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Over the last 12 months we have had one of the longest COVID pauses of any team in the country, had the devestating loss of an assistant coach who was also a family member and former player, and the late injury of what was expected to be our best player and conference POY. His players NEVER quit on him, play extremely hard, and his teams get better as the year wears on. I would argue he has had about as bad as luck as a coach could have and he is here working his a$$ off. This topic is ludicrous.

i think a few of you are getting upset with a lot of us that are not wanting to get rid of ford or think he is a horrible coach overall. i think most of us are complaining about his game coaching and/or his player development. but imo, he is a super recruiter and a very good motivator thus in the overall picture he might be the best coach we have ever had in my fandom. i know i would take him over anyone during that time period (i go back to 1978). i just think if he improved those two areas, he would make our program elite considering his ability to bring in players. so it is very frustrating to see us be this close. however, by no means do i want him gone. i know the slu track record for bringing in coaches. plus every time we get a new coach there is a "start over" period. those have been somewhat painful over time. so let the 3 or 4 rockheads that want to fire him just talk to themselves. most of us discussing the coaching mistakes after these last two very frustrating losses are not on that level.

Phil goes for 24 and 4 assists in SEMO’s 75-73 win over Evansville. 10-16 from the floor and 2-4 arc.

Are we seriously doing this? Seriously? I’ve been as critical of Ford’s in-game coaching as much as anyone. I still think it leaves a lot to be desired. But if you honestly asked me if I’d rather have a great recruiter or a brilliant X’s & O’s coach, I’ll take the great recruiter. Majerus was both, but he’s not walking through that door. I’ve spent way too much of my SLU fandom watching D2 players starting for the Billikens. Is Ford perfect? No, he’s not. Is he Majerus? No, he’s not. But he’s still, already, 1 of the winningest coaches in school history. Everybody needs to chill the F out! Good God!

That's fine if I don't have to wear a mask too. I have all my shots.

Guess I’ll call down and get a refund on the remaining games.

Records at SLU: Rick Majerus 07-08 16-15 51.61% 08-09 18-14 56.25% 09-10 23-13 63.89% 10-11 12-19 38.71% 11-12 26-8 81.25% Total 95-69 57.93% Travis Ford 16-17 12-21 36.36% 17-18 17-16 51.52% 18-19 23-13 63.89% 19-20 23-8 74.19% 20-21 14-7 66.67% 21-22 7-3 70.00% Total 96-68 58.54%

I’ll go with coach Ford that brings in local talent like Goodwin, Perkins and Nesbitt that are fun to watch. Not one critic that wants Ford fired for a great tactician has any idea what coach Ford will accomplish. SLU had something good going in 2020 winning the last 5 going into the tournament but COVID got him. COVID got Ford in 2020-2021 when the team with only 1 loss was shut down for 40 days. Then Perkins goes down this season and the team is 7-3 with a nice road win and tournament win. I am confident with the players on the team that the coach will figure out what is best and have the team playing it’s best at tournament time which has happened before. In 2019-2020 Ford has to figure out what to do when he lost Jimerson.

Here is a shocking stat: The Bills are 320th in the Nation in three point shots attempted. 320th! We are 229th in three point shots made. We are 38th in 3% made. We need to shoot more threes. We need Jimerson to shoot more threes. We need Rashad Williams to fire up some threes.

I don’t think Ford should be fired or anything like that. Just if you are going to use coaches as examples of not good coaches don’t use guys that have won more NCAA tournament games than Ford. Romar has won 7 more NCAA tournament games than Ford. I hate Crews, but he won 2 more tournament games than Ford has. Ford has had a couple disappointing nights in row. All coaches have some bad games. He has time to right the ship. I think just about everyone here his rooting that he does just that. Ford makes a lot of money to produce results. He has been given more tools to be a successful than any other coach in SLU’s history. He still has much to prove. Fans have every right to question him and hold him accountable.

Give RW a chance you mean like put him and GJ on the floor at the same time when you need a 3 to tie the game and the other team knows you have 2 3PT shooters in and can't double team? Just saying. But there is a use for RW and we could have used him last night.

Was Ford a bad coach when we were expected to finish last in the A10 during his 1st season when Crews left the cupboard bare, but ended up winning 6 A10 games to finish 11th easily ahead of 12-14? Was he a bad coach when he took a team decimated by Situation 2.0 with zero depth during his 2nd season to a winning record and tie for 5th place in the A10? Was he a bad coach when he rallied the team in his 3rd season to win 4 games 4 in days to win the A10 tournament? Was he a bad coach when he rallied the team after JImerson's foot injury & Thatch's illness in his 4th season to be one of the hottest teams in the country who had captured 4th place going into the A10 tournament? He's not Rick Majerus. These last 2 losses have been rough. But he's not a bad coach. SLU has lost heartbreaking games under Ford (and every coach before him) in the past and they will in the future. Best not to judge based on one or 2 games.

Just be prepared for a segment of the population to demand this crap for every flu season from now on. They are energized to change the way we live.

I'd be shocked if this cost the university any material amount of money. For all the people who are outraged & won't go, there are people who will go now because there is a vax mandate in place. Both groups are probably small enough not to matter anyways, but both are way more vocal than the average fan who just wants to watch basketball.

Thats where I sorta stand. if you're gonna do this, no way am I wearing a mask too.

Seems UAB did okay .....

The question is: was that game a matter of Ford not making (the correct) adjustments, coach making adjustments with players not executing or are did Ford make adjustments, the players executed them to the best of their abilities and we just don't have Perkins to put this team over the top from an above average team to a really good team.

It doesn’t work in the real world, I am happy to help you. Ford just past Majerus in wins, so Fords teams win. Winning the A10 tournament is winning. Going 23-8 in 19/20 is winning. Ford’s record at SLU 96-68 that is winning. I just proved to you Ford wins it is very obvious it’s not good enough for you but facts matter and does not back up your rebuttal to my post. On your comprehension of my post, I never talked about would have could have should have my post was about overcoming the loss of Jimerson, COVID being an issue for 2 seasons and figuring out a way to overcome Perkins and that by season’s end I believe he will have the team playing well based on past seasons. You don’t like coach Ford I get it. I like coach Ford and my suggestions is to never read my pro Ford posts again it will lower your blood pressure.

-I would like to know if during the game CFord changes things based on what an assistant coach or player suggests or if the game plan is so written in stone it has to followed come hell or high water -I am SO over him saying we will play fast and that we have a deep roster and will use it, even after JPerk got hurt he said we might even play faster, well Yuri crossing the timeline with 21 on the shot clock after walking it up doesn't fit that

So a group of us hung around after the UAB game to watch the soccer. The Swede, Williams, Nesbitt, and Markhi came back out on the floor. Williams and Nesbitt on one basket, The Swede and Markhi on the other. Soccer feed went dead for about 15 minutes, so we watched the shooters. Williams and the Swede are amazing! They consistently hit 9 out of 10 all around the 3 point line. Nesbitt was about 8 out of 10. Checked back again at halftime. Only Williams was still there. Pop,pop,pop…string music. This guy needs to be given a chance…he’s just too good a shooter.

Honestly, it is two games. It is always harder to get a win after a loss. This schedule will benefit this team come conference time. Pull it together and enjoy the journey. As far as the title, remember these names: Crews, Soderberg, Romar. I can keep going. No one can claim Ford is perfect, but he is a good coach.

It is always amazing how reeling of a few wins brings out the fears of losing Travis and then lose a couple and it's who'd want him? Two words Columbia, Missouri....... It's possible we could do better but we could do SO much worse

I have been at meetings where a couple (not all) of our HR people and one person from our wellness department said we should make the vaccine for influenza mandatory for our employees. We can't even fill a ton of positions right now and they want to add a flu vaccine mandate on top of the COVID vaccine mandate we may or may not be forced to comply with. Both times at the meetings I was at where it was brought up, the idea was dismissed. I assume it has come up at other meetings.

We told them up front they weren't purchasing tickets if this was the way it was going to be. They then came out and said you didn't need a test or the vaccine so we bought tickets. They better refund us or make us exempt from this bull****!

Wether or not this is true, it certainly feeds into this narrative and the concerns raised by many that organizations and government entities will use mask mandates beyond Covid's lifespan.

Wild. What a bungled mess they have dug themselves in.

there still is nothing at slubillikens.com or a personal email explaining such. old grads that havent went to slu for 40 years have no reason to check a .edu website and some probably dont have twitter. i do go to slubillikens.com every game to retrieve my tickets for that game, so a pop up there would be nice but an email to our personal email would be better and a robo call wouldnt hurt as well. they better put it out a little better than they have so far are they are going to have a lot of pizzed off season ticket holders the night of the 18th. surely they arent that dumb.

Thanks! I don't read good.

Maybe, maybe not, but it strongly reduces the chance that the person next to you has COVID. Impact on attendance will be nominal.

-I'll play, are Yuri's talents best used walking the ball up the court to pass the timeline with 21 seconds left on the shot clock?

SLU was / is / will continue to be in a no win situation with this. Unfortunately COVID is a giant political quagmire for any business or organization hosting the public. No matter what you do in terms of health/safety protocols, you're going to a have a relatively large group of very vocal partisans screaming that you're doing too much or too little. As a school with such a large medical school & healthcare footprint, IMO it makes sense for SLU to err on the side of public health. This is a step in that direction and it was sort of baffling to me that they chose to have less stringent requirements than the Blues in the first place.

That might be the sh!t part of this. I don’t care what they require but you can’t give someone a requirement that’s impossible to meet by the start date.

14 days after the second shot of the 2 dosers; 14 days after the single shot J&J ^on SLUs website

They are his players. They are the guys he recruited.

This. We’re 7-3 and lost our POY candidate best player a week before the season. We’ve had to find an entirely new identity over the start of the regular season. If you were expecting this season to be nothing but sunshine and roses, I really don’t know what to tell you. And at this point, I can’t keep track of who’s just trolling and who’s not.

The entire tone of the board is so negative right now. I find myself just not wanting to read or respond to basketball related threads for a while. We had one poster (and I agree I'm an idiot for even reading game day threads) claiming his dad was a better game coach than Ford.

2 of the final 3 games end with PK's and we wonder why there are so many casual fans out there that consider soccer boring.

Bonner, Brighton, MrJoeLabs. Ignored since jump street.

Don't feed the troll....

I remember when we couldn’t get local kids to come to SLU now we get kids Mizzou covets. We have known we have a a short non shooting guard for some time; it is also no surprise when a o low scoring center who has a shoulder operation lays out a year and can’t find the basket. Yes, we would like a miracle and have Jimmy Bell come back before he gains wait in the Jucos

I’ve had season tickets for a little over a decade. I’ve never felt unsafe leaving a game. I’ve never had issues with my car. I know concessions are expensive at all sporting events. But I’d like to see some data on lowering the price and selling more vs keeping it high and selling less. I’m pretty much to the point where I won’t buy anything. I think they could do a lot better job of marketing and filling the place. Reach out to high schools and get their pep clans in there have a contest of some sort for the loudest ones. If you can offer free tickets for the whole team to a Saturday game if you high school won the night before. Kids will buy concessions. Their parents might buy tickets to go also. If they see an exciting time they’ll come back. I would think it would be better to give tickets away then let the seats be empty. There has to be more they can do. People have a lot of options for entertainment these days. You have to find a way to make them choose you. I don’t think SLU does a good job of this. I remember in high school my friends and I buying tickets and driving 40 miles to go watch Clagget,H,and Highmark play. They were top 25 and man those were fun games to watch. We’d pile 5 or 6 people in a car and pay $5 to park in someone’s front yard. I really miss those times. Only thing we had to worry about was getting to class on time the next day.

The videos of it online don't do it justice. That's how great it was.

Ford can win at this level and I think he will win here. It’s obvious I had my expectations to high, especially after Perkins went down. When I look at this roster I just don’t see enough talent. What current players do you see starting on a top 25 team? Collins….solid back up PG on a top 25 team. makes great passes, has trouble shooting, turns the ball over to much, not tall enough. Hargrove…He hits the occasional 3 but hasn’t shown the ability to get to the basket and score on a regular basis. He can rebound Ok and defend OK but he hasn’t shown me he can be an all league player. Linssen…decent big but he isn’t starting on a top 25 team. Jimerson…he can score but that’s all he does. He has trouble defending and rebounding. He could possibly start on a top 25 team. Nesbitt…he wasn’t going to start at Memphis. I think he will be a star for the Bills but not this year. Okoro….I think he will blossom into an all league player but bigs take time and I think the year off hurt him Thatch….High motor reserve. Good defense and rebounding. Occasionally has high scoring games. Jones….looks good coming off the bench. To me the problem isn’t game coaching it’s either Ford and company not being able to coach these players up or talent evaluation. All that said I still think they can compete for an A10 title and provide a lot of excitement along the way.

Roy, I think its very easy to blame the coach when fans get over excited about a few wins and start expecting more of their team than the team can produce. Here's a list of some results from this season: Arizona State loses to UC Riverside, Standford lost to Santa Clara, Virginia lost to Navy, Florida lost to Texas Southern, South Carolina lost to Princeton, Pittsburgh lost to The Citadel, and Dayton lost to Lipscomb, UMass Lowell, and Austin Peay. The list goes on and on. Are the coaches of all of those teams bad coaches? Certainly those teams didn't perform up to their talent level in those games. How many of those teams lost their top player and probably conference POY winner right before the season started. I don't think anyone is going to argue that Anthony Grant is a bad coach two years after his team was going to be a #1 seed in the tournament, but his team lost to three teams that are much worse than UAB and Belmont. Are you saying he's a bad coach? I guarantee that someone could watch those three games and come up with an argument as to why his coaching sucked in those games, but the reality might just be that his team's talent level isn't what it has been in past years and that what he had didn't perform in this games. We lost our best offensive player and our team was still averaging 80+ points a game. We lost two of our best all time rebounders and our team was still outrebounding most teams. Our team lost some very good defenders, and they held a high scoring team down last night and have done so in general this season. Ford is a better recruiter and motivator than a bench coach, but I still would not trade him for almost anyone out there.

RU, Ford is an excellent recruiter and a very good motivator. Imo, he is not a good floor coach or player developer. I'm not speaking of him as a coach overall I think that is what many are expressing today. Not that overall he is a bad coach but a questionable floor coach. Even with what I view as his short comings, I'd still want him to be our coach as his strengths always give us a chance and I dread the day we replace him because our track record of hiring a coach is not good. It's just frustrating to me we are so close.

At what point is it on Ford? I don't want him fired or anything like that, but at what point does the responsibility fall on his shoulders? We are here in season six of the Travis Ford era at SLU with one NCAA tournament appearance. These are all his players. The guy that is hurt would have graduated and been unavailable under normal circumstances. There is a massive drop off in the team's play after opposing coaches make halftime adjustments. He doesn't play to the strengths of the guy Ford himself bills as the player the team revolves around. Ford hasn't found a way to get the best recruit the program has landed since Larry Hughes more involved in the offense. Just when does some of this fall on Ford?

Senior leadership is about a lot more than just age. I love Hargrove. I love the improvements he has made in his game since he first arrived to campus. But he's not ready to take on the role that Javonte would have had with this team. I love Jimerson, but his injuries have kept him off the court for enough time that he's not a senior either in terms of time on the court and ability to handle that role. Yuri is the closest, but (a) he's already doing so much for the team in terms of running the offense, I'm not sure it is fair to ask him to take on this role as well, and (b) I'm not sure he's a good enough shooter that you can put the team on his back at the end of the game. I have no doubt we win the last two games with Perkins (probably still don't win the Memphis game). This isn't on Ford, and to some degree it isn't on the team. It takes time for players to assume new roles, and you can't rush time. Even with the disappointment of the last two games, this team - without Perkins - has exceeded my expectations. Go Bills.

Good to see Stu finally taking some personal responsibility.

Another tough loss because this was a very winnable game. Let's start with the projected slash which is the average of all Bills games leading up to tonight.....48/39/77...to make that slash we would have needed 3 more 2s...2 more 3s and 3 more FTs. That is a total of 15 pts we left on the table. What this means is ...had we had an average night we win by 10...had we had an off night we win by 5 . But instead we have a bad night and lose by 5. 3 more FTs and a couple of layups and we win the game We missed 13 layups....that's a lot of misses... ( 8-21) Are we a bad team?...No....Is the season over?....No...Do we have no chance to win the A-10?....No....Is the Dance bid gone? ...again NO. We had a bad night shooting...that cost us the game...it happens to all teams. We shot 60% from the FT line tonight ...about the same as the last few years when we were the worst FT shooting team ITN. Are posters here going to say we have reverted back and that we are now a bad shooting FT team?... That there has been no FT progress this year based on this one game? No one on this board believes that. And our regular shooting is still good too. The good news is the rebounding was good and even with terrible shooting we came within seconds of a win because of that. We also made some mistakes in the final minutes of this game as well as the last game... TOs , bad shot selection ...essentially closing the game out mistakes. The good news is , like the rebounds , this too can be fixed. Bottom line...Things could be worse...You could be the #20 AP poll ranked Florida Gators and lose to Tex Sou. a team that was 0-7 (a grade D team). In the history of college basketball a Southwestern conf (worst league) team has never beaten a ranked SEC team. The record until yesterday was 51-0...by the way, they whupped them 69-54 ...so it wasn't even close. The ultimate college basketball humiliation. I predict that U of F will get a Dance bid at the end of the season. They will get that bid because they will fix what went wrong. The Bills can do the same...the potential is there. It is up to Ford to meld and bring that potential out. You can't teach potential ...you either have it or you don't. The Bills have it...shooting ability, athleticism, balance and depth. It just has to gel. Just do it.

Perfect fit for Russell. Could move from low-major to mid-major if he keeps playing at this level. Former Vashon PG James Washington made such a move from Western Illinois to Middle Tennessee State about 15 years ago.