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Has the men's basketball program now, finally, hit ROCK BOTTOM?

Have we finally arrived?


  • Total voters
    85
  • Poll closed .
It is hard to really fathom just how bad that 2011 team was, we were spectacularly bad in one of the worst periods for the ACC in general.

However, when you look at it we were still just a year off a NCAA tournament win, and Wakes basketball brand and fanbase was still strong. This year we are returning just 4 players off a team the won just two ACC games, lost our top two players because they didn't want to be here anymore, and an assistant coach just killed a man on a recruiting trip. Add on top of that a dead basketball brand, and a fanbase that stopped giving fucks 5 years ago and this might be the lowest point in Wake basketball history.

In the Buzz years the logic was fire buzz hire a competent coach and things will turn around. Now we might have cemented ourselves in the basement permanently.

This is a good articulation of why we might be worse off now than we were 4 years ago.
 
we've played 12 conference tournaments since the last time we managed to get into the semifinals (and that was on a miracle run after a last-place regular season finish)

every other team in our conference, including one who left a few years ago, has either played in the semifinals or the Final 4 in that time

but...

tenor.gif
 
I like Kenpom. It is a nice tool when comparing teams. The biggest negative is that it does not factor in wins and losses. A clutch team that is well coached and is able to bear down defensively may pull out 75% of their one possession games. A team with an inexperienced coach that does not emphasize defense or know how to get a team to focus may well lose 75% of those same games.

One of those teams is an NCAA advancing team. One of those teams is a bottom feeder. Kenpom sees those two team as very similar.

Being last in luck s really a factor of poor coaching. I know you hate "the eye test" but if you watch as much basketball as you seem to, it has to be obvious that Manning is not up to the job.

Even the 19-15 year was incredible frustrating to watch. Teams went on incredible runs against us in the last 5 minutes of the game. No lead was secure.

Skip was a poor defensive coach but his teams won most of their games that they lead at the 5 minute mark.

I’ve come to agree with this take. That’s basically what I was saying in my third paragraph.

It’s still a more accurate measure than w/l record devoid of context, though.
 
Comparing Bzz and Manning are like assessing the differences in turds...one has more nuts and corn and the other is greasier and a bit loose.

Wake Forest fans typically are grading against successful coaches like Odom, Skip and even Gaudio. Wellman has so screwed the pooch by firing a coach who won 61 games in 3 years and will never recover from that casual observer perspective that it was a rash and misguided decision (well, and the fact that it was...let him crash in burn in year 4 first...at least no coaches killed anyone).

It's interesting, to put it politely, that a certain poster continues to lament the "lack of supportive evidence" when most really don't care about the standard he is applying. Being a bit better than Bzzdoofuck is not a good measuring stick. And you could argue that the last Bzz team could actually have beaten Danny's '17-18 team 6 out of 10 times because they could score it inside, didn't turn the ball over as recklessly, actually played a modicum of defense and managed to beat a few teams better than a mediocre Syracuse or FSU team like last year's underachievers.

If you don’t want to discuss different degrees of shit, then stop commenting on the different degrees of shit.
 
Your first sentence here is great. Sure 25% is higher than 0%, but 75% is way the fuck higher that 25%, so there's that.

It is not cognitive dissonance to look at Manning's body of work at Wake and be extremely disappointed. He's had one ok season, with one player that vastly out performed his recruiting rankings. You keep asking what if John Collins hadn't left, what would have happened then, but let's consider the opposite for just a minute, what if Collin's had never come? Take away the Collins season and Manning is awful. Sure he is better than Bz, no doubt, but the results are more or less the same and from the outside looking in 7 out of 8 years have been futile and now our assistant coach killed a guy. Getting ranked 90 at the end of the season is really no different than being ranked 200 in most fans minds. Most people tune out if you fall below 65 and with 3 or 4 season is a row at that level no one pays attention anymore. I expect it's a logistic decay curve where satisfaction with the program starts to exponentially decay somewhere around 35 (approx the bottom of the "other receiving votes" category in the AP poll), and by the time you get to 90 its more or less flat lined. So our best season in 8 years was probably just barely at the point of down turn of the the logistic satisfaction curve.

Anyway, your are still placing different weight on certain data than other posters are, that's fine. But the reason people dislike you and your posting style is not because we secretly know you are correct, it is because many people weight the data differently than you and you act like they are imbeciles for emphasizing different data points in the same data set. Truth is they are doing the exact same thing as you but with different pieces of data, get over it and stop being a myopic dick about data interpretation.

Except when they don’t.

When people say that Manning isn’t any better than [Redacted] because they have similar win loss records, they are putting 100% weight on win/loss record. Each win and each loss is worth the same. A road win against UNC is worth the same as a home win against UNC-G.

But if you were to go look at a game thread for the former (unfortunately you have to go to the Scout board for that) those same posters were probably singing a far different tune than they were on the latter.

Those same posters also agree that UNC (26-11) was a better team last year than Stephen F. Austin (28-7).

So giving 100% weight to w/l is a standard that y’all apply selectively to Wake basketball on the Macro level. That’s what I think is imbecilic.
 
Except when they don’t.

When people say that Manning isn’t any better than [Redacted] because they have similar win loss records, they are putting 100% weight on win/loss record. Each win and each loss is worth the same. A road win against UNC is worth the same as a home win against UNC-G.

But if you were to go look at a game thread for the former (unfortunately you have to go to the Scout board for that) those same posters were probably singing a far different tune than they were on the latter.

Those same posters also agree that UNC (26-11) was a better team last year than Stephen F. Austin (28-7).

So giving 100% weight to w/l is a standard that y’all apply selectively to Wake basketball on the Macro level. That’s what I think is imbecilic.

of course you will find extremes on the message board

but mainly, people say that Manning's results haven't been better than []'s results, because most people define "results" as actual W-L and not as KenPom rankings
 
of course you will find extremes on the message board

but mainly, people say that Manning's results haven't been better than []'s results, because most people define "results" as actual W-L and not as KenPom rankings

weird, amirite?
 
This supports the logistic decay model for fan satisfaction...most of us look back on the Bz years as 4 equally pathetic years when is pretty clear that each year he got better. Where exactly the decay points and inflection points are is uncertain, but the difference between 99 and 189 is almost nothing in terms of fan pride and satisfaction with the team.

Seriously?

IIRC, even the most ardent bzzouters (myself included), recognized at the time that [Redacted] had vastly improved from his dismal opening season. We just accurately thought that each of those seasons were a fireable offense on their own accord and that [Redacted] shouldn’t receive any grace for starting to climb out of the shithole he himself created. We also saw 4 recruiting classes and concluded that if 2012 was the best he can do on that front then 13-14 is the best we can ever expect from him.
 
Rock bottom for the program was when Jeff was fired. He was finally starting to make progress and the admins pulled the rug out from under him.
 
If you look back objectively on that season with Collins doin' this thang, you can't honestly say we really beat anyone that season outside of L'ville. 7 of our 10 conference wins came against the basement dwellers, and they were bad. The Miami game was nice but the other was vs Va Tech, and we couldn't beat them two in a row in an exceedingly frustrating tourney game where our inept defense was really evident. No point in assigning too much weight to that season as it wasn't really THAT great...it was pretty good and that team was fun to watch offensively.

If only there were a way to objectively rank our team based on who we did and didn’t beat.

And I’d be fine if y’all would just assign it 25% (I would personally give it somewhere between 30-50% to account for recency and to factor in the handicap Manning started with)
 
Sorta like a finite mixture model of infection, plot it out and you will have two distinct plots one of uninfected the other infected, in this case two curves each corresponding to fan satisfaction. Skip and Dino would be one hump with satisfaction the other would have Danny and Buzz which is the shit hump, so it doesn’t matter if we improved some we still remain in the shit hump, the infected hump.

Were y’all more satisfied with the program on August 1, 2007 than you were on March 1, 2017? If so, why?
 
of course you will find extremes on the message board

but mainly, people say that Manning's results haven't been better than []'s results, because most people define "results" as actual W-L and not as KenPom rankings

So the people constantly pointing out that Manning and [Redacted] have similar w/l records have no other point? They are simply stating the fact for the record, not trying to support some argument about the relative quality of Manning and [Redacted]?
 
Were y’all more satisfied with the program on August 1, 2007 than you were on March 1, 2017? If so, why?

Being less than three years removed from being #1 in the country, as opposed to now being three coaches removed from being #1 in the country
 
It is hard to really fathom just how bad that 2011 team was, we were spectacularly bad in one of the worst periods for the ACC in general.

However, when you look at it we were still just a year off a NCAA tournament win, and Wakes basketball brand and fanbase was still strong. This year we are returning just 4 players off a team the won just two ACC games, lost our top two players because they didn't want to be here anymore, and an assistant coach just killed a man on a recruiting trip. Add on top of that a dead basketball brand, and a fanbase that stopped giving fucks 5 years ago and this might be the lowest point in Wake basketball history.

In the Buzz years the logic was fire buzz hire a competent coach and things will turn around. Now we might have cemented ourselves in the basement permanently.

This. The ACC was in a really low point that season and Wake was just getting abused like a high school girls team while featuring a lot of 4* ACC talent.

Had Wellman just the tiniest bit of vision and humility, he would have claimed BZ was a bad fit and let him go after the first or second year. Wake would have returned to norm as the basketball rep was still there. BZ would have enjoyed much greater happiness as he returned to his place as an NBA assistant and Wellman would have salvaged his reputation.

Obstinance killed the Wake basketball program and the reputation of Wellman. A cautionary tale to those whose ego goes out of control.
 
This is a good articulation of why we might be worse off now than we were 4 years ago.

I thought the current logic was that we need to fire Manning so we can hire a good coach to turn things around?

Honest question for y’all:

How do you see the next 5 years of Wake basketball playing out?
 
Being less than three years removed from being #1 in the country, as opposed to now being three coaches removed from being #1 in the country

So were you more satisfied with the program on January 1, 2011 (less than 2 years removed from # 1 in the country) than on January 1, 2008?
 
This. The ACC was in a really low point that season and Wake was just getting abused like a high school girls team while featuring a lot of 4* ACC talent.

Had Wellman just the tiniest bit of vision and humility, he would have claimed BZ was a bad fit and let him go after the first or second year. Wake would have returned to norm as the basketball rep was still there. BZ would have enjoyed much greater happiness as he returned to his place as an NBA assistant and Wellman would have salvaged his reputation.

Obstinance killed the Wake basketball program and the reputation of Wellman. A cautionary tale to those whose ego goes out of control.

Or never make Dino the perma head coach. I think he was reluctant to can Bz so quick b/c then it gives the look that he's canning coaches left and right, so how he handled Dino may have lead to unnecessary additional years of Bz and/or Danny
 
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