about old guard people here bowing down to Skerry and Ambrose. They're certainly not above criticism and if you cycle back to after the Hofstra game when I wrote out that long post (that you agreed with btw), that's my version of criticism. I see zero need like some to flat out call for firings. No decisionmakers are reading this and taking our opinions under consideration in regards to that. So why waste the bandwidth? I'll stick to commenting about what I see/hear on the field/court and if strategy/personnel moves need to be critiqued negatively, I'll still be jumping in to do that. But to label me as one of those who in your mind finds those two coaches beyond reproach is wrong.

Good to see that even a win keeps the tide of negativity flowing. Would you have rather they lost tonite?

And who do we have? Nobody. Read that again. N-O-B-O-D-Y. Every team in this conference with the exception of probably Elon and JMU has someone on the team that when you look at the scouting report, you say, "we need to make sure we stop this guy". We don't have that. And we haven't had that really since Benimon left (you could make the case for Moto or Morsell but they were prone to disappear on their own more than what the opponents did to them). All we have are a bunch of complementary players who, if they were paired with an alpha dog, might light it up on a regular basis as well. And because it's a bunch of spare parts, we get the inconsistency we see on a game-by-game basis. The team that I saw take Florida to the wire is light years away from where we're at now. But given what we've seen in the first 14 games, it makes sense. Play great at Florida, clank a home game against Kent State, throw away a win against Buffalo, blitz the hell out of St. Joe's, come back from yakking a lead against Tulane, embarrass yourselves against NE and in the 2nd half against Hofstra. Get used to it the rest of the season because who knows what we're gonna get on a nightly basis. It comes down to recruiting and while the staff might be 'trusting their eyes', it's become pretty obvious that they need to go see the ophthalmologist. Unfortunately for them, the culture of the program is such that it won't be attractive to someone who would be the alpha dog that we desperately need. The refusal to use the athletes to get out and run and to revamp the offense is a giant black eye on the staff. And for certain players to take steps back in their development also earns the staff demerits. After the way we've shown ourselves against two of the best teams in the conference and what we will likely show in game 3 against the other really good team, I would be shocked if we're not playing in the Friday night loser bowl in the conference tournament. The New Year's Resolution for this staff had better be to take a long soul-searching look inside themselves and make some characteristic changes. Otherwise, the cycle will never change and opponents will continue to brush us aside like what we've seen these last 2 games.

Or spell correctly...

When they were here in Orlando at Thanksgiving, I had heard through a pretty informed person that Turgeon disliked one of the brothers (not sure which one, guessing the one that got zero playing time) and he expected him not to be on the team much longer. I'd think these two are a package deal so having a pair of schollies available would be necessary.

The mid-major writer at The Athletic had written a week or so ago about how Liberty was undefeated with most of the team back that beat Miss State in the tourney last year but they hadn't really had any proven opposition yet. I think this weekend gave them a really good case. It'll be interesting to see what happens in conference this year if their first slip-up isn't until the conference tournament and what the committee would do to them. But that's 2+ months away. As for us and today, better 45-minute effort after dropkicking yesterday's halftime lead away. I'm never going to complain about a win but a few things in the last 5 minutes of regulation really irked me and it's both on staff and players. We get an 8, 9-point lead and we decide, ok, that's enough, time to pull it out and run clock. After all of these years of this type of player, why in the world would we want to purposefully run the clock down to 5 and below knowing that the shot that will be attempted is going to be low-quality? Too many times in those last 5 minutes, I'd hear Gibson for 3 or Fobbs for 3 or whoever for 3. That's the best we can do? I said this at the Florida game and it still rings true -- stop letting the shot clock dictate what offense you run. And in today's case, stop letting the scoreboard dictate what offense you run. 5 minutes left is far too much time on the clock to be pulling it out, especially with how hot Tulane was from 3. The other thing that bothered me and later found ironic was Spiro saying that Sanders was telling his teammates with about 2 minutes left to play smart. I was like, 'ok, good, someone is taking some much-needed leadership in this situation'. And then who commits the STUPID and-1 foul in the final seconds? Sanders. It would be nice if we could grow players who have a bit more of a basketball mind and could do the smart thing in crucial situations. Foul shooting much better (why we won), rebounding great, limiting Lawson to 1 for 14 is pretty damn amazing. A Florida fan asked me today how we're doing and I couldn't really give him an answer because we do some good things in one game and then we revert back to silly stuff the next. I know Pat likes to trumpet that we're 7-2 in our last 9 against the A-10 and AAC but we also haven't been playing Cincy, UCF, VCU, and Dayton in those 9 games. So who knows what the conference season is going to bring. It kinda feels like we're starting at 0 since we haven't exactly built on wins. Part of that might be the gap between games this month but I think it also exhibits the inconsistency with this group. Gotta hold serve at home against NE next Saturday and get this conference season off on the right foot.

I do. Good read about his recruitment and the unusual way he ended up at Towson.

When Spiro told me about that at the Florida basketball game, my jaw dropped. That’s a really nice marriage and it shows NDSU isn’t scared one bit about taking on a tough game on the road. Given their history vs 1-A teams, I’m not surprised they’d do it.

Why would the Twerps or GTown have any interest in helping an area school? They’re not falling over themselves to go to Mason, GW, or American either. It’s all in the coach’s scheduling philosophy. Roy isn’t afraid. Bobby Hurley isn’t afraid. Turgeon and Ewing seem like they have the old-school mentality of only playing a road game if the conference schedules it or it’s part of some ‘challenge’.

We should play the other locals. You think Villanova likes the idea of having to play an Ivy, two below-average A-10 teams, and a who-knows-what-you-get Temple team every year? For a while, Nova thumbed their nose at the rest of Philly and their rep in the city took a hit. We don’t have a rep to take a hit on if we skipped out of the local scene but those games are still always tough tests to prepare for conference season. On the rest of the OOC front, there has to be better effort to get someone with a name to SECU. Look across the landscape and see all the power conference schools going to mid-majors. NC has gone to Elon and UNCW the last two years. Illinois went to Grand Canyon. Arizona State went to Princeton ffs. You have to likely schedule 2 (or 3) for 1s to make it happen but if you stagger the years, you can get a name team into SECU every year. Even if that ‘major’ team is a Temple, VA Tech, Rutgers, Wake Forest, those guys are looking for a footing in the Baltimore recruiting market too and might have a strong interest in a trip. But it’s annoying to see all the schools on par with us conference-wise get one marquee home game every year or every other year while the best we can do is a first-division MAC team.

Speaking of officiating, Fobbs got fouled on a breakaway and the heavy balding ref put up an intentional foul signal. But when they came back from a timeout, it became a common foul. Was that reviewed during the timeout or did they just decide to change their mind?

Play of the game was the roll play from Fobbs to Sanders that got the and-1 to move the lead from 5 to 8. Up to that point, we hadn’t been doing anything right on offense and Morgan looked like they were going to get all the way back. After that, we got back to more of an open floor on offense and we locked them down defensively. Morgan isn’t the highest caliber but they still provide an element that gives us trouble and it exhibited to Gibson and Thompson that there are gonna be struggles out there. For those who watched the Morgan feed, did it feel like we were listening to announcers from the And 1 Summer Tour? Their confusion over the flop warning was especially entertaining.

Towson twitter said next game is Morgan so looks like we made the trip for nothing.

Sounds a lot like how they do the baseball and softball regionals -- minimizes the travel as much as possible.

Zane had 6 turnovers in 14 mins vs Auburn Monday nite. I turned the game on, saw he was in, and on his first possession he traveled. I was like, ‘yep, looks familiar’.

There are people here who have been very noticeable by their absence in this thread that have an agenda that the coaches must go. Doesn't matter how a loss happens, it's on the respective sport's coach. It's the same BS every game and frankly, it's getting to the point where I'm beginning to re-evaluate my amount of participation on here. It's tough to talk actual basketball when you have to tiptoe thru the minefield of 'fire coach x' and 'fire coach y'. Was the Buffalo loss a choke job? No doubt it was. Is that on the coaching staff? Not entirely. They can't control a senior trying to play too fast instead of taking care of the ball and instead, he turns it over (Tunstall in a 7-point game). They can't pass and move the ball against the press for the players. At some point, the actual players on the floor have to execute. But good on them for regrouping on Saturday and coming out and putting together a winning performance on Sunday nite. I was on the road during the game so I didn't see or hear any of it but it does mean a little something when you hold down a team that put 90+ on the board against UCONN. One other thing about the negativity -- I'm wondering if those same people stuck around to watch the Xavier-UCONN game that followed us on Friday night. If they had, they would have seen BOTH teams make the exact mistakes at the end of regulation and both overtimes that we did in yakking the late lead. Does that make Hurley and Steele awful coaches? The next few games will serve as another progress report as we get ready to head to conference play. Cornell just lost to Coppin but going to upstate NY is never easy. Morgan always gives us a rock fight, especially at their place and they took Evansville (remember they beat Kentucky two weeks ago?) to triple OT on Sunday. And then there's Vermont...that'll be a very tall test at their place. If we can build off Sunday nite's win, I don't see any reason why we can get 2 out of 3 minimum in this next stretch.

The uniform reveals each week is a kitschy touch. As long as we keep going with the gold tops at home, I like it.

A bit more up-tempo and certainly not as physical defensively as Xavier. UCONN’s big man had a pretty good time on the blocks. Given our penchant for wild shots in the paint last nite, the shots might be there, but will the makes show too?

I mentioned Grand Canyon basketball a couple of weeks ago. The Athletic went there to unlock the secrets of their success. PHOENIX — As she checks students into a pre-game tailgate where they will wait to be unleashed in waves into Grand Canyon University’s basketball arena, Jennifer Burke keeps asking the same question. “Do you have the app?” They all do. A visitor asks why the students need an app. “It controls your phone for the pregame light show,” says Burke, a sports management major from Colorado who also serves as the media coordinator for the Havocs, the student section that screams and dances its way through every game — win or lose. The Antelopes are playing Illinois tonight. The Illini are here because they’re on the way to Tucson to play Arizona in two days. This stop at GCU is a favor to former Illini basketball and baseball player Jerry Colangelo, who grew up to become the godfather of pro sports in Phoenix. Colangelo’s name is on the business school at GCU. A statue of the former Suns owner stands in front of the quad-turned-holding pen where the Havocs munch on pizza and wait until 45 minutes before tip-off, when a gate will open every few minutes and a few hundred will go sprinting into the arena up the stairs and down into their seats until they’ve filled one side of the court and all the seats behind one basket that aren’t taken up by GCU’s sizable pep band. That’s when the music starts pumping and the Havocs start jamming and the Illinois players — who have been warming up in relative peace — begin to realize this won’t feel like a night at Penn State. Within minutes, all 3,500 students are waving their arms to the Vengaboys. They’ll scream until the Illini’s 83-71 victory is seconds away, but now, a few minutes before tipoff, they’re hopeful for a better result. In the front row at midcourt, a senior from San Jose, Calif., named Caleb Duarte leads cheers between songs. Duarte, who hopes to become the next Jimmy Fallon, has dressed as Tinky Winky from the Teletubbies tonight. Asked to describe what will happen over the next two hours, Duarte turns into a Teletubby-shaped pro wrestler and cuts a promo. “What you should expect is not going to happen,” he yells over the throbbing music. “What’s going to happen is something you can never expect. When we say we’re the biggest party in college basketball, we back it up. From the front row to the second row to the third row to the last row.” He’s not wrong. Few in-game experiences compare to a GCU game. Basketball games are awesome at Duke and Kansas and Kentucky and Indiana, where fandom has been baked in for decades and tradition guides the experience. But at many Power 5 schools — where they have the budget and the staff to make games more fun for the students and for the people to whom they’d like to sell more tickets — the games can be dull as dirt. And then the AD and the coach wonder why they can’t sell out the arena. GCU, which played in the NAIA until the 1990s and didn’t become an active member of Division I until 2017, has proven that a school doesn’t need a perennial NCAA Tournament team to throw a hell of a party around a basketball game. So listen up, Power 5 athletic departments. If your basketball games are boring, it’s your fault. GCU created the ultimate hoops party from thin air, and if you take some notes, you probably could too. Collaborate When Emily Stephens came to GCU in 2008 to run the cheer program, the former Boise State cheerleader had no idea she’d be part of a event-staging operation where undergrads would meet regularly with the university president to discuss how to make basketball games more fun. But that’s what GCU has done. Stephens admits that having a blank canvas — rather than decades of staid tradition and season-ticket holders in the same seats for generations — probably worked in the school’s favor. “We could kind of start from scratch,” Stephens says. “That’s one of the benefits we had that other schools don’t. They have to deal with that balance of tradition and new.” But GCU created its own tradition in an unusual way. Instead of siloing marketing decisions in the marketing department and cheer decisions with the cheer coach and game management decisions with the external operations team, everyone got a voice, from university president Brian Mueller to the students attending the games. Mueller says the students themselves invented the Havocs. A group came to him during the Division II-to-Division I transition and asked to create a student section. So he empowered them to make one. Now more than 100 people apply each year for 10 Havoc leader positions, and the two Havoc presidents are involved in nearly every major game management decision. Students help choose the music that plays before games and during timeouts. They design the gear that each member of the Havocs pays for as part of the membership fee. (Slots filled up in three minutes before this season.) They help design contests like the second-half crowd-surfing race during which students in each section pass a fan from the bottom row to the top row. The first fan to cross the finish line wins for his or her entire section. Don’t Chase The Quick Buck Mueller considers the basketball atmosphere a priority because it creates a deep connection between the students and the school. It doesn’t matter who the Lopes are playing. It doesn’t even matter if the Lopes are good. (We’ll have to wait until January when St. John’s transfer Mikey Dixon and TCU transfer Jaylen Fisher are both eligible and playing to know whether coach Dan Majerle’s team will have a chance to make noise in the WAC.) Students pack their side of the arena every game because each game is the social event of the season. They know they’re going to sing. They know they’re going to dance. They know one of their fellow students might cause an opposing player to miss a free throw by waving a giant cardboard Michael Scott-in-a-bandana head behind the basket. That’s why Mueller made sure the students got prime seats. They fill one entire sideline, and they rarely sit. Why are Duke’s Cameron Crazies the most famous student section in college sports? Yes, they camp out so they can get in first and get the best seats. (So do the Havocs.) Yes, they make cheat sheets to more effectively heckle opponents. (The Havocs also do this, including social media handles for each opponent so fans can search for embarrassing info pregame.) Yes, they bob up and down and put the whammy on opposing players trying to inbound the ball on their sideline. But the reason we know all this is because Duke was smart enough to keep giving them the best seats at Cameron Indoor Stadium. They are what the camera sees, and they are all the opponent sees. GCU did the same but allotted even more seats to students. Few schools do this because those seats could go for good money. But Duke and GCU and Florida — another school where students cover an entire sideline — have forsaken that potential revenue to create a home-court advantage that makes the game more difficult for opponents, looks cool on TV and makes the experience more enjoyable for the people who do buy the expensive seats on the other side of the arena. “It’s a tradeoff,” Mueller says. “You can sell those seats, but you can create an environment where there are all kinds of spinoffs from this.” There also may be a long-term financial benefit. Recent graduates frequently apply for jobs at GCU because they want to remain connected to the campus. In the next few years, the school will need even more support from its alumni thanks to a recent change. Prior to 2004, GCU was a private Christian school with about 900 students. It went for-profit at the end of the last decade, and on-campus enrollment swelled to 22,000 while online enrollment ballooned to 85,000. The school received approval from Arizona’s state higher-education regulatory board and the IRS in July 2018 to return to non-profit status. It currently is appealing a Department of Education ruling that the school can’t yet call itself a non-profit. But the school is going forward with the plan to be a non-profit. Mueller plans to start a grant-writing program to beef up research initiatives. A development office also is in the works. And in 10 to 20 years, who will be the people most likely to respond by writing checks when that development office calls? The ones who love their school more because they had a blast during their time there. “I think we’ll have a very loyal alumni base,” Mueller says. Consider Every Detail At a lot of schools, students are let into the arena to chase the best first-come, first-serve seating. Then they just sit for 90 minutes to two hours while the teams shoot around. There’s probably some hip-hop playing, but little is done to engage them. At GCU, there is a reason the students can’t enter the building until 45 minutes prior to tipoff. “It’s very strategic,” Stephens says. Game organizers don’t want students twiddling their thumbs in the arena. They want them to enter the building ready to blow the roof off the place. And they do. The pregame energy level is off the charts from the moment the students start racing down the stairs. To keep the Havocs happy and get them more excited for their grand entrance, their leaders devised a tailgate that begins three hours prior to tipoff. Stephens knows tailgating for basketball is unusual, but it works at GCU. “We don’t have football,” she says, “so why not?” And when the gate opens, the Havocs are ready to fly. Don’t Be Afraid To Borrow Ideas Indiana has the The Greatest Timeout In College Basketball. GCU’s cheer squad loved that idea and started its own flag run during a timeout. (Yet another thing that most schools do at their football games that GCU does for basketball.) Meanwhile, one of the most beloved of the concepts that GCU is trying to turn into tradition was borrowed from the Cameron Crazies. GCU played at Duke in November 2016, and Stephens and the two Havoc presidents at the time went to Durham for the game. They took a lot of notes. One moment that resonated was a timeout when the PA system played Cascada’s “Every Time We Touch”, a song that starts with a slow build before accelerating into a driving chorus. The next day, the group sat waiting for a flight at RDU. Every person scrolled through songs, looking for just the right combination of buildup and payoff. Finally, one of the students played the perfect tune. It was a dance cover of Roxette’s 1988 classic “Listen To Your Heart” released in 2005 by Belgian group DHT. GCU started playing it at the under-12 minute timeout in the second half shortly after. The song has become a staple with its own choreography for the verse and an epic performance from mascot Thunder the Antelope during the breakdown. None of these ideas are copyrighted. Any school in America can do it. So if you’ve got boring basketball games, start taking some of these ideas. Your students, your players and your fans will love you for it. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll get a reaction like the one from Illinois fan Bill Shiner, who made the trip from Chicago to see his team play GCU and Arizona. “That,” Shiner said, “was the best student section in America.”

Interesting to note that Xavier is shooting about as well from 3 to start the season as Florida was before they played against us. They should have lost at home to Missouri State last week but the Bears couldn't get over the hump. I can definitely see us getting 2 wins this weekend. Where those 2 wins come from...well that'll be the fun part.