HJS {l Wrote}:eagle9903 {l Wrote}:twballgame9 {l Wrote}:For all the serious Interwebbing hoops weirdos, let me make myself clearer. The fan support is pretty much reflective of the product on the floor.
Now resume seriousness.
Seriousness resumed in earnest:
No. Skinner's third year, which happened to be my freshman year was coming off a 6-21 season and had identical total win totals and conference win totals to this years team. There was never a crowd as embarrassing as last nights. The nerds are worse than ever. This cannot be denied.
No matter what you say about Skinner or Don, Skinner walked into one of the most toxic situations in BC basketball history. There was the admissions scandal... there was Obie suing the school claiming racism as his waltzed to OSU... there was the entire coaching staff supposedly telling every current BB player to transfer as they didn't know what BC would do with its BB program (even eluded to it being shutting down)... then, they were telling every local school to never send kids.. etc.
It is entirely possible that the students back in Skinner's early days were rallying to support the program. Whereas, there has been no tangible progress under Don from what was the best run BC BB has ever seen (under Skinner). For instance, when Cedorchuck replaced Ciglarski, BC Hockey had regular attendances worse than last night. Same will happen if York's successor sucks as bad.
Again, I like Don... but the combo of no W/L improvement, no fans and no major recruits for people to get excited for... is a recipe for termination. I don't think it happens this year, but next year he will be talked about being on a Spaz-like hot-seat... which will make it THAT much harder for him to successfully recruit top players. It's a vicious cycle that I thought he would start breaking out of through winning this year. He hasn't. That's disappointing for the few fans left and is precarious for his career.
As I see it this board breaks down into people who don't like Donahue for a couple reasons, with some crossover:
1) they are Skinner ballwashers who either are reacting to Skinner bashers or just liked Skinner more than BC basketball or wanted a Skinner assistant or think we'd have been better off in year 16 of Skinner;
2) they hate GDF;
3) they blame donahue for a complete restart from nothing and believe it could have been a more gradual transition;
4) they are fundamentally against losing ever, despite circumstances; and
5) they actually think this team stinks or Donahue is a bad coach and will not improve to an acceptable level.
There are probably more categories and certainly there are breakdowns within each one. I think there is a lot of 2) that gets misplaced in 1), 3) and probably 4). There are also a lot of people who claims to be 5) but are really one or more of the others.
This isn't really responsive to the post above it. So I'll tack on, Donahue is most likely really, really far away from the hot seat outside of fan opinion.