re: Dan Wolken: if Kirby doesn't win the East in 17, he's a clown

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Stegeman is not a suitable venue for a major college basketball team.

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So dumb.

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Stegeman is not a suitable venue for a major college basketball team.

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Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see something done more than the facelift that it saw, but I don't agree that it's an excuse for not making the tournament. Again, we're not holding ourselves to the standard of top 25 "major CBB team", we're trying to make the tournament consistently. You start doing that, and you give yourself more opportunities to win a round. 64(+4) > 32... Do that and you build your brand - both with recruits and with fans...

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... and those other SEC programs suck on the national scale. Why would they be the metric?

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The original point of this thread was using the conference as a measuring stick. Again, we're not performing at a top 25 level in basketball, we're trying to make the tournament. We just need to be a top 4 program in the SEC in order to consistently make the tournament most years. Other than UK and probably UF, I'm not sold that our atmosphere/fan support is significantly worse than the rest of the SEC. And that's *with* what most would consider a stale HC situation at this point.

As far as the examples I gave, I was simply showing that even for schools that quite literally can pull from anywhere, a good chunk of their roster is made up of guys that are in their region. If you move down the RPI ratings, it's similar in most cases. Basketball actually isn't a sport where teams are *heavily* imbalanced by national recruiting. Pointing out that UGA isn't as attractive a location as say Kansas or Duke isn't exactly earth shattering, but are you saying that excluding head coaching situations that we're significantly worse off than Alabama, South Carolina, or Mississippi State (all of which have better looking recruiting classes at the moment)?

Yes, South Carolina is playing a good brand of basketball now, but prior to this HC hire, they were not any more desirable a place, and they have had the building they're in now since 2002... In that 15 years, they've made the tournament once (2004), of course getting a little screwed last year (with a little help from 3 losses at the hands of the Dawgs) but are on track to likely make it this year. Simply having a good building does not change a program... On top of that, basketball rankings and ratings of recruits are in many ways a little less complete than football. Hell, it only took an average recruiting class ranking of 38 over the last 4 years (excluding this year) for Villanova to have a championship caliber team. And again, we're not even holding our team to championship caliber, you have to start somewhere... making the tournament with some degree of consistency would be a great start, as would maybe winning a round.

All I'm stating is that it's strange that we want to hold Kirby to the standard of "be the best team in the division", which in general will require a 6-2 conference record or better in most seasons, but we aren't holding Fox accountable for anywhere near that level of performance after 8 years here... The "he inherited a mess" excuse is over... at some point you have to face that he is incapable of fielding a team that can compete at a high enough level - even with 2 "all time UGA greats" on the roster or "the best returning player in the SEC" as someone else put it.