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72Spider

72Spider

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May 6, 2003
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If this was the final year of Mooney's contract, what would the administration do? Extend for 5 ys., 3 yrs, 1 yr, or another 10 yrs? Or let him go (go in another direction)? This is not a Fire Mooney thread. Just curious what we thought the administration would do. Because of the remaining years on his contract this is moot.
 
72Spider said:
If this was the final year of Mooney's contract, what would the administration do? Extend for 5 ys., 3 yrs, 1 yr, or another 10 yrs? Or let him go (go in another direction)? This is not a Fire Mooney thread. Just curious what we thought the administration would do. Because of the remaining years on his contract this is moot.
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Probably extend his contract for 3 years in order to see how the latest class of recruits pans out. OSC
 
Coaches rarely ever reach the last year of their contract. You have to make sure the coach perpetually has 2, 3, or even 4 years on his contract otherwise it makes recruiting much more difficult. Even if a coach is in the hot seat you still need to make sure his contract has 2 more years on it, but the contract needs to make it easy for the university to part ways with the coach. After last season Mooney would have probably been given another extension until 2018 or 2019. The difference is it is easier to fire a guy who has 2 years on his contract than someone who has 5.
 
it would never have gotten to this being his last year. doubtful we land Buckingham, Sherod and Golden without having the coach signed up.
 
No way do you extend a coach for making the NIT. Good god, have some standards. Frankly, I think if he had 2 years left on the contract, most places he gets canned. If we're a BCS program where money isn't an issue, Mooney is getting canned next week even with 5 years left on his contract.

If you are talking about "our administration" though, I think they feel little external pressure to fire Mooney and all things relative, it is a lot more work to hire a new coach, than to stay with old one. If Gill hires a new coach and they flop, than he harms his upward mobility of taking a more profile AD job in the future.
 
Having Mooney as our coach is kind of like being in a mediocre marriage. He's not bad enough that you file for divorce, but you know that if you ever did, you'd have a lot of better options and probably be a lot happier in the end.
 
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If Keith Gill wants to be the athletic director at a Duke or an Oklahoma one day, making the tough choice and bringing in a coach who is more successful would be worth brownie points. We are at about .500 this year, and could be lower next year with three seniors graduating. Then it would be harder for Mooney to find another job; and a new coach would have to come in with ShawnDre and TJ graduating. I think that the boosters and Gill will have the final say - could go either way.
 
you can have a contract as long as you'd like as long as there are performance standards, behavior standards, etc. that if not met he's gone at the discretion of the University. Nobody would have to know the details but the coach could still claim a 4, 5 etc year contract.
 
Eight Legger said:
Having Mooney as our coach is kind of like being in a mediocre marriage. He's not bad enough that you file for divorce, but you know that if you ever did, you'd have a lot of better options and probably be a lot happier in the end.
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Worse, unless you pay your wife a million a year.
 
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I think CM has put himself in the position of 2 more years before he could be fired, Change for me from thinking before the start of the season that only would be let go at end of contract.

I think his best recruiting class gives him time to say, now I have some studs to work with. Them being local products puts more pressure on him to succeed though. Robins Center was packed this year, but how many more people will want to see Buck and Nick play and only minutes by car from doing so. This is great for UR.

Those local people will leave at the end of the game happy or not satisfied. Buck and Nick seem to be players who dearly want to win and won't be all abroad with what CM tells them if losing happens more times than expected.

So hopefully the 2016-17 UR team that has a thin roster look to it does better than predicted to do so. The Spiders progress further in 2017-18 with some new recruits and the picture looks brighter for a NCAA bid the next year.

Now say the team falters and does less than anticipated the first 2 Buck/Nick years. I think then these guys aren't happy and other local Richmond HS stars see it and the continuing success getting these guys to sign at UR disappears. For me that would be the time that CM must be asked to leave showing the leaders being Buck/Nick that they realize success will only come through a coaching change.
 
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fan2011 said:
Coaches rarely ever reach the last year of their contract. You have to make sure the coach perpetually has 2, 3, or even 4 years on his contract otherwise it makes recruiting much more difficult. Even if a coach is in the hot seat you still need to make sure his contract has 2 more years on it, but the contract needs to make it easy for the university to part ways with the coach. After last season Mooney would have probably been given another extension until 2018 or 2019. The difference is it is easier to fire a guy who has 2 years on his contract than someone who has 5.
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One can certainly argue that the 10 year contract he received after the Sweet 16 year really didn't have any measurable impact on recruiting during the first 5 years!
 
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I think Coach comes back very strong next year. He looked very tired this year. But I do think he is good coach. He did not want to change the wheel while the car was still moving this year . Maybe was a good idea too
 
coachfezz said:
I think Coach comes back very strong next year. He looked very tired this year. But I do think he is good coach. He did not want to change the wheel while the car was still moving this year . Maybe was a good idea too
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Fezz, agree. He and his staff will adjust and usher in new approaches and sustained success beginning next season. OSC
 
coachfezz said:
I think Coach comes back very strong next year. He looked very tired this year. But I do think he is good coach. He did not want to change the wheel while the car was still moving this year . Maybe was a good idea too
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So we went off the cliff.
 
The opposite of my typical example.

You are headed into a brick wall with no brakes.
Everyone says "We need a change, any change."
So you swerve off a cliff...
Not all changes are equal.
 
The dilemma at this point is not good either way you slice it.

Option 1: Keep playing the only defense Mooney knows and hope that this was just an anomaly. This could work, or it could be that the changes to the rules and the shot clock, combined with people figuring it out after 11 years, means that it will be bad again next year.

Option 2: Change to a new defense. This also could work, but there are a lot of unknowns. The coaching staff won't really know whether it's going to work until the games start next year. And as we saw this year, Mooney seems not to want to make many changes during the season. So if they spend all spring and summer creating a new defense and then it doesn't work either, where do we go from there?
 
Eight Legger said:
The dilemma at this point is not good either way you slice it.

Option 1: Keep playing the only defense Mooney knows and hope that this was just an anomaly. This could work, or it could be that the changes to the rules and the shot clock, combined with people figuring it out after 11 years, means that it will be bad again next year.

Option 2: Change to a new defense. This also could work, but there are a lot of unknowns. The coaching staff won't really know whether it's going to work until the games start next year. And as we saw this year, Mooney seems not to want to make many changes during the season. So if they spend all spring and summer creating a new defense and then it doesn't work either, where do we go from there?
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Many of you guys mentioned and rightly so that defense is mostly about playing the guy in front of you. Denying him the ball or an easy shot. I see how this works in the UVA defense. Nothing tricky, just make the offensive player uncomfortable. Our players did very little of this. As mentioned before, "other teams were very comfortable with our defense".

I think it comes down to an individual effort spreading to a team effort. I didn't see that this year much and certainly not on a consistent basis.
 
Eight Legger said:
The dilemma at this point is not good either way you slice it.

Option 1: Keep playing the only defense Mooney knows and hope that this was just an anomaly. This could work, or it could be that the changes to the rules and the shot clock, combined with people figuring it out after 11 years, means that it will be bad again next year.

Option 2: Change to a new defense. This also could work, but there are a lot of unknowns. The coaching staff won't really know whether it's going to work until the games start next year. And as we saw this year, Mooney seems not to want to make many changes during the season. So if they spend all spring and summer creating a new defense and then it doesn't work either, where do we go from there?
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I wouldn't say either of those options is necessarily bad, both are just very big unknowns. There are a couple things that make me think Mooney's defense can still work with the proper personnel:

1) Our defense was very good last year. We successfully did all the things the matchup-zone traditionally excels at (low 3FG%, low 3 attempt rate, high forced turnover rate). I don't think it is likely that in the 10th year of the defense no one had figured it out yet, then all the sudden in the 11th year everyone had figured it out.

2) Every team we played against destroyed our defense, not just teams that have seen the defense for the past decade. Even teams and coaches we had never played before had really easy times scoring against us.

It is possible that the new rules are the reason our defense is much worse, and that even with the correct personnel it will be ineffective. I think this is more likely than other coaches 'figuring our defense out' explanation. I would suspect the rules rendering our defense ineffective would manifest through increasing the number of fouls we commit, though this is just a guess. However, we didn't commit more fouls than the average Mooney defense and were below the national average in fouling on defense. That doesn't completely disprove the theory though.

I think no matter which is correct, option 1 or option 2, Mooney needs to develop a new defense this offseason and teach it next year. Even if option 1 is correct and this year was just an anomaly I think this year has shown it is completely necessary for Mooney to have an alternate defense. We have seen how low the floor to the matchup-zone is, Mooney needs an alternative defense he can implement when we don't have the personnel for the matchup-zone.

I decided to do a quick regression analysis to see if the minutes played by each of our players correlated at all with defensive efficiency. This is a very, very rough picture and there is probably a lot more noise in the data than signal, but this is what came out:

There was an r^2 value of less than 0.01 for the following players, suggesting that their playing time had little impact on our team's defensive performance:

TJC, TA, Fore, Trey, Deion.

The following players' playing time seemed to correlate with us doing worse on defense:

SDJ (r^2=.09)
Wood (r^2=.17)

The only player who's playing time correlated with us doing better on defense was Julius (r^2 = .07)

The r^2 value is extremely tiny for all players, so it is hard to draw anything meaningful from the numbers.
 
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fan2011 said:
I wouldn't say either of those options is necessarily bad, both are just very big unknowns. There are a couple things that make me think Mooney's defense can still work with the proper personnel:

1) Our defense was very good last year. We successfully did all the things the matchup-zone traditionally excels at (low 3FG%, low 3 attempt rate, high forced turnover rate). I don't think it is likely that in the 10th year of the defense no one had figured it out yet, then all the sudden in the 11th year everyone had figured it out.

2) Every team we played against destroyed our defense, not just teams that have seen the defense for the past decade. Even teams and coaches we had never played before had really easy times scoring against us.

It is possible that the new rules are the reason our defense is much worse, and that even with the correct personnel it will be ineffective. I think this is more likely than other coaches 'figuring our defense out' explanation. I would suspect the rules rendering our defense ineffective would manifest through increasing the number of fouls we commit, though this is just a guess. However, we didn't commit more fouls than the average Mooney defense and were below the national average in fouling on defense. That doesn't completely disprove the theory though.

I think no matter which is correct, option 1 or option 2, Mooney needs to develop a new defense this offseason and teach it next year. Even if option 1 is correct and this year was just an anomaly I think this year has shown it is completely necessary for Mooney to have an alternate defense. We have seen how low the floor to the matchup-zone is, Mooney needs an alternative defense he can implement when we don't have the personnel for the matchup-zone.
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Pretty much agree with this. The scary part is that with the rules changes having just taken effect this year, we have no idea whether this one-year blip was completely unrelated or totally the reason for our awful defense. So that means it's going to take another year to figure that out, most likely. If we switch to a different defense and it sucks, then we'll wonder whether some tweaking of our standard defense would have been the way to go. If we stay with the current defense and it still sucks, we'll lament having wasted another year and not tried something different.

Worst of all, Mooney has never been in a position where he had to make a MAJOR shift to his basketball beliefs. It sounds like he is thinking very strongly about doing that, and we have no idea whether he is up to the task or not. He might be, but we have no evidence of it because he's never attempted it. That's kinda scary.
 
coachfezz said:
I think Coach comes back very strong next year. He looked very tired this year. But I do think he is good coach. He did not want to change the wheel while the car was still moving this year . Maybe was a good idea too
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You certainly should change the wheel if the tire goes flat!
 
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One thing is clear on the base D, it is very brittle. It seems to limit who we can play as a result. Perhaps It will be better next year but it shouldn't be a Herculean effort To practice more than one defensive strategy.
 
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Or CMs responses in the Woody article could just be those of a man saying the right things to protect his job.
 
Good D is often about desire and attitude. Assuming that has not been the problem we have to look at other issues. I believe our D causes guys to have to "think" to much and when you think you are generally beaten. I believe our D worked well during our two year run because the majority of the players had played together for years and knew each other well, also we had a great leader in KA. One final reason our D holds us back is that it is difficult to understand (play against), some would say that is good, well I disagree, most of our freshmen get little minutes because they cannot play our D. I believe that holds back their development.

Last but not least, those that say Chris cannot change forget how much our offense has changed since Chris came here. Do we play the Princeton anymore?
 
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urfan1 said:
Good D is often about desire and attitude.
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It is but it is also about athleticism too. Unless we recruit more players quick enough to stay in front of A10 caliber players, I really don't think it matters what defense we play.
 
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Mooney has definitely evolved. I just don't get why he is so slow to do so at times. "Methodical" is ok but glacial is an issue.
 
Neubauer had a great comment after the Fordham game about how good of a defender Khwan was and how they couldn't get dribble penetration on him.

A big part of our defensive issues this year was neither Trey nor Sdj could keep the other teams guards in front of them.
 
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I guess what I meant was that Mooney has never made a drastic change overnight. He evolves glacially, like Tbone said. His offense is different from what it was in 2005, but he's had 11 years to get from there to here. Scrapping the only defense he's ever known and instituting something entirely different next year (if that's what he does) would be a significant and sudden change, the likes of which we've never seen him undertake.
 
97spiderfan said:
Neubauer had a great comment after the Fordham game about how good of a defender Khwan was and how they couldn't get dribble penetration on him.

A big part of our defensive issues this year was neither Trey nor Sdj could keep the other teams guards in front of them.
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Right. We can hide 1 poor defender in our matchup zone. Can't hide 2 or 3. That's what worries me about next year. Shawndre is terrific with the ball in his hands but is not a good defender. Wood is not a good defender. TJ has improved on the defensive end but needs to improve more.

We really need Buckingham to be able to play on the defensive end next year.
 
Does anybody know what D's were played by the teams of the 3 incoming freshmen? That might be a good place to start
 
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