3star_recruit

He's the rare juco two-way player. Before he exploded offensively this year, he was already a defensive standout.

That's what Ok St did, $3.9 million to be exact. And signed the new coach to a 5 year deal. I'll believe our boosters will do something similar when I see it. It would be the most expensive mid major buyout in college basketball history.

The only reason I don't trust it is because I don't believe the money men have any interest in paying for a $10 million buyout. Or paying a humongous lump sum. SLU boosters paying more than Oklahoma State boosters to get rid of a coach? On what planet?

Not only is Parker out, Meadows has been in and out of the lineup due to health. Hughes and Thames are just coming back from injury. This was a below average defensive team at full strength. They're Swiss cheese now. Coach Ford could have brought in better defensive players in the portal. He made a big gamble on being able to outscore teams with a Big Three + veteran role players and smoke and mirrors on defense. He lost.

I don't know. Those are good questions. Let me know what he says when you ask them on Monday.

I don't doubt it. But most people aren't real life tough guys. First world problems.

There are no consequences for ridiculing a coach or a player's abilities on a message board. A week doesn't pass without a Crews jab and he hasn't been here in 8 years. That's part of what makes the internet so attractive. You can say things that you probably wouldn't say to that person's face for fear of consequences. Message boards turn overwhelmingly negative once many years pass without expectations being met. There's a lot of testosterone here. It's going to happen. The only way to prevent it is for the coach to do some winning and lots of it. Whenever a new coach comes, he'll get a two year honeymoon. After that he better start winning or we'll be right back here.

$10 million is the same buyout he had when signing a new contract at Oklahoma State so there might be something to this. https://www.sportingnews.com/us/ncaa-basketball/news/travis-ford-coaching-rumors-saint-louis-billikens-oklahoma-state/15k4ou2ezpenk1q6yc1p373ua7 Assuming there's 4 years left on Coach Ford's contract, buying him out next year would still cost $7.5 million.

Parker returning and us going on a run will be the sales pitch. "You're the missing piece." We don't have anything else to refute the "our HC is going to be gone" narrative. This February is the most important month of Coach Ford's Billiken career.

I don't care how a team scores. If you have a system and recruit players to that system, great. If you have a trio of one-on-one scorers and let them carry the offense, fine. If you have the nation's leading assist man to set the table, then do that. But if you don't have a system or multiple one-one players or Yuri Collins you can't carry out any of these options. The cool thing about having a system is theoretically you can plug in another guy and still be somewhat effective. When your success depends mostly on players making plays and one of those key players is unavailable, you're hard-pressed to even win a game. According to my fellow MBMs, the BVF has $500K+ to sign players. That's enough to sign a scoring point guard, a defensive stopper, pay Parker and Big Brad and the role players around them. If Coach Ford does return, he should thank Troy Robertson and company for building up a respectable war chest.

Then a bewildered BOT might be forced to think outside the box for once and turn to the younger generation for advice. Otherwise the old boy network of doing things will continue.

If the team makes a run when Parker returns, the case can be made that this injury-riddled, defensive disaster is an aberration. Add a defensive stopper and upgrade the point guard position and we're right back in the mix. Which is probably true. And remember, the money men WANT the sales pitch to be true. There have been a lot of convincing cases made to make a change at the end of the season. But none of those cases suggest a course of action that the BOT would actually follow.

We're his best offer at the moment. The high majors will come sniffing around come spring. Not only can he create his own offense, but he's a good defender. His mediocre free throw shooting will limit his high major options, though.

With Big Brad in the lineup, we're giving up 79.

You are a numbers guy. In addition to being one of worst defensive teams in D-1, this is one of the worst passing teams in D-1. You're not going to survive in the 2nd half once the teams turn up the pressure if you're bad at passing AND you're bad at stopping teams on the other end. If the players aren't good at a particular skillset -- passing, defending -- I don't think that's fixable this year. You can, for example, go from being a horrible defense to a below average defense. You can only fix that problem by bringing in players who are better defenders. The coaching staff hoped to have a Big Three to cover up their offensive and defensive deficiencies. For much of the season they only had a Big One (Jimerson), recently they became a Big Two (Jimerson and Big Brad). Not enough. They need a healthy Parker. This team is so bad at defense, they need to average 80 ppg to win. Maybe after marginal improvement on defense they can get by with averaging 77.

The only guys that have done this in the past 60 years have been Spoon and Majerus. That's it. When you look at the likely free agent market after the season, you don't see that guy. It's Chris Mack, who could jump right back into high major D-1 if he wants, and everybody else. There may be an up and comer in the free agent market who becomes the next Chris Mack but the risk-averse BOT isn't going to bring him here. They're culturally incapable of it. There's a reason that those kinds of success stories happen at St. Mary's and Florida Atlantic and not at so-called established mid-majors. Programs and boosters who feel they have nothing to lose are willing to take a lot bigger risks.

Our mediocre defense is exacerbated that by the fact that we have to work so hard to score. I believe we'll give up fewer points once Parker becomes a significant contributor. A Big Three will mask deficiencies on both sides of the ball similar to how Yuri-mania masked deficiencies on both sides of the ball last year. The question is will a late-season run be enough to save Coach Ford's job? Will the BOT be willing to kick the can down the road? The free-agent market will probably have bigger names by then. That seems to be the route the BOT is most comfortable with if they want to make a move.

I agree. Good to see LJ get some threes to go, though. He was struggling mightily even before the injury.

The Matthew Rocchio tweet from earlier this week said Parker wouldn't be available this week. Our next game is at home followed by two road games where we'll be double digit dogs even with Parker in the lineup. If the goal is to put Parker in a position to succeed, I wouldn't bring him back until after the VCU game. What would you do?

Salvaging the season means going .500 in January, going on a run in February and continuing that run to the conference tournament finals. Then a case could be made that if the roster had been healthy all along, the traumatic blowout losses in non-conference never would have happened. As it stands, I don't think the coaching staff can be competitive in the transfer portal. We're not sitting on pots of money and we're at the bottom of the A-10. A salesman needs a reasonably attractive product to sell.

We'll never know. We can only engage in MBM speculation. I suspect it's because the clandestine old boy network known as the BOT signed off on it. Talking about replacing a coach and an AD is therapeutic because one day that will happen. But will the BOT ever be receptive to so-called "out of the box thinking" when large sums of money are involved? I seriously doubt it.

I thought the consensus was that we need someone who is a top-notch teacher of the game. Somebody who can "coach up" mid-major recruits. What does a Duke assistant know about coaching up that caliber of player? I think there's a reason that Coach's K tree has been underwhelming.

The top mid-major programs basically have 1 guy who could be a high-major starter on a good team, a couple of other guys who could be in a high-major rotation and other guys who are just mid-major guys. I don't see that changing. It will just become a lot more expensive to acquire and maintain such a team.