A-10 Tournament
- Thread starter PASpider
- Start date
Well, if nothing else, perhaps yesterday finally extinguishes the whole Top 4 finish in the A-10 as some type of success metric for our program. Maybe back when the A-10 was a 3-5 bid league it was, but it is absolutely meaningless now.
Now, if you finish 5 or 6th, you get what should be an easy warm up game against a bottom tier A-10 team and advantage of coming to the next game with not just a feel for the arena but the positive momentum of having just won. And now the A-10 has built a rest day after the quarters in anyway, so it's not 4 games in 4 days.
Not that we should try to finish Top 4, but the Mooney company line of we want to be in the Top 4 team, as that gives us some type of definitive advantage and therefore a metric for our program's success. Utter hogwash.
Now, if you finish 5 or 6th, you get what should be an easy warm up game against a bottom tier A-10 team and advantage of coming to the next game with not just a feel for the arena but the positive momentum of having just won. And now the A-10 has built a rest day after the quarters in anyway, so it's not 4 games in 4 days.
Not that we should try to finish Top 4, but the Mooney company line of we want to be in the Top 4 team, as that gives us some type of definitive advantage and therefore a metric for our program's success. Utter hogwash.
Most of the actual good teams in college basketball do some level of not playing by the rules. It’s not a big deal to break the rules a little bit because you’re not killing or harming anyone. You think louisville for example looks back on even when they had their title vacated and thinks “oh well I guess we didn’t win a title that year”. No they still did because they saw it happen on the court. Can promise you their fans don’t care at all. Maybe we should be less soft as a fanbase and be willing to push the envelope as a program a little bit.
VCU improved its A-10 tournament record to 18-7 in 11 appearances. That .720 winning percentage is the best of any current A-10 program. Not that it makes me feel good, but have to give credit where it is due.
21-20 if you count last year, but he was on sick leave - think we were 1 and 1? and if that is the case he would be 20-19 not counting last year....................See SF post above ................
SF is more accurate - I was listing all UR tournament appearances as Mooney being the coach...............first year for him in tournament would be 2006..................
8legs1dream
Team Manager
Well, he is Mr. 55% so this is on par (actually slightly below par, 51.6%). But literally par for the course of our program.
Well shit, we ARE a bunch of grumpy old men. What's your point? You young guys can just wait it out until Mooney moves on or retires. Us grumpy old men don't have that luxury.
Are you sure we didn't forget to tell payroll and he's still collecting checks like Milton in Office Space?
Yes, I think we are stuck. I remember someone finding an old post of mine from years back saying how I could wait out Mooney. Since then came to the realization that is the hoops world we are living in. Like I said in one post, I feel like Mooney does some good things, but just needs more help with game management, and anticipating game plan and adjusting.
Love my alter-ego Rick. Hate most all other VCU trolls. And I can't disagree with what he said (this time)
Whenever FMRick says he's not here to gloat, or he's not here to do something else....that means he's exactly here to do what he says he's not here for! Every time.
He's a douche but in this case I can't really debate what he said. Coaching is hard but Mooney absolutely made tactical and game manamegement errors yesterday.
I didn't agree with the net cutting myself but I realize there is wide difference of opinion there. U can celebrate in many ways.
I said that earlier myself about today. What a great day today, a Friday, would have been. Sit back and chill no pressure of gameday, watch other leagues, and know the best comp you had is all out of the tourney and u r two games from another NCAA bid. That could have been us. Except....it's VCU again who gets to enjoy it. Welp. I feel badly for all the UR fans who traveled to Brooklyn. It would have been even better for those there. I'm not a fan of the built-in day off but they would have been living it up just like FMDick.
I get 16-16
1 year no tourney
8 years 0-1 including first three and yesterday
7 years 1-1 including last year
2010 2-1
2011 3-0
2022 4-0
19 years, 3 of 18 with multiple wins
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I doubt it too, but that's bc I think it was all PR based anyway. smokescreen & then the hope to get PR out of it. but why can we make the assumption he's not? some posters claimed he was on a multi year deal. SF please confirm u always have great ways of getting info. If we fired him, after making such a big deal out of hiring him, what was the reason? Fans r interested in scheuduling strategy.
I think the reason is a guy named GKiller ridiculed it on a message board.
There can only be 15 losses...19 seasons minus two where we won it all, one where there was no tournament, and last year when he was out.
Ah I am counting 1-1 last year.
But wouldn’t that make it 15-15?
I was trying to add up UR March 2006 to now on KenPom.
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8legs1dream
Team Manager
even stevens.
but 55% is within our sights!
but 55% is within our sights!
Only dropping by for a second.
- I hate the net cutting for regular season. VCU did it years back and suffered an awful CAA upset that cost us an at large. Never did it again.
- I honestly felt St Joes was a dangerous team with their guards and I felt King had to be really on and make few of his trademark wild shots to win. Reynolds is just ridiculous sometimes.
- I thought Mooney should have just kept going through Quinn. He was the conductor.
- No doubt yall should get a NIT bid and are capable of making a run.
Over the years to come the young guys might become grumpy old men, and Moon will still be coaching.
The numbers have been beaten to death for years on this board but Mooney is incredibly consistent. I gave up a long time ago trying to argue with and convince folks that we can do better than "a little better than average" because Mooney does produce seasons like this year where there is some tangible success...it's just that the successes are always buttressed with down periods/stretches like the OOC this season or the last two games of the year. Nobody who follows this program can say that they were surprised by the result yesterday and I know anything can happen in college basketball but all spider fans know that Mooney's teams usually find that 55% mean (and I understand that percentage goes up against conference foes and teams but it's frankly pretty bad against power 5 OOC competition and of course our rival). It doesn't mean that he hasn't had some very good accomplishments and certainly deserves credit for those but they are stretched out over time and I think his 20 year tenure shows that those are more outliers than norms. I'm apathetic at this point, as I sense some (maybe more?) fans/alums are or at least resigned may be a better description.
Yep, have heard this discussed on a gambling podcast recently, basically how one team (not us) cut down the nets and celebrated like a national championship then crapped the bed the next game. Mooney was so caught up in it. I actually was OK with a small quick celebration but human nature is human nature. And it showed with us big time. This is actually one of the most disappointing end of the seasons I can remember in a long time.
Also mature experience means we are often correct. History teaches
Ive said this all year… when CM subs he is the only coach in the country who takes out nearly his whole team at once. He has done it all year. His bench management is so bad he must just try to give everyone a rest at the same time. Horrendous!!
Re disappointing end to the season. The Charlotte fiasco sticks in my mind as well as the abrupt end to the COVID season. Depending on what we do in the NIT, this one might rank right up there.
Also, regarding the sight lines in the arena. I feel like we hear this about a lot of schools every year, whether it's an in season tournament at Barclays or Atlantis, the conference tournament at wherever, or the NCAA venues. If this is a known problem not only for us but for other teams as well, why can't we try to get one or two regular season games, scrimmages, or even practices in such places???? Surely we have "some" connections somewhere.
Any chance CM has to celebrate some achievement, even one that wasnt even clinched, he has to jump at it. They are so few and far between.
The good news is that this was the last year the tournament will be in Brooklyn, hopefully ever. No one wants to go there for it, we've largely sucked there forever, so good riddance. Next year is DC, hopefully we'll go back to Pittsburgh for a year or two and then within a few years it will be in Henrico at the GreenCity arena.
I might rank it 3rd worst A10 loss behind the crushing losses to vcu in Brooklyn and Pittsburgh. I can see the argument for higher on the disappointing scale given us being the 1 seed tho. The Charlotte loss was way behind imo bc that wasn’t an ncaa caliber team.
Here's my synopsis of things: the top nine teams in this league were very close in talent this year. We earned the top seed in part because we won a bunch of close games that could have gone either way. But those close games weren't always going to go our way.
When you have eight teams like we did yesterday who were so closely matched, little advantages help. The teams that had already played a game had those advantages this year.
And also, the four teams left were picked second, third, fourth and fifth in the preseason poll. They're all good teams. The ball didn't roll our way yesterday and it sucks, but given the parity in the league, it's not surprising and I can't view it as some awful bed-wetting by us.
When you have eight teams like we did yesterday who were so closely matched, little advantages help. The teams that had already played a game had those advantages this year.
And also, the four teams left were picked second, third, fourth and fifth in the preseason poll. They're all good teams. The ball didn't roll our way yesterday and it sucks, but given the parity in the league, it's not surprising and I can't view it as some awful bed-wetting by us.
If asked I would have told Mooney as soon as the nets were down and in the locker room, he should have said congratulations on the win hope you enjoyed the celebration, practice is 6:30 am tomorrow, don't be late, Practice would be to remind them they are not so special, they have to work hard to win.
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