re: Fox returning as MBB coach next year

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Are you saying a blue blood didn't steal uga's coach after the 1983 final four? Crazy. Must not have been any perfect storms that year.

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There was a lot of momentum around the program at that point and around the entire AD and University. It was a different time as far as the arms race went. I think coach Durham thought he could build something and he almost did. Unfortunately, things stagnated and his career died.

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Again, you confuse your ability to type a lot of words with actually understanding the conversation.

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If your argument is that hiring a hot up and coming coach will just result in said coach leaving at the first opportunity, a natural conclusion would be that you are in support of keeping Fox at this time... regardless of the rationale behind it. You can't make the claim that hiring a new coach doesn't improve the team and then remain "neutral" on keeping Fox. You either believe he needs to be replaced, or you don't think that replacing him will improve things so he should stay until the situation changes. If I've misunderstood you or there is an alternative that I haven't provided, happy to discuss...

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This tangent has nothing to do with Keeping Fox. It has to do with whether UGA has enough substance as a program to keep a hot up and comer. Our history says no, but sadly, we have only hired one hot up and comer... or at least one good enough to get s better job. To me, that says a lot as well. Our bigger issue may be having the ability to get one of them to come.

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So historically, we have paid one of the lowest salaries in MBB in the SEC, and not exactly competitive with the rest of the country. We now are paying in line with some pretty good coaches. Below is a link to the salary breakdown from coaches whose teams made the 2016 tournament, and an excerpt (formatting sucks...) showing that we stack up among the 15th to 30th highest paid coaches that made the tournament.

LINK /

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Rk | School | Conference | Head Coach | School Pay | Other Pay | Total Pay | Max Bonus
15 Baylor Big 12 Scott Drew $2,502,491 $263 $2,502,754 --
16 Villanova Big East Jay Wright $2,477,245 -- $2,477,245 --
17 Purdue Big Ten Matt Painter $2,428,795 $0 $2,428,795 $901,874
18 Maryland Big Ten Mark Turgeon $2,360,121 $5,000 $2,365,121 $525,000
19 Cincinnati AAC Mick Cronin $2,201,305 -- $2,201,305 $640,000
20 Syracuse ACC Jim Boeheim $2,144,384 -- $2,144,384 --
21 Vanderbilt SEC Kevin Stallings $2,138,645 -- $2,138,645 --
22 Virginia ACC Tony Bennett $2,100,000 $1,500 $2,101,500 $1,450,000
23 Iowa Big Ten Fran McCaffery $2,000,000 $2,156 $2,002,156 $805,000
24 Oregon Pac-12 Dana Altman $2,000,000 $1,000 $2,001,000 $820,000
25 North Carolina ACC Roy Williams $1,998,169 -- $1,998,169 $1,000,000
26 Texas Tech Big 12 Tubby Smith $1,800,000 $11,300 $1,811,300 $400,000
27 Notre Dame ACC Mike Brey $992,264 $720,000 $1,712,264 --
28 Providence Big East Ed Cooley $1,656,099 -- $1,656,099 --
29 Miami (Fla.) ACC Jim Larranaga $1,544,178 -- $1,544,178 --
30 California Pac-12 Cuonzo Martin $1,540,000 $0 $1,540,000 $300,000

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So yeah, while it has taken us a while to get there, Fox has quite literally raised the bar at UGA in terms of budget to keep a coach, even while not necessarily killing it with on court results. You mentioned that he has us winning, but he doesn't have us getting *meaningful* wins. I definitely appreciate that he has improved the team since he's been here, but he seems to have plateaued. It's not like this is one year where the team failed to get any major wins, it's year in year out "play the good teams close"... So we're "competitive" but not "tournament competitive"... That isn't going to get your program to a level of excitement that will warrant the changes that you (and I, and probably most of the passionate fans discussing this) would like to see the University take. Specifically, what steps does the University need to take in your opinion?

Don't just tell me that we need to replace Stegeman unless you truly believe that Fox's results warrant a new arena... We actually do probably need a new MBB arena *but* beyond the logistical issues of "where" and all that jazz, the program simply doesn't have enough buzz to attract the kind of donations that CheapAss McGarity will require to even entertain the thought... You could try an "if you build it they will come" approach, but that's risky as hell. They've made significant improvements to Stegeman. As I showed earlier, Harrick was able to win *and* generate fan engagement to the tune of 93-94% average capacity for home games in his final year... it even carried over into the first year of Felton amidst all of the scandal in Harrick's wake. The only way I see us getting "committed" to basketball is to re-invigorate the program. Fox is a known quantity, so getting people riled up and excited for the future under him is going to be next to impossible.

To add to your argument...the officiating of some of these games has made many of the early games almost unwatchable but during Harricks time I never really remember them being this bad.

Of course I say that and then I get curious..

Just comparing 2002-2003 (Harrick's last season) to 2016-2017 (not complete yet, but good enough to compare) here's what I see:
2002-2003 (27 games)
UGA took 584 Free Throws and made 417 (.714)
Meanwhile, we committed 465 fouls

2016-2017 (32 games so far)
UGA took 739 Free Throws and made 560 (.758)
Meanwhile, we committed 597 fouls

If I put that on a per game adjusted basis:
2002-2003
21.6 FTa/g
15.4 FTm/g
17.2 Fouls/g

2016-2017
23.1 FTa/g
17.5 FTm/g
18.7 Fouls/g

Kind of not exactly what I'd expected... which I'm ok with. What it "seems" to tell me is that on both ends of the court, the game was just allowed to be "played" a bit more perhaps in 2002-2003 than now... Perhaps just over officiated these days? That would lend credence to the *feeling* that calls have been more egregious as fans often tend to see the poorly made calls against their team more frequently than they assess poorly made calls that went in their favor. If there were simply fewer whistles in general, it would alleviate that sense of unbalance to some degree.

Obviously super small sample size and I definitely don't have the time or energy to crunch some big data here... I suspect someone has likely done it across more than just one team somewhere though if I looked hard enough.