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To your first point, here's what I've been thinking, legitimate or not:
You're right. He has no head coaching experience. The ACC is not a place too friendly to new head coaches. He's going to grow as a coach, and he's paying his dues as we speak. I say have a little faith in him, give him the chance to grow in the position, and see where it takes us.
We haven't been real competitive in basketball in a long time, and we aren't much of a basketball school. As much as I want to see us win, we don't lose out on a whole lot by giving JJ time. Now, a five year contract may have been a bit much for my tastes, I think four years would have been plenty to see what he can do, but I'm willing to live with it.
I'd say this is probably the biggest positive regarding this year's team:
Battered Hokies Still Shine in Class
It's a very refreshing read, especially in light of how the season played out.
That gif is absolutely disgusting.
I was so happy when we signed Morgan, but good god did he underperform, especially for his contract. Sad to see Tapp go, but we weren't using him properly or enough. I like Montgomery, but it was time to move on from him.
DHall I think is a steal at his contract, and I hope his play can keep up at his current level. It crazy to me to think they cut him last year.
I'm flying out of IAD for work Monday morning, I could really use "no snow" for me and my wife's sake.
What are you brewing? I need to brew again but it's probably not going to be for a few weeks. We don't drink enough beer in my house anymore to merit brewing more than once a month.
Are you on untappd? I think in untappd freinds with someone on here, but I forget who.
"The idea of divisions is that they break down the conference teams into an even spectrum of difficulty for every team"
In theory, yes, but then you throw in cross divisional games and you abandon that entirely. What about a year where we play BC and Wake and Miami plays FSU and clemson? Even if Miami goes undefeated in our division (God forbid), if they lose to both clemson and FSU, we could make it to the championship game just by virtue of playing the scrubs of the atlantic division.
So if we're going to be completely fair, each team should only play the other 6 schools in the division to determine who earns the right to face an atlantic division team in the championship. No one will ever go for this (nor should they), but we should toss out the argument that anything short of that is a fair set up. Actually, you could keep playing atlantic teams, but then when it comes to figuring out the division champion, you only consider those wins/losses in the case of a tiebreaker and then only after head to head.
Here's the problem: because he has literally no head coaching experience anywhere we have literally no idea if he's capable of competing even with a roster of ACC talent. We have no clue. All we know of him as a head coach at any level is what he's done here, and it isn't pretty. This is why you don't hire guys to their first HC gig ever in the freaking ACC.
To your second question: hypothetical new coach would hypothetically be someone with a proven record of success as an HC, which is more than enough to merit a third year, also I honk both SG and JJs buyouts would be over by then.
My thing with JJ is that we have literally nothing other than "hope" that he can be even a mediocre ACC coach. That's really troubling to me.
For what it's worth, even though we disagree on this, I really like to read all of your posts. They are absurdly well written.
I just want hokie basketball to be even relevant again. My three year old son loves college basketball, and it sucks having to watch a whole lot of...not us. I was firmly in JJs corner through all of last year, I was conducting the excuse train. But this year broke me. They didn't improve at all, and were downright embarrassing through half of conference play. A four game 20 point loss streak in conference? Good god.
I'm just not convinced he's the guy. He's done nothing outside of beating OkSt to show me otherwise. And that was 8 games into his career, it's literally been nothing but downhill from there for two years.
I just can't help but feel that we're delaying the inevitable, and this delaying us ever being even remotely good, by putting this off for another year in the name of "saving money"
College basketball isn't this hard, high major teams can do better than one tournament appearance a decade and it doesn't take a lot to do so. We've spent 20 years "saving money" on basketball and we've gotten EXACTLY what we've paid for. Some could argue we got more than we paid for under SG.
I'm just over this. I'm over us sucking at basketball, I'm ready to turn the page.
First of all, I just want to say that you've raised some really good points throughout this debate.
I think the crux of the debate is this:
No one can made a compelling argument for keeping JJ based solely on the team's on-the-court performance. You see this as cause to believe JJ doesn't have the tools to succeed as a head coach in the ACC. I see it as an unavoidable consequence of having a roster bereft of ACC-caliber talent and depth due to a host of injuries and attrition. To you, this is an excuse for a guy in over his head, and to me, it is an insurmountable barrier to success. I think we just fundamentally disagree there.
And here's a hypothetical question for you: If we hire a new coach and the team is still not competitive in conference play after two years, what do you do? Do you start over again and add a 4th coach to payroll?
Yeah he's been pissed about something that's for sure this winter has been pretty brutal but things are looking to be clearing out hopefully this will begin a trend towards consistently warm weather and old man winter can be shutup for another 9 months...although if I've learned anything its that blacksburg weather is incredibly all over the place
I'm holding you to that when we finish with 11-13 wins next year ;)
What's to please? We're having a discussion on an Internet board. You got something else to talk about right now?
The loeffler analogy is this: even if it wasn't necessarily what he ideally wanted to run, you could see a coherent vision of what he was doing and why. Can we say that about JJ? What was the offense under JJ this year? What were they doing out there and why ? Like the original article said, what was our offensive identity under JJ?
We all know what he "wants" to do, we've heard all about it for two years, only to be immediately followed by all the reasons he couldn't do what he wants. The $680k question is: does he have the ability to actually make what he "wants" happen on the court?
No more than one game below .500 is where I am mentally, however it breaks out between OOC and ACC
Thanks
I believe the current coaches account for about $800K, mainly the assistant head coach. So you are looking at an increase of at least that much but probably more.
I would add 1 more year to his contract if he gets us to around .500 next season.
If he doesn't show significant improvement you and I won't be having this conversation. We will be hashing over my list of candidates to see what has changed with it in a year and where we rack and stack them as options for VT.
As a whole I think it is possible that JJ can find six more wins total between OOC and ACC play. It may only be a four or five win improvement in conference or it might be the full seven. So many factors impact it. Schedule, other teams rosters, home vs away, etc. I do however think we will see much more of what JJ wants to run. Injuries aren't something I can predict. Imagine if Logan Thomas missed three quarters of the ACC games this year? What would our record have been like?
I'm so not looking forward to having this conversation again next year. There's going to be a bunch of fans lining up to give a laundry list of excuses...err reasons why we failed again and why it's OK and if we only give him one more year we might make the CBI and then from there the sky's the limit!
We literally had this same conversation for almost a decade about Bryan Stinespring at OC. People will find any reason they can to keep coaches who aren't performing.
I was talking about the improvement from JJs first year to second. Not comparing JJ to greenburg. I surrender, greenburg had his team playing more fundamentally than JJ after 9 years.
As for football(basketball), Loefler(JJ) was using the players at hand to implement the strategy he saw best to win. Loefler(JJ) probably didnt anticipate using 3rd and Logan(zone defense or having to use walk-ons) so often. But he saw the players on the team and drafted a plan accordingly, even if it differed from his Tom Brady or Chad Henne plan. Although it doesnt work if logan doesnt pass crisply to the open receiver (Eddie misses an open three from the corner or JVZ misses a dunk) missing dunks? are you kidding me, JVZ.
We have heard what JJ wants to run, even if we havent seen it. He needs the players before he can run like VCU and play suffocating man-to-man defense for 60 min.
I believe we are forced to concede one thing on our desires for JJ: agree to disagree
Where's your line? Do you see where I'm going with this? Does he get an extension for one game below .500? Two? Three? 12 wins next year is still an improvement, right? Then people will be on here talking about how we were just one or two close losses away from being .500, and injuries this and in it till the end that...
It's like I said in the other thread, at what point does the guy actually have to start winning here?
At 6'1", 160 lbs, this kid needs gentrification/west end immediately
I would extend him a year so his deal still has three years on it especially if he brings in a top 40 recruiting class because it will point to stability and improvement.
I'm no expert on basketball, so I'm largely staying quiet on this issue, but in my mind, if JJ can get us back in the neighborhood of 15 wins, that's a +6 differential, which is 67% more wins than we had this year. Doing that with mostly the same cast, plus any new recruits that he is bringing in, shows me that he's developing the existing talent and identifying new guys that fit in. Fundamentally, that's what I want to see in a coach. At that point, I expect continued improvement, but going from cellar dweller in the ACC to middle of the pack in one year is good progress.
Can we consolidate all the JJ threads, please?