Mark Fox Contract Extension

No, he just signed.

Amazing really. The admin does not give a shite about basketball.

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No, he just signed. Amazing really. The admin does not give a shite about basketball.

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He's exceeding expectations based on resources and support. What problem do you have with us extending a coach that is probably taking us dancing this year?

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Pearl

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Hasn't won shite without cheating. Let's wait and see how well he recruits now that the term cheater is the first thing people think of when they hear the name Bruce Pearl. He is not the be all end all messiah of a coach that you've portrayed him to be multiple times on this site. That 2008 team should have been in the Final Four but they lost by 20 in the Sweet 16.

Give Fox and Pearl equal talent and Fox would beat him 7 times out of 10. Fox's problem is he hasn't gotten that talent. Whether that's his fault, the admin's fault, or the fact that UGA basketball has been really bad for most of its history, I'm not sure.

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Hasn't won shite without cheating

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Then I guess he should be winning a lot of games next year instead of 6 years from now with his first class at Auburn Financial Institution.

I used to be against Mark Fox, but I have since come around. I tend to agree that it is not Fox's fault that we do not bring in any of the top tier talent. I would put that blame on the facilities, lack of historical success in the program, and the terrible atmosphere at UGA games. I think that if we could have atmospheres like the one we had against UK the other night then more and more recruits will start choosing UGA. Unfortunately, I doubt people will make a difference in their basketball attendance until we are consistently good, which typically requires good recruits. So the next best thing is to have a coach who can do more with less, which is where Mark Fox comes in. There's my two cents.

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I also think people tend to forget or underestimate how big of a mess Fox inherited from Felton. Rebuilding from that was never going to be a quick and easy process.

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That whole era was bad, but its' not like fox didn't have talent left over from felton. Fox inherited Chris Barnes, Albert Jackson, Leslie, Price, Trey, and Dustin Ware in his first season.

Felton was actually a pretty darn good recruiter, just an atrocious coach. Harrick God bless him was an average recruiter but was an ELITE coach. Fox is just kind of in the middle..below average/average recruiter, average/pretty good coach.

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And as a result, that is where we are. Average and delighted to get beaten in the 1st round

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If you look at the history of UGA basketball, just making the tourney is pretty darn good. In 100+ years of basketball we've gone to the tourney 11 times. I don't know the overall numbers but at least one of those (08) was based on lucking into winning the tourney. Fox going twice in 7 years is well above what our standard would be.

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I just wish folks would want more out of Bball

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I do want more. There's no reason we can't be a thriving program. But with someone like Florida who has bball/football...it started with them getting an elite coach and him staying for a while. Same thing happened with them in football with spurrier. If Tubby stayed here for 15 years I'm quite sure that our program would be in a totally different place. To change things we're either going to have to:

-get a hot young up and coming coach to make us a desirable job for other good coaches
-get a good quality coach that will stick around for a decade

We saw a glimpse of what we could potentially be with Harrick. Dammit I love jim harrick. The only difference between him and pearl is our cheating was deemed more offensive and our administration fed him to the wolves.

That's another problem. If for some miracle john calipari stepped down and fox retired, and for whatever reason JC approached us with an interest...our administration wouldn't even give him an interview. We are soooooo concerned with what everyone thinks of us and doing things a certain way that we're stuck with who we go after. Taht's the only reason we got felton, because he was as straight laced as they come which was a 180 from harrick. Fox has done a good job of improving our program. There's no doubt that we are in much better shape now than we were with felton. The next step will be getting someone even better than fox.

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I am pretty convinced we never will be and that is the shame of it.

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Our entire history has been a 1 step forward, 5 steps back kinda thing. We were rolling pretty well under Durham but couldn't keep it rolling. Tubby was legit then bolted. People say (I can't speak on it, I have no knowledge of the situation) that we didn't choose to match/up the ante to keep him, who knows though. Hard to fault someone for leaving for UK to coach his kid though. Harrick had us rolling and I'll go to my grave thinking we were a legit final 4 team that last year, around 03ish.

Oh well. It's pretty obvious Fox isn't a next level coach, but he's about on par (maybe even a little better than par) for UGA basketball. I can only hope that our next coach continues to improve us the way fox has after felton.

I never said I want him gone, we're just kind of stuck. As mentioned he has brought us in the right diretion, and compared to UGA basketball history he's done better than the norm.

But he's never going to get us to a sweet 16 barring a hell of a run or a top 10 type national recruit, at least in my opinion. I'm pretty happy with him as a coach honestly, he just needs to recruit better.

and the trend needs to stay up to lead to improved recruiting. people are going to freak out when we make the NIT next year, but that's ok. just need to be a consistent post season team. it's gonna take time. we will probably bounce around between the nit and ncaa for a while before becoming a consistent tourney team.

hell, staying on the bubble all year gets you a lot of exposure. just keep ourselves in the conversation and we will keep getting better as a program. we have now had 2 years in a row where that is the case and next year should make 3. you have to like that.