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Post by Judge Smails on Feb 26, 2020 8:08:18 GMT -8
I became a fan of Oregon St. when I went there through a domestic exchange program during the 1980-81 school year. I then followed them pretty much through Ralph's final seasons. Actually dragged some friends up to Milwaukee (lived in Chicago at the time) to see the Beavs play Marquette in Ralph's final season. They won by the way. In subsequent years, life got in the way and didn't follow the Beavs much until Robinson's last two years or so. WT's hiring coincided with me getting the Pac 12 network with my cable package, so I started following the team much closer. Since it seems we have some historians on the board as well as no shortage of opinions, how did the Beavs end up as an after thought in the Pac 12? Just bad hires? Hanging on to Anderson for too long when he wasn't getting the job done? It just baffles me how they could have fallen so far. As I've mentioned on here, the other school I root for is Illinois. Illinois fired Bruce Weber 7 seasons after he got them into the NCAA finals (albeit with Bill Self's recruits). And it wasn't like his subsequent years were terrible -- four NCAA and one NIT tournaments, and the two he missed weren't even in a row. The guy they then hired, John Groce, went to 4 post-season tournaments in his 5 years (though only one NCAA) and was actually fired after the Illini earned a berth in the NIT. However, he never finished above 7th in conference and his best year was a .500 record. Though Brad Underwood's first two seasons were bad (10th and 11th in conference), most fans understood he was building something -- culture of toughness and defense -- and for the most part have been behind him. Through some very good recruiting -- recruiting classes of #30 nationally, #25 (with 32nd ranked player), #68 (but with #46 ranked player) and #13 right now for 2020 (with #33 and #45 ranked players), he has the Illini looking like they will be in NCAA tourney (#35 NET). Just crazy to me that OSU's administration let it get so bad. Especially when you consider both schools had iconic, successful coaches -- Ralph Miller and Lou Henson -- for a long time. Henson coached Illini for 21 years starting in 1975-76. A couple of weeks ago, I talked with a friend who was a part of the program bridging Ralph and Jimmy Anderson’s eras. He was with the team with GP, and continued to be when Jimmy took over for a while. He said that it definitely went south quickly when Jimmy became the head man. I love Jimmy, but in terms of adverse impact on us, he hurt hoops. Not as badly as that other Andersen guy hurt football, but Jimmy really wasn’t the head guy. He got to the Dance his first year because he had the best player in America. GP was the coach according to my friend. He told me that a lot of people don’t realize how smart GP is. He just wouldn’t condone screw-offs or selfish behavior by teammates. His skill, clutch and charisma was only rivaled by his tenacity, toughness and competitive burn. This guy told me that he loved Ralph because he coached his players to play the game the right way, and it didn’t matter how talented a kid was. If they didn’t do things the right way or were unteachable, he’d run them off. He said that while Jimmy was a really good assistant, he lost control quickly with his obsession with bringing “athletes”, rather than basketball players who loved the game and were coachable. Guys like Chad Scott were athletes and gifted, but he held up a pizza delivery guy, and it was symptomatic of losing sight of what Ralph put a premium on. For every Brent Barry, there were bad actors. If they could play, he tended to look the other way. Coaches have to build their own program, but if you are inheriting a strong culture, it’s wise to reinforce and build your own thing on a solid, pre-existing foundation. There were also rumors that there was dissension and tension on the team spurred by certain assistants that didn’t help. Jimmy also fell prey to a common problem for many decent coaches who failed to surround themselves with good assistants. During that time, he also suffered the tragedy of losing a top 10 rated transfer from Oklahoma, Earnest Killum, a tremendous offensive player who died of a heart condition. Eddie Payne followed that unfortunate run of 6 years, and brought in an amazing first class in ‘96 I believe, including Corey Benjamin, rated the #5 prospect in America, in the same rare air as the likes of Jermaine O’Neal and Kobe. Unfortunately, within 2 years all but 2 or 3 of the 9 highly-touted recruits had left for myriad reasons, and that great potential run sputtered with JB Bickerstaff transferring and Benjamin declaring early for the NBA draft just as he was catching his stride and showing his immense potential. Eddie was so close to getting things on track just a few years post-Ralph, but he was soon gone, replaced by the poser formerly known as Ritchie McKay, who always seemed to have a new dream job after he landed in his current dream job. We endured Ritchie and his “me first” approach for a few years, until he slunk out of town in the middle of the night to pursue his next dream job. By then, we were over a decade removed from relevance, with few recruits who could tell you much about the Orange Express. Further, Lute at Arizona had created a basketball machine and was snatching the best in our state right and left, and Ernie Kent had some really good teams led by Luke Jackson, Luke Ridnauer. and Freddie Jones. Jackson had narrowed it between the Oregon schools, and Ridnauer (who was friends with the other Luke) took a late visit to OSU even though he was verbally committed to the ducks. In the end, they went to Oregon together. We were no longer THE program in our own state even. When Miller was here, he got the best kids in our state a good deal of the time. We owned the Ducks (even with the shift in the last 25 years, the Beavers still lead the all-time series by a good margin) Jay John was overhyped (“big man guru” from Lute’s Arizona staff). He turned out to be nothing resembling Olson in his leadership. He had some pretty talented individuals like Philip Ricci, Nick Dewitz, Brian Jackson (sad story there), Sasa Cuic (a gifted piece of work who reportedly thought he had signed play for the “OSU ducks”) and Chris Stephens, but he was a poor tactician and had very little control in the locker room. His players were mutinous by the time we finally sent him packing. Remnants of the proud hoops program were becoming hard to find. Craig Robinson was about our 6th choice when we got him. He had some charisma, and for a once-proud program that had been to 1 NIT and zero Big Dances in the previous 19 years, the relative success that his first team had and the win in the modest CBI tourney made some wonder if maybe we could get back on track with him. Good man, mediocre game coach. The CBI was by far his crown jewel in his 6 years here. When Tinkle came aboard, despite the silly notion in my head that Ben Howland or some other name guy would be the coach, I heard that this might be solid from some folks. He had early success as GP2 carried us and some holdovers from Robinson’s team brought some good things to the table. He got us to the Big Dance for the first time in a quarter century, and between he and assistant Stephan Thompson, they brought in 3 nice players who happened to share DNA with them. We have never been more perplexing than we have during his tenure. Let’s go outplay a top 20 team and win, then follow it up with a loss to a team with an RPI below 200. They are excruciating to watch. I have no idea what our identity is in our program. The Beaver hoops program that you speak of is history. I keep hoping that someday we’ll see this program write some new chapters of the type that we were privileged to witness consistently for about 15 straight years. Excellent post. One question for you. I did not remember that Earnest transferred from Oklahoma. Are you sure about that? I was pretty sure that he just chose OSU over Long Beach St. & Oklahoma. I knew Earnest in college and he had to sit out a year here due to his medical condition, but I am pretty sure that was his freshman year. Earnest dated my girlfriend's best friend and I hung out with him quite a bit. I do not remember him saying anything ever about transferring from Oklahoma and I could not find anything online about that. Maybe he just never mentioned it to me. Earnest was a good dude and potentially a great player. He was just starting to shine when he passed away. Chad Scott was a definite bonehead, but he was already academically ineligible and off the team when the pizza delivery incident happened. He was a Prop 48 guy and not eligible his freshman year either.
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Post by nabeav on Feb 26, 2020 8:56:02 GMT -8
beaverinohio - NCAA Tournament money is doled out to the conference in "units." Each game a team plays is one unit. So if the Pac-12 gets three teams into the tournament, one loses first round (1 unit), another makes the second round (2 units) and a third makes the elite 8 (4 units) that's 7 units for the conference. In 2018, each unit was worth about $275K, so $2.2M. It gets even more complicated in that units are distributed for 6 years, so that's $2.2M a year for the next six years, or $13.2M total. I believe that the $2.2M is on top of all the units earned during the previous five years of tournaments as well. In any event, this chart shows that prior to the 2019 tournament, the B1G was getting $35.3M in basketball payouts, compared to the Pac-12's $11.7M. herosports.com/ncaa-tournament/basketball-fund-team-conference-money-ahahAs for your assertion that the buyout to bring in Underwood inflated the expenses for that one year, you might be right, but I can't find numbers for any other year that easily. Interestingly enough I found an article from the Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette suggesting that the Illini might extend or increase the contract of Underwood as a pre-emptive strike against Texas making a run at him if they fire Shaka Smart. I did find this from 2017, which said that Illinois had the 4th largest debt of all college athletic departments, trailing Cal, A&M, and Washington (Oregon was 7th on that list, but I imagine one call to Uncle Phil wipes that out whenever they need it). www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-04/college-football-s-top-teams-are-built-on-crippling-debt
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2ndGenBeaver
Sophomore
Posts: 1,803
Grad Year: 1991 (MS/CS) 1999 (PhD/CS)
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Post by 2ndGenBeaver on Feb 26, 2020 9:00:52 GMT -8
I have been around OSU since 1987 (GP-I's sophomore year and beyond), and another factor is that our Athletic Department doesn't seem to have a clear-cut vision of what sort of a athletics-related school we want to be.....hard to be decisive about coaches (should they stay or should they go?) if you don't have a crisp view of what you need them to accomplish.
This lack of vision could be caused by a number of factors, but decisions like "do we keep Jimmy or build on the Ralph legacy with a new hire?" or "Is Jay John a good fit?" or "Is Tinkle getting it done?" can only be made when there is a clear context of what we are trying to get done.
So, along with the excellent write up above about the head coach trail of tears we have been on, there is a leadership component that seems to have been lacking. And it seems like a key aspect to that is accountability - I don't want to go too far into the weeds, but I see other incidents recently (Forestry department) that indicate a severe lack of accountability in OSU leadership ranks, and why should our basketball program be immune to the effects of that?
Go Beavers!
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Post by beaverinohio on Feb 26, 2020 9:58:34 GMT -8
beaverinohio - NCAA Tournament money is doled out to the conference in "units." Each game a team plays is one unit. So if the Pac-12 gets three teams into the tournament, one loses first round (1 unit), another makes the second round (2 units) and a third makes the elite 8 (4 units) that's 7 units for the conference. In 2018, each unit was worth about $275K, so $2.2M. It gets even more complicated in that units are distributed for 6 years, so that's $2.2M a year for the next six years, or $13.2M total. I believe that the $2.2M is on top of all the units earned during the previous five years of tournaments as well. In any event, this chart shows that prior to the 2019 tournament, the B1G was getting $35.3M in basketball payouts, compared to the Pac-12's $11.7M. herosports.com/ncaa-tournament/basketball-fund-team-conference-money-ahahAs for your assertion that the buyout to bring in Underwood inflated the expenses for that one year, you might be right, but I can't find numbers for any other year that easily. Interestingly enough I found an article from the Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette suggesting that the Illini might extend or increase the contract of Underwood as a pre-emptive strike against Texas making a run at him if they fire Shaka Smart. I did find this from 2017, which said that Illinois had the 4th largest debt of all college athletic departments, trailing Cal, A&M, and Washington (Oregon was 7th on that list, but I imagine one call to Uncle Phil wipes that out whenever they need it). www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-04/college-football-s-top-teams-are-built-on-crippling-debt Thanks for the information. Doesn't surprise me about possible Underwood extension. Given what it looks like he's going to accomplish this year -- make the tournament for first time since 2012-13. But it is really that combined with the recruiting that makes an extension palpable. If Adam Miller comes to Illinois next year (has committed but not signed LOI), that will be 4 top 50 players in 3 years. And Illini are in on some very good recruits for 2021 and 2022. That to me is the key to extensions -- have to be tied to everything going on in the program (win/loss, recruiting, how donors feel about coach). All that said, I'd be surprised if he would really truly consider Texas job (of course, money does talk). I don't think he has any connection to state of Texas except for coaching at Stephen F. Austin. He has voiced quite a bit that Illinois has been his dream job for quite some time (certainly some coach speak in there, but I think it is pretty true). He was an assistant at W. Illinois for 11 years -- much of that time during the Illini's good years including back to back Elite 8 and Sweet 16 appearances -- so he's seen up close what Illinois can be. The Illini debt thing was pretty interesting. Most of that is the renovation of Assembly Hall (now State Farm Center), which originally had a $160M price tag. Not sure what the final price came in at. It was built in early 1960s I think, and it was needed. From all I've heard, they did it right. Here is a link to article on what was planned if interested (assuming link works). They also just opened up a new football center this year that I think cost about $80 million. Those two projects took Illinois' facilities out of the "worst in the conference" category. So they were needed and I'm sure the debt is tied closely to things like naming rights of SFC, donor pledges as well as relatively conservative revenue projections. Obviously nothing is completely safe, but I really don't think administration would let the athletics department negatively impact the finances of the school. It is first and foremost considered a research institution not a sports factory by the administration.
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Post by mbabeav on Feb 26, 2020 12:13:42 GMT -8
My opinion? The good in-state players starting going elsewhere. Once we started losing them, the record dropped, and then out of state guys had no reason to choose to come to the PNW. None of the truly elite talent out of Oregon (Love, Singlers, Stoudamires, Terrence Ross, Terrence Jones....etc. have chosen to come to OSU. Who is the last nationally recruited in state guy to come to OSU, Charlie Sitton? Brian Jackson, I guess....but the Oregon Jimmy Chitwood never really seemed comfortable away from the confines of Knappa. Brian Jackson had a good career considering he was playing with some fairly serious abdominal injuries throughout much of it. Didn't they discover after the fact that he had bone spurs growing from his hip bones that were causing the "injuries" - as I recall, it was amazing that he was able to play at all given the pain, and that he had to play all those years without the spurs being detected was something that made me suspicious of OSU's medical care. I could be wrong, but I think that's how it went down.
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Post by nabeav on Feb 26, 2020 12:30:22 GMT -8
I need to apologize to AC Green too. He was definitely an elite in-state talent
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Post by beaverinohio on Feb 26, 2020 14:19:41 GMT -8
I need to apologize to AC Green too. He was definitely an elite in-state talent He might be my favorite Beaver basketball player. Probably top 3 would be him, Lester Conner and Gary Payton with an honorable mention to Jeff Stoutt.
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Post by beaverstever on Feb 26, 2020 14:35:18 GMT -8
I think it's pretty telling that nobody we've hired at OSU since Ralph had any success elsewhere either, other that little Richie to a minor degree. Spending money on coaches is a problem, but we haven't even been able to hir anyone who used OSU as a stepping stone.
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Post by Judge Smails on Feb 26, 2020 15:01:47 GMT -8
I think it's pretty telling that nobody we've hired at OSU since Ralph had any success elsewhere either, other that little Richie to a minor degree. Spending money on coaches is a problem, but we haven't even been able to hir anyone who used OSU as a stepping stone. What do you mean? CR went to the pros (Milwaukee Bucks)........oh, but not as a coach.
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Post by beaverinohio on Feb 26, 2020 15:22:04 GMT -8
I think it's pretty telling that nobody we've hired at OSU since Ralph had any success elsewhere either, other that little Richie to a minor degree. Spending money on coaches is a problem, but we haven't even been able to hir anyone who used OSU as a stepping stone. What do you mean? CR went to the pros (Milwaukee Bucks)........oh, but not as a coach. Ritchie is having a nice little run with Liberty. Even won a game last year in tourney
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Post by Judge Smails on Feb 26, 2020 15:49:08 GMT -8
What do you mean? CR went to the pros (Milwaukee Bucks)........oh, but not as a coach. Ritchie is having a nice little run with Liberty. Even won a game last year in tourney Yeah, RM used as a stepping stone to get to New Mexico. He got Danny Granger there which gave him some success, but he faded quickly. Hopefully, he has matured by now. He had a little bit of Lavonda Wagner in his coaching style when he was here. Very two-faced.
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Post by OSUprof on Feb 26, 2020 16:18:43 GMT -8
Money was the primary issue in competitiveness of our two revenue sports prior to the late 1990s.
Since that time, the primary issue is allocation of financial resources to football and men's basketball within the athletic department. These Power 5 programs spend less on athletics than OSU:
NC State Va Tech Purdue Oklahoma State Mississippi State Rutgers Boston College Texas Tech Syracuse Kansas State Georgia Tech Utah Vanderbilt WSU Iowa State Wake Forest
Yet OSU is dead last in football spending (65th) in the Power 5 and 64th in men's basketball spending. OSU is dead last in total wins in FB and MBB over the last 3 decades. Those that claim the federal numbers are incorrect and that OSU actually spends more on these sports need to justify the extremely poor return on investment.
We do not spend more than the competition on non-revenue sports or on debt service (OSU has the lowest total debt among the public schools in the conference). We do spend more than the competition on administration. This is a fact. There are specific guidelines on how spending is to be reported - there are no apples and oranges here. Those that claim otherwise are current or former AD employees, those that receive favors from the department, or the uninformed.
If OSU is not serious about spending what is required to be competitive, then the money should be used elsewhere. As long as no one pushes them on this point, there will be no change.
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Post by beaversproud on Feb 26, 2020 17:07:12 GMT -8
Because quite frankly beaver fans are complacent. Simple as that. Discretion is the better part of valor. Guaranteed limited success is a million times better than a likely complete lack of success and far cheaper to attain. If we can find a way to pump a couple of extra million into Oregon State basketball per year, then we'll talk. Until then, we are getting about what we are paying for. This is low hanging fruit. This is the same argument used by people who say facilities are to blame. We can look up hundreds of schools that have larger budget with less success. Just like we can find smaller budget with greater success. I hope no one here has the time or inclination to do either. This is a good statement. You take a good coach, see Tony Bennett (this should be an obvious rebuttal), and you can win anywhere.
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Post by 93beav on Feb 26, 2020 17:30:43 GMT -8
Money was the primary issue in competitiveness of our two revenue sports prior to the late 1990s.
Since that time, the primary issue is allocation of financial resources to football and men's basketball within the athletic department. These Power 5 programs spend less on athletics than OSU:
NC State Va Tech Purdue Oklahoma State Mississippi State Rutgers Boston College Texas Tech Syracuse Kansas State Georgia Tech Utah Vanderbilt WSU Iowa State Wake Forest
Yet OSU is dead last in football spending (65th) in the Power 5 and 64th in men's basketball spending. OSU is dead last in total wins in FB and MBB over the last 3 decades. Those that claim the federal numbers are incorrect and that OSU actually spends more on these sports need to justify the extremely poor return on investment.
We do not spend more than the competition on non-revenue sports or on debt service (OSU has the lowest total debt among the public schools in the conference). We do spend more than the competition on administration. This is a fact. There are specific guidelines on how spending is to be reported - there are no apples and oranges here. Those that claim otherwise are current or former AD employees, those that receive favors from the department, or the uninformed.
If OSU is not serious about spending what is required to be competitive, then the money should be used elsewhere. As long as no one pushes them on this point, there will be no change.
Does anybody know why we are so low in spending? Sure, fan apathy has to play some part, but essentially it sounds like there isn't the equivalent level of fan apathy anywhere in the Power 5? Is there some legal reason? Some control by the state over spending? Some fear of debt management (which, to be fair, WSU should be an example of why you can't throw the kitchen sink in sometimes). I'm just curious how OSU became so manacled by the spending. It seems like the top level administration in the last couple of years has at least vocally been supportive of more spending. Maybe we just don't have the donor base to help?
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Post by 93beav on Feb 26, 2020 17:33:40 GMT -8
I should just add that I was at school the last year of GP1. The remaining years have been nothing short of a cruel taunt from the universe about expectations being dropped. If it weren't for the occasional blip from baseball or women's basketball, I'd almost be okay with shutting down athletics ...or maybe become the first university to just run fully off of club sports. I think for quite awhile we were tops in racquetball.
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