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The sad state of our basketball program - Printable Version

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Re: The sad state of our basketball program - Leftcoast - 01-22-2013

Quote:Pac 12 scheduling is made for college towns with no traffic and few competing events or interests.


Hmmhhhhhh ...... Like Berkeley, Los Angeles, Seattle and Phoenix?  We aren't the only ones with traffic and big city problems.

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - Treebound - 01-22-2013

As Madden often states, "Winning is the best deodorant!"  Dawkins has had the opportunity to make the Dance and he's whiffed.  He has brought in some decent talent, but they haven't progressed all that much since their freshman season.    Watching Monty coaching Cal on Saturday reminded me of how he worked the refs throughout a game.  He and Lute were as much fun to watch when we hosted UofA as the players on the court.  If ever there was a year for Dawkins to step up his game this is it, but I only see more of the same stoic sideline schtick.

This will be Muir's first major decision and I hope he's ready to be decisive.  I don't want to return to the Davis years.  Monty proved that we can compete at the highest levels and Harbs and Shaw have down the same in football.  I would love to see both programs at the top of their game as we move forward.  I still care about and enjoy hoops, but I've gone to fewer games this season than I have in the past 17 years.  Judging by the large number of empty seats on Saturday, more and more people are voting with their feet.

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - pincemob - 01-22-2013

Leftcoast, maybe I should have clarified "disproportionately".    I was comparing Stanford vs. colleges in general moreso than our Pac 12 counterparts.  A lot of "college town" schools (think Kansas, Kentucky, maybe Arizona) have so much demand that game times can be tweaked for TV without emptying a lot of seats. Not true for Stanford.  When the Pac 12 schedules our games at weird times, whether that's a Friday night football Championship game or 6pm Wednesday basketball game, our seats empty out more than other schools, I think.  You are right to point out some of our Pac 12 members are also hurt -- I would bet that Washington, UCLA, USC, Cal and ASU are also seeing attendance hurt by the variety in the game times.  I am not sure the Pac 12 gurus know their customers all that well. 

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - 82 Card - 01-22-2013

(01-22-2013, 01:14 PM)Kathy link Wrote:
Quote:But kids in Contra Costa County are as likely to talk about UCLA as Stanford

More likely the weenies than UCLA

Definitely true. UCLA is way down the list.

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - Farm93 - 01-23-2013

(01-22-2013, 07:10 PM)Leftcoast link Wrote:
Quote:Pac 12 scheduling is made for college towns with no traffic and few competing events or interests.


Hmmhhhhhh ...... Like Berkeley, Los Angeles, Seattle and Phoenix?  We aren't the only ones with traffic and big city problems.

The Pac-10 had that Thursday/Saturday combination for a reason.  IMO.  It was much easier for fans attending games throughout the conference.  But TV is the key to basketball recruiting success and revenue.  Other conferences start agree to crazier stuff just to get on ESPN.  6PM starts are OK.

The new obsession with early evening time slots actually impacts some other programs in the Pac-12 more than Stanford.

The 6PM Wednesday time slot is not the problem.  If the Stanford team was ranked in the top 15 then Maples would be packed.  And I believe the AD and the Pac-12 could make a credible argument that playing at 9PM Eastern on ESPN is critical to getting more national recruits to come to the Pac-12 and more national credibility.

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - pincemob - 01-23-2013

Maybe it's just me, but when I see a game on TV and there are no fans there, I tend to switch channels faster.  When I see a game and the crowd is going crazy and is excited, I get more excited and watch more of the game. 

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - Farm93 - 01-23-2013

(01-23-2013, 03:57 PM)norcalcard link Wrote:Maybe it's just me, but when I see a game on TV and there are no fans there, I tend to switch channels faster.  When I see a game and the crowd is going crazy and is excited, I get more excited and watch more of the game.
That's true.  Which is why I don't think Stanford Basketball fans will need to worry about too many 6PM starts as long as Dawkins is our coach.  ESPN is not going to put two sub 500 teams on at 6PM if can find a better Pac-12 contest.

If you hate 6PM starts, then Dawkins is your man.  If/when we get a new coach I hope Stanford is on at 6PM almost every Wednesday during the conference season.  Since that would suggest that ESPN believes the event at Maples is the best show in the conference.

Back in the day we had Dickie V coming to town, and many did not like his style.  Dawkins solved that problem too.

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - pincemob - 01-23-2013

I didn't think it was an open schedule; I thought game times were locked down well in advance unlike football where it's TBA until the week before.  Maybe I am wrong about that, but looking at the basketball website it appears the rest of the gametimes are already decided and we have a lot of Wednesday games locked down. 

One other thing I saw on the website:  no Arizona home game this year!  Stanford-Arizona was the #1 west coast rivalry for years, often both were top-5 programs when we met.    I remember one year (1998?) when Magic Johnson and Jerry Rice attended the Arizona game in Maples.  Rice wore a 6th man shirt if I remember correctly.  Now with the rotating schedule we don't play Arizona in Maples. 

I am not a brobdingnagian fan of Dawkins but I agree with the previous poster who said basketball's issues go well beyond the coach.  Fan support is a big part of the problem, and I don't think the new schedule helps that at all. 

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - Leftcoast - 01-24-2013

It's sort of a chicken/egg dilemma, isn't it?  Strong and winning programs are helped along by an avid fanbase and avid fanbases contribute to strong and winning program.

IMHO Stanford fell out of the elite group of programs with our last Elite 8 appearance and we fell out of the second tier of programs when an entire high school graduating class went through without ever seeing Stanford in the NCAA tournament.

We are now in that third tier of programs who have seen the mountaintop, have some history but are now in the bottom half of their own conference.  We can't pick and choose from long lists of top recruits and coaches and will need to do the painstaking work of building back our fanbase, recruiting profile, coaching staff and team esprit de corp. 

So I agree with you, NorCal.  Saying winning is the best deodorant is a truism but too simplistic.  Getting back to winning consistently will mean a lot of the little things will need to be done much better than they are being done now and that includes building the fanbase.  How we do that - Repricing tickets, more attractive contests, pushing for timeslots that work for  you and rebuilding a truly pissed-off set of previous ticketholders (yup, my hands up!) are all parts of the equation.

Our Montgomery capital has been spent - so be it.  Time to build a new program from the rubble of the base he left.  Time to start fighting like we're hungry, understand the issues and have our eyes on the prize.

We did it in football so why not basketball?


(By the way, when did dictionaries stop recognizing "dilemna" with an "N"?  It seems to be autocorrected to "dilemma" now.  Have I gone an entire lifetime spelling this wrong?  Kathy?)

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - Kathy - 01-24-2013

I'm saving up my vicious moves for the new batch of interns that started this week — I'm supposed to lecture them on do's and don'ts, and the editor-in-chief wants me to scare them.

So I will be kind, Lefty: yes, you have been misspelling that particular word all your life. Dilemma has no "n" in it. It has been spelled that way since the Late Latin linguistic era and comes from the Greek root word "lemma," which is a preliminary or auxiliary proposition or theorem. "Dilemma" is a situation involving choice between equally unsatisfactory alternatives (hence, where we get the idiom "the horns of a dilemma").

OK, Lefty, you can start breathing again. I don't know if my interns will get that same opportunity ...  ;)


Re: The sad state of our basketball program - Leftcoast - 01-24-2013

OK ..... I stand corrected, contrite and relieved to have survived Kathy's wrath.  I hope she doesn't use some poor college intern as a sacrificial whipping boy on my behalf - unless any are from Cal, USC or Notre Dame, in which case go right ahead.

So, where the heck did dilemma with an n come from?  I'm sure this was used as an example of a silent n in my high school English class.  Am I nuts? 

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - Farm93 - 01-24-2013

I agree that the Stanford AD will need to do a lot to get the basketball program in a better place.  HOWEVER..

With the Pac-12 Networks in place I would guess that every team in the conference must work with the conference to schedule conference game start times.  The conference must spread the content out over as many days as possible, so the days when every team would play at 7PM on Thursday are likely long, long, long gone.  While the really bad teams likely get to schedule without too much interference, the mid and top tier teams probably have less control of their start times.  So if perfect scheduling is our key to success, then I think I would have to predict that it will be very difficult for Stanford to succeed in the Pac-12.

"Luckily", at least for this year, the TV powers predicted Stanford would be bad this year, so our conference schedule has few of the unpopular East Coast oriented start times.

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - Bruce Wang - 01-24-2013

(01-24-2013, 02:22 PM)Leftcoast link Wrote:So, where the heck did dilemma with an n come from?  I'm sure this was used as an example of a silent n in my high school English class.  Am I nuts?

Supposably.

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - Robbie - 01-24-2013

(01-24-2013, 02:22 PM)Leftcoast link Wrote:So, where the heck did dilemma with an n come from?  I'm sure this was used as an example of a silent n in my high school English class.  Am I nuts?

My mother taught me to spell "vacuum" as "vacumn". It took me years to get that fixed.

When in doubt, blame your parents.

Speaking of misspellings... - M T - 01-24-2013

It hurt me to see the Stanford promo at the halftime of tonight's MBB game ("At Stanford, you have a chance to leave your legacy.")  They show a female writing notes with a Marks-a-Lot on colored Post-Its.  The orange piece of paper in the foreground has (presumably in her handwriting),
  "Phone Tech Inadequit"

It seems like not only did this example of a Stanford student apparently misspell the word, whoever put this promo together didn't notice it either.


Re: The sad state of our basketball program - Farm93 - 01-24-2013

Another sad example of the state of our basketball program.

While the team is getting blitzed in Boulder the board is obsessed with spelling.  UGH!!!

Maybe we will get to learn to spell the last name of a new head coach soon?

Current coach? "Inadequit"TM



Re: The sad state of our basketball program - washingtonismoney - 01-24-2013

Final score sees Stanford going down by 21 points.

About to test that old maxim, you know, "if you beat your rival and never win another game, it's a good year."

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - Kathy - 01-24-2013

(01-24-2013, 10:13 PM)washingtonismoney link Wrote:About to test that old maxim, you know, "if you beat your rival and never win another game, it's a good year."

That maxim is for losers.
This year sucks.

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - fullmetal - 01-25-2013

(01-24-2013, 10:13 PM)washingtonismoney link Wrote:About to test that old maxim, you know, "if you beat your rival and never win another game, it's a good year."

that only works if you're desperate enough to settle for one nail on which to hang your hat for the season...sigh.  Colorado, really?  but hey, they almost (should have) beaten Arizona this season...that 3 ptr was good.

Re: The sad state of our basketball program - washingtonismoney - 01-25-2013

Destroying your opponent on the boards while your opponent is shooting terribly is a signal sign of incompetence.