MuchMany

Tod should bail. Wonder if he could get Indiana State.

Nice pickup. Presutti and GH3 get the shoutout on his IG announcement. Plus all our freshmen are all over his post with positive stuff, so it looks like they're still invested here after a bad season. 

Also Gavin Doty liked Oboh's post. I think we're in good shape with him. If I had to guess our freshman class will be Jackson, Oboh, and Doty, with the other 3-4 spots filled by transfers/JUCOs.

8 hours ago, TheCommish said:

Does everyone think we will be magically good next year?

NIL - $0

Brought this over from the future of MBB thread so as not to derail it.

The fact that Alnutt, Whitesell, and Mo sat on their hands for two years while NIL was becoming the reality of D1 is such a dereliction of duty. It blows my mind that UB is at the back of the pack with this stuff, as a wealthy state's flagship university coming off excellent/elite runs in both basketball and football. The timing would have been perfect to hit the ground running to maintain the level we had reached, but instead we were flat-footed and seemingly uninterested.

People say it's not the AD or coaches' place to handle NIL, but it didn't just happen out of thin air everywhere else. Have some dinners, make some calls, connect the right people - do your job with urgency and foresight. I get that ADs are by nature conservative and the legal/procedural landscape of NIL is shifting quickly, but we pay you the big bucks to be agile wrt this stuff. It's not easy to figure out, but the winners will. 

1 minute ago, BrooklynBull said:

Do not know about Austin, but Michigan is closer to JMU than we are.  I had a friend whose son went there, in part because of athletics.  In his first three years he never made it into the stadium for a football game.  Too much partying going on outside the stadium.

Definitely, Ann Arbor has the best of both worlds when it comes to academics and athletics/fun. So does Madison. I was wondering more about the academic vs party reputation of UB relative to a place like JMU. 

18 hours ago, clodney said:

Let me see if I have this straight.

JMU has 20,346 Undergrads and 1,878 Graduate Students and they get $2,340 out of every student for $52MM.

UB has 21,467 Undergrads and 10,865 Graduate Students and they get $480 out of only the Undergrads for $10.3MM.

If that's the case, therein lies the problem. I hope Graduate Students don't get any perks for Athletic events and are paying full price.

 

I wish someone had laid out this math earlier. There's been a lot of discussion about why we can't seem to enter the same athletic "weight class" with our flagship peers in size and quality. This math is why.

Now the question is, do students pay less here for athletics because they don't care, or do they not care because they pay less? How does such a lack of interest get passed down year after year to fresh student bodies?

JMU gets accurately described as a party school, but is UB more similar to that or to Austin/Ann Arbor? When sitting in Alumni pondering empty student sections, I've felt like UB gets mostly two kinds of kids - commuters who lack interest in "the college experience" and nerds/internationals with the same lack of interest. The missing middle of average kids who like sports and aren't too cool to wear school colors is what I'm curious about.

2 minutes ago, UB92 said:

I would be very happy to be wrong, but you could also put together a scenario for the A's to win the West this year as well.  

My point is that, with the portal and the very likely roster turnover, we are relying on this coaching staff to remake the roster AND improve on all the other challenges people have listed.   It is not even a big ask...it's a huge ask.  

I hear ya, I'm not particularly optimistic either. But the A's can't swap out 50-75% of their roster before the season like UB can as a transfer-era CBB team.

I'm not as worried about the other challenges listed. Recruiting is what matters. Until we have better players, the rest is deck chairs on the Titanic. I was saying the same thing the last few years of JW. Watching other good teams in mid-major conference tournaments, it's clear that we don't have the athletes, we don't have the shooters, we don't have the size, and we don't have the ball handling. That needs to change. The good news is that it can, quickly.

2 hours ago, UB92 said:

I don't even have to see what the roster looks like for November to say that a single-digit win season is exceedingly likely.  Anyone who is thinking a .500 season is in the cards isn't really looking at the facts. 

Maybe I'm alone here, but what the roster looks like in November will matter a lot to my season predictions. Presutti could pull guys from his Big East connections. Tibbs could find guys from his northeast AAU ties. Cage could land guys he knows from the DMV.

The fact is the "facts" haven't been formed yet. The roster is going to look very different and that's a good thing. I expect some real talent to arrive this spring, like the staff's jobs depend on it.

53 minutes ago, bullsbball said:

MuchMany, thanks for the corrections.

Coaches abbreviation has been corrected in my original post. 

Why would UB's own coaching staff say it wasn't public?

Correct on Sabol. Hot and cold. 35.7% if you don't include the last game.

If I had to guess why it isn't "public," it's because he hasn't officially signed his LOI for whatever reason. So they can't comment on a player in that case.

Why would you exclude Sabol's last game of the year in his stats? That game mattered just as much as any other one. Not really fair to arbitrarily remove a nice shooting game from his season stats.

59 minutes ago, bullsbball said:

Oh, on the radio post game, UB coaching staff says they have one Commit for next year but it hasn't been made public yet. 

Why would anybody want to come to UB?

It's public. It's Brayden Jackson from Fort Erie Academy. Plenty of discussion on him in the Recruiting sub forum.

I'll post something of my own when I get some time, but for now just a couple points of clarification to your previous post:

RH3...not sure if you have Robert Griffin in the brain or?

Sabol's three point shooting was not "off" most of the season. He was hot and cold for sure, with games of 0-4 0-5 0-6 balanced by 7-10 6-8 5-8. But he shot 37.6% on the season, which is excellent for anyone let alone a lightly recruited freshman.

Boldin was a useful player and showed a lot of promise before getting shut down with an injury. He doesn't belong lumped in with McVeigh, who struggled with the speed and feel of the college game most of the year. 

He's just a painfully unintelligent man. I read his quotes like people watch car crashes, unable to look away. Like, what??? 

“Any time you reach an aspiration of running your own program and all the work that you put in, all the years of work that goes into getting to that point that you’re an FBS head coach, I will tell you it was an extremely difficult decision to leave that,” Linguist told the Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News. “I wouldn’t have left it for anything.”

5 hours ago, Big 4 Hoops Blogger said:

Recently found out some interesting information. Without going into details, I think UB is aware of what needs to be done to get their program back on track.

Yeah let's hear some details lol

Just now, Tee4three said:

I think there will be a ton activity fairly quickly too once the season ends 

Yeah I mean six guys who will be out of a job at this time next year unless things turn around here. Seems like it should be major motivation to hit the portal hard.

54 minutes ago, John said:

There doesn’t seem to be much hope for next year when there is no indication Coach H has an any idea on recruiting. The years of getting some decent transfers and JUCO’s seem to be gone.

Curious what makes you think this. The next two months are going to be incredibly active for transfers. And we have two HS commits that seems as good as what JW was signing.

I don't want to get ahead of myself on the negativity before anything actually happens. The coming off-season does not have to follow the course of this season. The staff certainly knows it will be in trouble if it does, so I expect quite an effort here.

14 hours ago, UB Horns Up said:

How do you explain St Bonaventure Bonnies winning and they are the smallest school in Division I basketball in enrollment.

Winning what exactly?? 

Was it just last year that he was here for the Spring Game or do I have my schedule mixed up? 

2 hours ago, John said:

Jury still out on Sabol who has not improved at all.

Gotta disagree with this point. His shooting is streaky sure, but it's still solid. But he looks entirely more comfortable on the court now compared to November. Ball handling, staying in front of guys on D, he looks like a young college player now whereas he looked like a HS player in the fall.

1 minute ago, trueblue32 said:

Hes already maybe the best defender on the team too. Never understood why he was chained to the bench in blowouts. Lets get him some experience

Yeah I like his defense too. High-major athlete/size with a quiet intensity to his game. In the staff's defense a bit, he did look completely lost in early action. Tricky balance to get him game experience while also trying to field a somewhat competitive team. His maturation has been notable though.

Bryson Wilson is a reason to be excited for next season. His skill is catching up with his athleticism.

15 minutes ago, trueblue32 said:

Exactly, the Adams bashing is super weird. Given the state of disarray on this team his switch from PF to PG has been as good as you could have hoped for.

-His assist to turnover ratio improved from 0.53 to 1.18
-His free throw percentage went up from 66.1% to 70.8%. This isn't super notable but suggests to me that his shot isn't broken and the 3P% regression is a result of decreased quality of opportunity.
-His 2P% at the rim increased from 54.4% to 67.1% despite the assist rate on those looks going down from 41.9% to 23.6%. Not to mention that the team's 3 point shooting has regressed which allows defenses to collapse on drivers.

So he's improved:
-His ability to create for others
-His ball protection
-His free throw shooting
-His ability to create for himself
-His ability to finish

It's weird that people think that a career 34% 3 point shooter steps onto the worst team in UB history and becomes a 22% 3 point shooter and it's a result of his regression rather than a product of the team context

I tend to agree that most of it is team context, his role, and an injury (that we heard nothing about, because of course). But regardless of the reason, he has been underwhelming to bad this year. The assists and heavy usage don't even prop up his overall ORTG.

That said, he'll absolutely be a useful piece next year if he hangs around but from talking to some folks that sounds less likely. It shouldn't be impossible to find a replacement in the portal though. 

21 hours ago, UBinMD said:

Fair point, however, I think Adam's regression/stagnation or whatever you want to call it is one of our major issues. If he was an actual solid veteran presence that he and Sy could be a 1-2 punch and allow the remaining guys to perform their roles, that would have helped a ton. That didn't happen and won't happen. These are the missing pieces we really need to figure out. Somehow we need to find 2 veteran scorers that can work together within whatever system the GH3 staff is envisioning. These guys must also be able to play D. Not an easy ask for sure.

Although not having a lead guard like Jones forced Adams to play out of position as a point forward (essentially a lead guard) and likely threw his game into the uneven state we see. Having an actual lead guard, while not worth ten wins, would have slotted everyone including Adams into a more appropriate position, role, and rank in the pecking order.

44 minutes ago, DaBulls99 said:

Honestly shocked the staff couldn’t find a single player to transfer down with all their connections. 

Agreed. They did get Graham, but he wasn't supposed to play this year and looks like he forgot how to play basketball anyways.

There's a lot of pressure on the staff to find a couple readymade MAC starters this off-season via their high-major connections. 

3 minutes ago, trueblue32 said:

A metric for a metric

Why look at days when we're talking about four months?? 

1 hour ago, trueblue32 said:

On other teams improving: we have a first year coach, 283rd in minutes continuity, 305th in D1 experience. We had a multi-time transfer get eligibility mid-year. We should have had far more room for growth than most teams.

I guess my question is do we really believe we're scoring a 20% now? I don't know what result is leading people to that conclusion. We've gotten a few D1 wins, which maybe leads people to think we're improving, but I think that's much more a product of the strength of schedule falling off a cliff due to entering conference play in the worst MAC in ?? years. For reference, Niagara was probably our second worst OOC opponent, we lost by 6 to them. Analytics would slot them in as the 5th best MAC team this year, notably ahead of our best win, Central Michigan.

Pretty clear, if unimpressive, improvement. Matches the eye test of effort and organization. It's been marginal but the freshmen have matured and we don't look totally lost as a team anymore. 

I think we'd be best off keeping the five newcomers (Boldin, Fulcher, Sabol, McVeigh, Wilson), I guess Zaakir, and adding seven new players that fit the systems that GH3 wants to run. More shooters, more ball handlers, a good big. 

8 hours ago, UB Horns Up said:

At least with the UB Janitor as the 2024-25 UB Basketball head coach I have hope for UB Bulls basketball because the UB Janitor maybe can coach George Halcovage I know can’t coach in my opinion.

You've got a reputation around here for having measured, sober-minded takes, but I'm sorry this one feels like outlandish hyperbole to me! 

9 minutes ago, UBinMD said:

We covered again!

GH3 was really coaching us up to get a stop and bucket at the end there...and that flipped the spread.