With all the history here, I was kind of curious to measure the sentiment on basketball over time. So, I’ve taken all Basketball Forum Posts (leaving out recruiting and smack talk) and scored them with a sentiment model.
Given, the model used isn’t tuned in any way for basketball lingo, it’s just an older model trained off of Twitter… Below is the trend over time. The score there is the composite average of the positive, negative, and neutral scores for each post. Obviously the down is negative and up is positive here. The range is 1 to -1 overall. What’s more important here is the trend though. Where we used to be and where we are now…
Basketball is just painful these days. Complaining about it is just about the only thing I can do. I don’t have anything positive to say or feel. I feel like I’ve pretty much hit the don’t care level. I’ve been giving the program the benefit of the doubt for so many years. They have to earn it back. I’m buying a single cheapest ticket I can. I’m becoming someone I said I would never be with basketball.
Honestly though it isn’t entirely on the program it is just the current state of college athletics. So part of what Mac is probably picking up is dissatisfaction with not just Niners but the environment we now are in.
Well, it isn’t the entire program that breeds negativity here, it is the entire basketball program that does. It’s the state of our failed basketball program that is the problem. Others suggesting the negativity here is the fault of a few upset fans are in denial about what is reflected in Mac’s chart here. The downward trend is akin to the fall of the angel cast out from heaven to hell. We are literally in basketball hell! Not to be critical
I think MBB resides with the late 90s, early 00s. For those of us who were students at that time or remember those years, we saw the potential of our program and school. Only to see Judy Rose bury it and then piss on it when she “retired.” We could be talking about Lutz in the same breath as coaches who represent a program, much like Mark Few, or Coach K, Ole Roy, or McKillop, if he would have stayed. But that got screwed due to ego and pride. I can see lutz court as I type this. Sigh.
Now we’re 15 years deep in bumbling, mediocre at best, boring basketball. I want us to win more than anything and hope for guys to succeed, whether I like their style or not. But knowing where we were at and what could have been with MBB is why it’s so hard to enjoy even a 20 win season. With the portal and losing our best players now, it’s even harder to get excited about next season and what could be.
I would love to see the evergreen plan happen over the next decade and know we have top notch facilities we can all be proud of. I just want to enjoy a good game at a nice facility with my charlotte gear on and call it a day. Anything beyond is icing on the cake. But to live and die with wins and losses is unrealistic at this point.
A bit of revisionist history in this post. Lutz tried desperately to get the Tennessee job and then wasn’t the same here after he didn’t get it. He was way too heavy in JUCO players that were at best 2 year players and our high school recruiting dropped measurably.
Don’t get me wrong I love Bobby and appreciate every great thing he did for our program but he wasn’t the same coach after TN job and our move to A10.
Oh please…yes, Bobby talked to Tennessee but this crap about him not being the same afterwards is just that…crap. Did his production go down after going to the A10,? yes but that had more to do with losing the Cincy, Louisville, Memphis, etc. Conference mates. I think the “revisionist” history part comes more from the people that downplay how much that change hurt our recruiting.
And the other part of the revisionist history no one likes to mention is that JUDY HATED HIM AND WANTED HIM TO LEAVE.
She was making his life miserable and wanted him to go…that’s why he wanted/tried to leave. She got what she wanted in the end. She was enough of a disruption and made things so difficult for him that he couldn’t succede at the same level…which gave her just enough of an excuse to fire him.
To say she was not a supportive AD for Bobby would be a massive understatement.
His success was in spite of her and her contempt for him won out in the end.
Lutz would talk about the three C’s of his recruiting success. City, Campus, and Conference. When Conference was ripped away it hurt. All coaches listen and inquire about other jobs all the time. I agree that’s revisionist history to think that had anything to do with his coaching.
So not doing well in recruiting because of conference, hmmmm. Isn’t that what you have been busting Ron for?
Hypocrisy is a funny thing cause it can bite ya.
I love Bobby. Whatever excuse you want to use, his last few years were below the bar he had set.
We have not been the same since.
You know this is just reverting back to Fire Ron Sanchez. This is because Ron Sanchez is the root cause of the basketball negativity here. Since basketball negativity makes up the vast majority of negativity here, Ron Sanchez is the root cause of the majority of negativity here.
Crazy thing is Ron had the top recruiting class in CUSA his second & third year. He was a great recruiter. The problem is he never did anything with that talent & now most of them are gone. When it becomes apparent to everyone except the athletic director & a few fans who are just happy to have a team that Ron is not a great head coach it becomes very hard to recruit. Our conference has had nothing to do with it. We’re now moving to a better conference with much better exposure & he can’t seem to fill open scholarships. His failure to capitalize on the talent he has had & the style of play are what is killing his ability to recruit.
What really struck me in the chart is that you can see the negativity towards Lutz over the Last few years and we recovered and honestly stayed fairly even till Price tanked it. We recovered some positivity with the hiring of Sanchez and then it was a steady decline.
What is it? I personally think the style of basketball we are playing demands winning and for those wins to be meaningful. If that isn’t there and we are middle of the road, the style isn’t entertaining enough. It’s only tolerable if we are seeing tangible results.
I still think NIL and portal are contributing to negative feelings in general. Hard to be positive when the system is set up to stop us and then throw a coach like Ron in on top of that and this is what ya get.
