Trumpy is not a good example to use on the point you are making...
It’s time to move on from Collins
- Thread starter TheC
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Yep. Players, formations, plays.
We don’t do that right now in this program. We should.
I honestly thought coming into the season that Beran would have a Shurna-like breakout and have always believed Nance has NBA-level gifts we currently see a few times a year. Starting them together makes sense. Two bigs who can shoot, pass, and drive make it impossible to switch and become a defensive nightmare. The ankle sprain appears to have thrown off Beran's rhythm, but he's still a sophomore, so we'll see. We might as well start Gaines right now for speed and defense. But I still believe that there is at least one future all-Big Ten player between Beran, Nance, and Kopp.
BMac cared DEEPLY about winning vs. losing. So did Pardon. You could see the pain each time they didn't come through, and the urgency to get better. Which made the experience of "The Pass" all that much more cathartic.
It's subjective, but I just don't see that in anyone on this team. Sure, there are players who are sometimes "clutch," but to me at least, that's a very different thing, something that's separate and apart from having that gnawing sense of urgency throughout the game.
NU's players are "talented" enough to be in the rotation of just about all Big Ten teams, in my opinion. But they need a "dude" or two to step up and lead the way BMac and Pardon and Law did, and I'm not sure we have it.
The problem is that I highly doubt the next AD wants to fire CC before 2023.
Like I said above, I expect AD budget to be $30-40 million in the red this year and $10-15 million in the red next fiscal year. It will likely take through 2026 or so to balance the books fully.
So when next AD is deciding what to do with say 2 years left on CC contract, best situation may be to just buy a year of stability by exchanging CC's current contract with a new 5 year deal with a lower immediate buyout after 1 year than would be left on current contract.
i.e. Show current players/recruits he has a long-term deal in place but it is really a "show me" contract that let's us cut him loose cheaply if needed.
I get that fans may be unhappy but new AD is literally entering with a giant budget hole the stabilization of which is going to take priority.
there’s a huge difference between being one of the best at your position in the conference, which BMac and Pardon were, and being roster worthy. Yeah most of our current players can make most team’s rosters, but only as the 4th best guy or a bench player. Hard to win with a team full of guys like that.
Must be all of those big time recruits that wanted to come to NU but were passed over. After all, the 3000 strong in the upper deck (25 being students) have to be an allure that overcomes the rich history of NU B Ball. The adoring students? The brainiac culture they fit in with? The NBA players produced? The “new” facilities that are so strong compared to others? Short of John Wooden being resurrected, it is a Herculean tasks or any Coach to recruit NU as well as most every other B1G program.
The futility must be news to the school, which just spent a small fortune renovating the arena. Why even try? Let’s disband the team. After all, by your logic, NU has no hope of competing against conference juggernauts and famous blue blood programs like Iowa, Minnnesota, and Rutgers
Agree and have said this many times. I have no doubt every player on the team wants to win. What I don’t see ( and I don’t personally know the team) is a a-hole that hates to lose more than he likes to win.
I think Pat Spencer was that guy that was fearless and a PIA. Unfortunately, he didn’t have 4 years to develop and instill it in the team. Not the most talented guy on the team, but you would want him in the foxhole with you. I wish NU had that playground player that played in games where fouls are called and didn’t stay on the court unless you won the game.
This is the biggest indictment against Collins, imo. He makes people feel like the program has no hope. If Ron Zook can bring the school from Rantoul to Pasadena, there’s a coach out there who can make NU men’s basketball respectable
Thimk playinf in the NCAA Tournament isn't respectable? How did you feel while Carmody coached 14 years (?) and no ticket to "The Dance"???
Sure, and that got him a 10 year extension. Eventually, if you suck balls for long enough after a tournament appearance, the goodwill runs out. And if Collins was able to do it once, there’s no reason to believe another coach can’t replicate it more consistently.
When Mark Few took over at Gonzaga, they had made the tournament once in their history.
We all know that NU basketball has an absolute train wreck of a (very long) history, most likely given academic requirements. The key question is therefore - what are realistic expectations? What are the odds of finding a coach who could make us a CONSISTENT winner? It has to be one in 1,000 or less. Iowa hasn’t won the BigTen in 30 years. Are they regularly looking to fire McCaffrey for every year he fails to win the BigTen? Our job is a Herculean task, and Collins showed his very high potential once. We can’t expect sustained excellence as yet. But if he does it another time, our chances of sustained success increase exponentially. IMHO, Collins takes way too much negativity from this board when viewed appropriately against realistic program expectations.
Should the expectations be higher than last place? We were 13th last year, 14th before, currently 12th right now. I don’t see why anyone would or should be content with that. Say what we want about Collins, I know he’s not happy with it.
Correct. None of us are happy with those results. But are they a fireable offense?
Absolutely. I could get the team to finish 14th for a shit load less money.
Mostly agree, but look at the actual record. His first team started mediocre, 2nd got better, 3rd got better, Tourney, then WTF.
His teams prior to the tourney were good teams. I'd take that now. Makes the collapse all the more maddening
I think he just got lucky with his first 2 recruiting classes with BMac, Pardon, Law. He has yet to find that same caliber of player again.
This is true.
Add Lindsey there too.
And while Law was a top-100 guy, the core of the best team in program history was pretty lightly recruited.
But, geez, every dispatch from Mac’s senior season was gold. (8 assists and they won again and they’re undefeated...12 assists in the state semifinals... ) You knew that Mac was going to come in and be a dude. And, for all his limitations, he went to war every minute he was on the court.
They had been twice, including an Elite Eight the year before he took over.
They also won the WCC 4 out of the 6 years before he took over.
I've said it before, so excuse me for repeating this.
Collins is paid a mid-range B10 salary so can we stop with the line that his salary has anything to do with the evaluation?
You need to pay someone a minimum of a mid-range salary for career suicide.
You must not teach in the business school to accept failure as okay. Needless to say, it is obvious that you should not be in the sports marketing department.
Did you notice something about his first success? Vic, Scott and the back up center, Benson, were from Illinois. Mac was from Indiana, Lumpkin was from Minny and our center from Ohio. How many players on our current roster are from Illinois? 2. Walk-ons. How many from Indiana? O. Iowa or Wisconsin? 0. Ohio? 1. Michigan 1. Our next group has more kids from from Indiana and Michigan. Our schollie players are from NY (3), Ga, Oh, Pa, Mich, KS, Va and Texas. 2 players in total from B10 states.
Take a look at Wiscy's, Iowa's and Indy's rosters. Full of players from their states. They do have the advantage of being the flagship university, but when NU went NCAA and was the star in the state, Illinois sucked. Chris shot for the stars in the state and struck out. I find it inexplicable that NU's last recruit from Indiana, IIRC, was MacIntosh, and in Illinois, IIRC, was Rap and Benson or the class of 2016. There may have been some, but I can't think of any. The question I would have as an AD is this: "Did he lose Illinois or Chicagoland as a recruiting area?" It sure looks that way. I am not going to say that getting a recruit from that area would solve our b-ball problems, but I find it inexplicable that in 5 years there has been no player, other than the superstars he tried for, who could meet the academic standards and play with some ability to help our team from a metro area of 9.5 million people. Or, get players from other local states, not far flung locations?
I think what we have is that he missed and thought his recruiting and coaching acumen was so great or high that he made a mistake in judgment of what recruits he thought he could get to NU, especially with the knowledge of a small arena, high academic standards, disinterested students, and a non-vocal fanbase.
Your whole post makes me realize that Loyola's Final Four team, which had no NBA players on it, was due solely to Sister Jean's prayers and divine intervention and had nothing to do with coaching or player development and that NU is doomed to persistent failure.
Clearly, I screwed up the years. Point is, there's nothing inherent about Gonzaga that makes them a basketball power. Yes, they beat up on the WCC every year, but they also play a tough noncon and win a lot.
We have great facilities, we're in a great location, we have a phenomenal education to sell. We play in the premier conference in the country. We can get guys admitted, despite all the protestations on this board. It hasn't come together. Again, I'd love the guy to succeed and have a 30-year run here. He deserved the patience he got for the first year...or two...or three after the tourney team. But it's further and further back in the rearview mirror. I firmly disbelieve that an athletic program that can be good to dominant in nearly every other sport it competes in can't put at least a solid men's basketball program together. We should strive for better than happy with 12th place.
Can I take a little umbrage with the disinterested students piece? When the team sucks, they're not there, but neither are the other fans. So it goes in a pro sports town.
But I remember a lot of overflowing student sections in my latter years in school and beyond, and again when they made the tourney run. The year in Allstate really killed momentum, and by the time we got back into the new place, the luster had worn off.
I have more confidence that students will show when the team is good than I do that STHs won't give their tickets to Wolverines and Hoosiers.
This is honestly pathetic. Nobody is asking for consistent conference championships. 99% of the fanbase would be beyond thrilled with a team that could average out to .500 in conference play and make the tournament every 3 years (and make the NIT the other years). That's not an unrealistic or unfair goal for this program. To say that we are being too negative about a coach that owns a conference record of .300 is laughably pathetic.
A) The question about realistic expectations is a good one b/c I don't think many in this thread are dealing with the reality of this putrid history.
B) For now, unfortunately, the GOAL is consistent winning. The reality is NU has never been close, so that can't be the expectation. There's a step of some sort before that.
C) Applause, applause for the idea that the board has been BRUTAL on Collins. Too many in this thread wanted to dump him early last year. Then you came out swinging after the Pitt loss.
Some of you are living dream world if you think you can just line up candidate after candidate every six years, and that will solve the problem.
This thing is going to run its course in the next year or two. Let's try not to devalue the program even more by being the ignorant fan base that sways its support depending on a win or a loss.
Excuse me for a moment, Whitney. This one isn't personal because you're FAR from the first person to say it.
Can we stop with the idea that location, conference and education are differentiators? Every coach since Tex Winter opens their press conference with this line and they obviously don't make a difference.
I agree we shouldn't be happy with 12th place, but there needs to be some realism.
I also want to agree with your theory that if ee can get it done in other sports, it should happen in basketball.
But I also have 50 years of modern basketball records that indicate basketball is a different beast.
Also remember the program already set the standard that 4 straight NIT years was an insufficient level of success.
If it's realistic, can you show me again when it happened at NU in the last 50 years? Maybe you can also show me an NU coach who blows away the pitiful .329 conference percentage.
Yes, it's pathetic. Now you're getting it. Good luck finding the next coach.
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Yes. Your job is to graduate players, represent the university well and win basketball games. He hasn't done a great job with at least the first and third of those things. The second is in the eye of the beholder, and there have been some incidents that, depending on whom you believe, don't pass that test either.
Again, I fully expect Chris Collins will be coaching at NU next season if he wants to be. After that, I would expect the new AD to be undertaking a serious evaluation of the program. Hopefully it's to extend him because the roster grew up and made great strides next year, or even because the team comes back strong in the second half this year. But right now it's a wing and a prayer. And not a Buff Joe's wing, per the other thread.
Is that a mindset that a winning coach brings to his work? Good lord.
Let’s put it this way. I think we can all agree that Collins isn’t a generational coaching talent. Opinions of him on this board range from poor to good. But everyone can agree he isn’t John Wooden or Coach K. If a coach of Collins level can bring NU to the tournament once, why isn’t it realistic to expect a better coach can deliver a more consistent performance? A tournament appearance every 3-4 years? After all, Collins is not a historic or generational coaching talent and he has already established some baseline of what is achievable here.
Likewise, Bill Carmody was also a poor to good coach (depending on your opinion) and he was able to bring NU to the NIT consistently by the end of his tenure. And NU decided that wasn’t good enough. If a coach of Carmody’s talents can deliver consistent NIT appearances and be fired for it, why can’t we expect a tournament appearance every 3/4 years? Why can’t we expect a >.300 conference record? Why can’t we expect not to get our ass cheeks blown out by 25 points at home consistently? Why can’t we expect to not have 8+ game losing streaks every year?
I know you're as diehard as I am. We've both been posting here for years. I hear where you're coming from.
I guess I just don't agree that what happened 50, 30, even 10 years ago should be all that relevant. When I was in school and was friendly with some players, the excuse was that we couldn't get good enough talent and that our facilities weren't good enough to attract it. We now have the best. I do think it's fair to raise expectations after the university invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the program. The program earned that investment with the late NIT runs with Carmody and then making it to the Dance. But with investment comes obligations.
It should be much, much, MUCH harder to field a solid football program than a solid basketball program. It just requires so many more people to be able to do so many more things. And yet, three coaches in my lifetime have been able to achieve great success in football, with the current one showing no signs of slowing down even when there's still a dud year every now and then. And under Fitz, at least, those things do seem to be differentiators. I don't know why it wouldn't be true on this end.
My problem with Collins isn't even the record, per se. It's that we keep seeing the same mistakes, and nothing changes.
So is it the recruiting? We keep seeing the increased recruiting rankings, but at least since Mac/Pardon/Law/Lindsey we never seem to quite develop that star that takes us to the next level. We were in on Talen Horton-Tucker, now in the NBA. Didn't land him. In on Saddiq Bey, now in the NBA. Didn't land him. In on Ayo Dosunmu and Luka Garza, NPOY candidates and probably soon to be in the NBA. Didn't land them. In on Max Christie. Didn't land him. Pat Baldwin, Jr., literal scion to program royalty, is next, and maybe we'll land him. And the guys we have landed, despite solid pedigrees themselves, haven't measured up to the standards of those other players. The $64,000 question is, would they had they gone elsewhere?
So is it the offense? Bill Carmody, for all of his faults, put together a top-50 offense nationally something like 3-4 seasons in a row. (I'm not going to get into Carmody-Collins comps. Carmody got fired because his defenses and rebounding never improved, which kept us from winning.) Collins' offenses (per CBB Reference) have been 340th, 170th, 70th, 113th (dancing!), 176th, 309th, and 291st. So far this year we're actually at 85th, so there's been major improvement on the strength of the first few conference games, and we're still 6-8 and in 12th place in the conference. We saw a fleeting glimpse of what it could look like in the first 3 games, but obviously we weren't able to maintain that clip.
Is it the defense? The rebounding? The play calling? The confidence building? The chemistry? Or is it some magical voodoo force that surrounds Welsh-Ryan Arena? This season isn't yet written in stone; there's still time to find 4-6 more wins and feel pretty good heading into next year. But, again, we're just hoping that something changes the way that fans hope. And watching games in Welsh-Ryan the last few seasons has been the basketball equivalent of Charlie Brown, which led to plenty of social distancing inside the arena before it was cool. It's a program death spiral.
Now, changing coaches likely means an exodus of players and another tough 3-4 years before a realistic chance of returning to relevance, with no guarantee of any success beyond that point. I don't want to get into the revolving door of coaches either. But this isn't a Frank Solich situation, where we have a higher opinion of ourselves than reality. Unless we truly just are a 12th-place program, in which case we should have invested the money into WRA and the practice facility somewhere else.
tl;dr: I hope Collins can turn it around. Truly, I'm rooting for him, and for us. But belief without evidence was SO 25 years ago.
Look, folks, we haven't won a Big Ten title since the 1930s, and even though we had a few solid seasons in the '50s and '60s, we've been absolutely terrible since then. It's easy to say that the next coach up is going to be the one to magically fix everything, but is that realistic? The last several decades say it isn't. So rather than pulling the trigger and going through this same cycle again and again, let's just let Francis Peay have a few more years at the helm to see if he can finally put it together. After all, who could we possibly get to replace him at a program this terrible?
A couple last thoughts for the evening ...
I continue to be pretty blown away that in this seven-page thread I’m pretty sure there's not even two or three acknowledgements of how brutally competitive the conference is. There's absolutely none of the mediocrity of Steve Alford, Dan Monson, Jim O'Brien and Tommy Amaker to help pad records.
If you want to run out Collins in a historically competitive conference, so be it. But let’s stop acting like this is just any other year, and comparing to seasons when Tubby, Lickliter and Ed DeChellis are on the schedule and any team with eight guys had a shot at 4-2.
I'm sure some will read this and think I'm making excuses for Collins. The truth is I don't have a problem with anyone who started questioning the direction this year.
My problem is this is a pretty poor fan base to start with – football school … barely shows up … not a huge donor base … sits on their hands. And for a couple years now, people have gone out of their way to shred the guy who actually completed step A of the project. The build-up results in this - a seven-page thread without a whole lot of perspective.
It simply demonstrates another limit to the program.
I continue to be pretty blown away that in this seven-page thread I’m pretty sure there's not even two or three acknowledgements of how brutally competitive the conference is. There's absolutely none of the mediocrity of Steve Alford, Dan Monson, Jim O'Brien and Tommy Amaker to help pad records.
If you want to run out Collins in a historically competitive conference, so be it. But let’s stop acting like this is just any other year, and comparing to seasons when Tubby, Lickliter and Ed DeChellis are on the schedule and any team with eight guys had a shot at 4-2.
I'm sure some will read this and think I'm making excuses for Collins. The truth is I don't have a problem with anyone who started questioning the direction this year.
My problem is this is a pretty poor fan base to start with – football school … barely shows up … not a huge donor base … sits on their hands. And for a couple years now, people have gone out of their way to shred the guy who actually completed step A of the project. The build-up results in this - a seven-page thread without a whole lot of perspective.
It simply demonstrates another limit to the program.
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