Chris Datres

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.

If ever there was a time for this program to finally break their conference tournament jinx, this would be it. Hopefully they can finish off the CAA season in style and do what past teams never could figure out how to do.

Most complete game of the season? Defense was outstanding throughout. That's the kind of game we've been needing to see. These guys have been playing pretty well since halftime of JMU and hopefully, we're peaking at the right time. Take care of Elon next week and hope we don't get screwed by the committee.

Trust me, I want to be in the NCAA Tournament (even if it's freakin Dayton on Tuesday or Wednesday) in the worst way and have wanted that since there was a 'State' in our name. And given that we made the 1-AA championship game in 2013, we should have been able to parlay that into consistent playoff appearances over the next few years. We haven't been able to do that in either of our two major sports. Various combinations of unlucky recruiting, choked-away games, bad preparation, execution, all-world game by the opponents, and injuries are all to blame. Can that be put on the coaching, most definitely. In football, we've jettisoned a couple of DC's and let little brother go to the Chickens. In basketball, I think we need to do a better job of identifying players who can work in the flow of TODAY'S game. Guys like Gibson and Thompson give us that kind of potential and are types of recruits we need to focus on. With the greater emphasis on the 3, I'm hoping that Pat is realizing that his brand of ball isn't going to cut it in today's college basketball. Defense and rebounding still carries the day but if you can only crack 60-65 points, you're not going to have the firepower when the opponent has a good shooting night. Should we be dishing out extensions without the amount of success that would warrant those extensions? Probably not but there is something about stability in recruiting and if you pay attention to the offseason, the transfer portal was overloaded with players whose coaches went on to different jobs. The way the transfer rule works now, if Skerry got bounced, you can bet half our roster would be looking elsewhere. Was a monster extension deserved at that time? I'd say no, especially since no one was really beating down the door to steal Pat from us. But that's not Pat's fault, that's on those who give the extension (and he must have a hell of an agent too). And I don't want to get into any wars on here because it's pointless given our numbers here. I just don't like that after every loss it seems, the default is to blame the bench. I was critical of Skerry in my summary last nite that he should have had Dottin out there more in the final 8 minutes instead of Gibson. But I still have confidence that these guys will find more ways to win and hopefully, those wins come when the games mean the most.

Damn double posts. So I’ll go ahead and answer my own 2 questions - no, you weren’t and no, they didn’t. So how’d you know what he told them? Ya think just maybe that whatever was set up may have broken down because <gasp> the other team may have defended it pretty well? Would you rather something be forced and we turned it over? I’m sure had that happened, you’d have been all over that too as the coach’s fault.

Were you in the huddle during the timeout with :55 left? Did ESPN2 have Pat miked up during that timeout?

Not sure where to start other than DAMN, that was a big opportunity that we missed out on as Florida was ripe for the taking and we just couldn't get over the hump. Offensively, I thought we worked really hard against that Gators defense and was able to find passes and were patient with what was given. I thought if we shot 45% or better, we'd have a chance. We shot 43.8%. I thought if we scaled back on turnovers, we'd be in good shape. We had 13 which is a touch above the average we've had in the first 3 games. Lost in the stats was a couple of key putback misses by Gray and I think Sanders in the last 3 minutes as well as having a rebound secured but we were falling out of bounds and it ended up going to a Gator. In games like this, one bounce here and there can be the major difference. Defensively, I thought they did an above-average job. It helped that Florida was still subpar from the 3-point line but they did hit a couple of big ones off of terrific ball movement when we doubleteamed Blackshear in the post. I was really surprised that Florida waited until the 10-minute mark of the 2nd half to really start pounding it down low. Sanders, Thompson, and Tunstall did really nice work on Blackshear throughout the entire game. And what we saw out of Sanders and Thompson is some of the potential that we hoped we'd see. That has to continue. Sanders had good control of his body after he got pulled in the first half, especially after the dumb moving screen on the post handoff. He was in much better position in the 2nd half and he was rewarded with not having to get serenaded by the Rowdy Reptiles with a left-right-left-right chant to the bench. Last possessions -- I'm always a proponent of looking to penetrate and if available, kick for an open look. On the first possession after Blackshear gave Florida the lead, we passed it around too much out front and Fobbs dribbled too much before hoisting. It's the same thing that happened against Kent State -- settling rather than trying to work something inside. And right now, he can't be shooting these shots unless it's off of a pass. Unfortunately, he felt like he was the guy that had to take the shots and it didn't work out. Down 4, you try to extend the game and get into the paint and instead, he's chucking up a 26-footer. Now, Florida did a really good job of cutting off any driving lanes and they made it really difficult to take it into the lane if that's what we wanted to do. But I'd hope someone like a Gray or a Betrand could find his way on a drive and maybe hit a 12 to 16-foot pullup. Personnel -- Only complaint would be I'd have had Dottin out there for the final 4 minutes rather than Gibson. The moment wasn't too big for Gibson but he wasn't having much success getting any sort of penetration and the way Dottin had played in this one, he could have slithered his way into the lane and found something. If Dottin's shot continues to work like it did tonite, that's going to be a giant weapon to have and I would love to see a Dottin/Gibson combo where you can have a lot of drive & kick for open looks. As for the naysayers and the haters out there, let's keep in mind that the other team is on scholarship too and we're not in the huddle when these things are drawn up. As much as I'd like to have seen us go to the basket, Florida also stepped it up defensively and they're bit a longer than what we're used to seeing. At least we got shots off and didn't kick it out of bounds or just toss it away. But rather than giving credit to the other team or crediting our guys for a terrific game and Skerry for a solid gameplan, some of you are going to continue your hard-line approach against the coaching staff and frankly, I'm getting f'ing sick of it. When some of you constantly use that as your go-to no matter what the sport, it lends credence to my belief that you don't know a damn thing about the sport you're commenting on and you're just looking to blame, bash, and complain. I'm certainly no expert but I at least understand there are two sides to every game and a number of you on here don't see that. You just want to push your agenda of getting a coach out of here. I truly enjoy the discourse on here and wish we'd have even more participation but there are a number of days when I wish there was an 'ignore' feature so some of the stuff could be muted. Rant done...On to Xavier next week. I hope that we can carry what we learned from tonite over to Charleston. If so, we might have a better result against X and maybe make a little bit of noise. Either way, the amount of chemistry and production these guys continue to get are going to pay dividends in conference season.

Keys to this one... Offensively - shoot better than 45% and limit turnovers Defensively - wall off the paint and get out on 3-pt shooters (not impossible to do both at the same time) If you listen to the radio broadcast tonite, you might hear that repeated. 😉 Not sure if we have anyone to match up with Blackshear. Sanders probably but he’ll foul out in 6 mins.

I wish Fobbs would have realized at some point that the jumper wasn't going to fall and that he'd just keep taking the ball into the lane and start working thru traffic. If the 3's not there, find something else that works. Same thing with Betrand on the final inbounds play. There was 4 seconds left, plenty of time to get a couple of dribbles to the elbow and hit a pull up. Unfortunately, the execution just wasn't there on either of the final shots but at least Fobbs drove in, which is the way it should be handled on the final play. But, the mentality nowadays in most players is to settle for 3's. The other big disappointment was not being able to get a rebound when we needed it in the last 20 seconds or getting a stop at all in the last 4-5 minutes. We just couldn't push that lead out any further once it hovered around 1-2 points.

I had brought this up in a thread a year or so ago and I think it deserves repeating. I look at a school like Grand Canyon. It's located in the middle of Phoenix, which is a hotbed of major league sports not to mention having Arizona State right down the street, and numerous other nightlife opportunities. Last year, they averaged almost 7200 fans for a school that has 20,000 on campus. They've only been D-1 for 6-7 years and yet, they've immediately built it into numerous sellouts and that's with playing a WAC (not whack/wack/whatever) schedule. So I'd say that our people should be taking a field trip to Phoenix (it's nice this time of year) and pick the brains of the GCU people and find out how they can attract such a large amount of people to their games.

Spiro said in pregame that they didn't expect to Solomon to play but I'm guessing that given the depth issues with others being out that they needed to plug the big man in if he could go a few minutes.

Stay away. Stay farrrrrr away. Gotta give it a couple of games to really get the feel of anyone. However, 2nd half plays aren't necessarily a bad idea if you've been able to watch the first half and can make an impression of what you've seen versus what the line is.

Can we all agree that the uniform makeup was on point today and needs to continue to be our go-to going forward? Love the gold tops on both hoops and lacrosse and football has made it look great as well.

We don't like to make it easy but the defense FINALLY came up with a big stop at the end to preserve the lead. Chickens should have never been in this game but we gave them the ball 3 different times on fumbles. While winning 4 in a row is a tall task, you can't win 4 until you win the first so let's hope this is a nice building block to a super November finish.

I wonder if we have a defense that can stop Little Brother's attack.

The committee would find a way to put an 0-11 UNH team in if they could. Outside of some concord grapes (do those even come from NH?) or a trip to the top of Mt. Washington in February, what else does NH have that's worth a bribe?

Yeah, it's a pretty rough picture in 1-AA when we're still ranked with what we've done in the past month. All that means is that if we can win the last 4, there might be more hope at a berth than we think. Meanwhile, I'm gonna see what I can do about getting the 'over' in our game on Saturday.

So they shouldn’t win this one? Would certainly help your agenda.

Unlikely...don't think we're UCONN. But there's apparently a clause in your contract to start whining about the coach within 15-20 minutes of a loss.