re: When did A&M quit caring about basketball and Bama quit caring about baseball?

Basketball got pretty huge here with Billy Clyde and Mark Turgeon at the helm. Of course that coincided with sucking at football.

Now, football excitement is at a all time high and our BB team is just plain hard to watch. Im still in to basketball pretty heavily as it got me through my school years, but man, we are a very poor fundamental BB team.

We had like 24 turnovers against LSU last night.

Did anyone care about Baseball at LSU before they hired their really good coach that started everything?

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At least with college basketball and college football many of the players you watch will one day become giants of the sport in the professional league

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Ryan Theriot from LSU won a World Series title last year. Brian Wilson from LSU played a huge role for the Giants in their World Series title a couple of years ago. So, what you are saying is if Bama had better players you would like it more?

Maybe because football >>> basketball and (especially) baseball?

Tha frick is basketball?

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I love baseball. Alabama's just not very good right now.

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Finally!

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If you'd seen the LSU crowd at the SEC tourney last year in New Orleans, you'd know LSU isn't a basketball school anymore either. At least until they start winning.

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Which is why their trolling of Alabama fans only caring about football is so lame. My brother lives near New Orleans so we've driven over for the last 2 Bama/LSU games in the P-Mac and the arena MAY have been half full and that is being very generous with the estimate. I was embarrassed for them. It was comparable to the crowd at Alabama's opening exhibition games against a local D3 school that nobody shows up for. I can't imagine they get more than 3,000 for the early pre-conference games against scrub teams.


Alabama finished last season 5th in the SEC in attendance behind only Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Vandy. Those first 3 have much bigger arenas than Alabama and the last has an equal sized arena and had arguably the most hyped team in their school's history last year. Still, Alabama who supposedly "only cares about football" outdrew what many consider a major basketball program (Florida) by just over 2,000 per game.

LSU's announced #s are downright fraudalent imho. There is no way on earth they averaged throughout the year what they are listed at. They had far below the average listed for the Bama/LSU game last year. NO WAY they made up for that with the pre-conference scrub games and games against lesser SEC teams.

2012 basketball attendance

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THEY'RE WHITE, YOU'RE BLACK, THIS ISN'T frickING HOCKEY!!!

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That part of the trailer cracks me the hell up every time

A&M has definitely had periods where basketball was big, it just has had some setbacks that really hurt it. We had a great coach for decades in Shelby Metcalf that always kept us competitive and was a great personality. Folks packed our little arena at the time which was G Rollie White. We would occasionally win the SWC and had a few special teams but they always played with heart and fundamentals and were decent.

Then in the late 80's when John David Crow became our AD he pushed Shelby out and went out of his way to not care about basketball and focus all efforts on football. We hired an idiot who immediately got us on probation and was fired mid season. Then we had a string of bad coaching hires and horrific teams through the '90s and early '00s that showed our AD had no commitment at all to the sport (Wally Groff replaced JDC and he also didn't give a damn about it). So we had a ton of Aggies that saw basketball as a joke. Team after team with limited talent and horrible effort made it hard to support them.

Then Gillispie came in and completely turned it around. It was a tragedy for both sides when he left for Kentucky, he was a perfect fit at A&M where he had carte blanche and his teams played with fire and attitude that got people excited. The recruiting was really taking off as well. Then we replaced him with Turgeon who was a good X's and O's coach but not a cultural fit. He was a KU guy that expected basketball to be King and refused to do any outreach on campus to drum up support. His teams got to the Tourney but had quick exits, we would essentially beat the teams we were supposed to beat and lose to the teams we were supposed to lose to. The style of play was also like watching paint dry. Very defensive oriented and you could go 3 games without seeing a "highlight" play. He made supporting Aggie basketball feel like a chore you were expected to do and not something you got excited to do.

Now we have Kennedy. Who knows what he would have been had he not been diagnosed with Parkinsons but that sadly he has it. He has never gotten the team to buy in to his system and he seems to lose scholarship players so often it isn't even a story anymore. Then he blames their problems on not having enough players. It's just a depressing situation, though he Kentucky win was fun for 10 minutes.

So in the end the key is having the right coach in Aggieland. Get the right coach and they will be able to recruit talent there as we have good facilities and are in the middle of a good basketball recruiting area. Get an exciting team that puts forth effort and has decent fundamentals and people will support it. When you have games where you give up 19 steals though and can't seem to even get a shot off it is going to make it challenging to get people to support you.

Love me some college baseball. Only 2 real problems with the sport. First, they need to have more scholarships. An MLB team carries 25 players but college teams get less than half that number of scholarships. Stupid. Second, I wish they would serve beer at games. For baseball you just need beer. It's a slow paced game and sipping on some suds makes it much more entertaining. Don't see either of those things happening but one can dream.