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okstatefan

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  1. ....or is it official? Maybe I wasted my typing skills, but oh well. I'm a huge Cardinals fan by the way, so wish the best for everything St. Louis
  2. Oklahoma State fan dropping by, was curious to see how the hire of Travis Ford would be received. I'll be interested to see how he does. I hope he does well for your sake. I think the consensus among our fans is that he is a nice guy, but we were ready for him to move on. I see a lot of comments about him being an ###### or a bad guy, but I'm not sure it's accurate. He works very hard, a tireless recruiter, and he did have some recruiting success for us. He won on some big time recruits. What he failed to do as far as recruiting goes, is recruit a complete roster. He always had major holes at the 4 and 5 position and he'd have a plethora of thin, 6'5-6'7 "athletes" who would be forced to play in the post, and ride the bench, while we lacked true big men. Most of our fans did not appreciate his style of play. (disclaimer: this may have had something to do with most of us being accustomed to Eddie Sutton grind out, tough defense, high iq, half court ball). In fact, we sometimes questioned if he had a style of play. He promised uptempo basketball, and it seemed he recruited athletes to play this way, but it never really translated on the court. Not only did he fail to recruit true big men, he also failed to develop the few we did have. It did not seem to be an emphasis for him. It seemed his assistant coaches were pretty useless, and he didn't make as many changes as he should have, in my opinion. I'll also mention Travis had some awful luck with injuries to some of our better players, and also lost a difference maker to a questionable off the court issue. This year for example, we lost our two best players for a good portion of the season, one for the entire season. I was skeptical when we hired him. He came in and took over after Sean Sutton was fired, and took over a team with some highly rated players who had failed to perform under Sean, and took them to the second round of the NCAA tournament. He came in and multiple players really improved in his first year. I started to become a believer at that point. I was impressed by the turnaround and thought maybe we really had something. Unfortunately it was mostly downhill from there with some occasional brief moments of hope. I'll note some of his weaknesses from my perspective: NOT LEARNING FROM HIS MISTAKES. Almost every year we had one dominant player, Eaton his senior year, James Anderson, Marcus Smart. He rode some of these guys into the ground, and I think they would tire out by seasons end. We had a terrible conference road record during Ford's tenure. My impression: he did not emphasize high percentage shots. Time and again it seemed we'd either jack up a shot without running an offense, or we'd waste the shot clock then ended up settling for a low percentage shot. His offense just did not work. It did not go inside out through most of his time with us. It was very rare for us to have a post presence (which again goes back to lack of recruiting them, lack of developing them). Hell one year, our roster was so depleted we had play a walk on a few times at the end of the season, and he actually brought some life to our team rebounding, playing interior d, two things we severely lacked even before injuries. That was a small, but significant event resulting in myself questioning Coach Ford's awareness. We had decent transition D, but part of the reason was because we did not attempt to get offensive rebounds. Low percentage shots, getting dominated on the boards= terrible road record, pretty simple equation. We also had multiple end of game management/decision blunders under Ford: not remembering how many timeouts we had, missed a scoreboard error, poor player decisions. Here's his final career road record at OSU pulled from our message board: Combined: 23-62 Non-Conference: 8-7 Ws: Texas A&M CC, Stanford, LaSalle, Tulsa, Missouri St., S. Florida, Memphis, Auburn Ls: Washington, Tulsa, Gonzaga, Wash St., Alabama, Virginia Tech, South Carolina Conference: 15-55 Baylor: 1-7 Colorado: 1-1 Iowa State: 1-5 Kansas: 1-6 Kansas State: 1-5 Missouri: 0-2 Nebraska: 1-1 Oklahoma: 0-8 TCU: 2-2 Texas: 2-6 Texas A&M: 0-5 Texas Tech: 3-5 West Virginia: 2-2 I think he has some soul searching to do. Looking back, I felt we had a couple teams who could I thought could legitimately compete. His very first season we developed a guy who could score in the paint, and this gave us a fighting chance for post season success. Beyond that, we were much too reliant on a single perimeter player. I think what you need to be hopeful for is hiring an assistant who knows how to recruit/develop post players, and Ford needs to give big men a chance. You need Ford to do a better job of piecing together a complete roster instead of 1-2 studs, but gaping holes elsewhere. Ford needs to establish an identity. If he's going to recruit a bunch of "athletes", he needs to run a system best suited for them. We did have a pretty strong defense this year with Ford. One thing that was interesting with Ford teams (other than this year), his teams always seemed to fight the hardest when their back was against the wall, when you were ready to give up on them, or thought their season was done. His players always played hard for him. Anyway, sorry if that was too much rambling...too tired to proofread. I'll be happy to answer any questions.
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