More on AFA basketball schedule
September 30th, 2008, 9:17 am · 5 Comments · posted by david ramsey
I received several responses - via e-mail and message boards - about last week’s column on Air Force’s sorry nonconference basketball schedule. Many of the responses agreed with my view. And many didn’t.
Here is my response to your responses:
1. AFA doesn’t need to play the University of Denver because their styles are similar. Both teams play slowdown basketball.
Style isn’t what matters. Execution matters. Talent matters. The Falcons could play a quality opponent that resides 65 miles away. This is an obvious - virtually required - rivalry. I’m baffled by anyone who can’t see this.
2. AFA’s coaches and athletic staff ”tried” for a better schedule.
I’ve never watched a game when a team didn’t “try” to win. Never. Trying isn’t the point. The point is to accomplish what you attempt.
Sure, AFA coaches and athletic staff “tried” to construct a quality nonconference schedule.
And they failed.
3. Many other teams in America also have less-than-attractive schedules. This list includes DU and CU.
This point does nothing to excuse the Falcons. If every school in America wants to weaken the state of college basketball by fleeing from any and all challenges, that does nothing to elevate the Falcons.
The Falcons should seek to test themselves and offer fans quality basketball.
4. The Falcons will be young and inexperienced this season.
So give these youngsters a challenge. Let them battle and watch quality opponents.
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Sir, I’ll reply to your reply although in many ways just a repeat of earlier comments. Indeed everyone is entitled to their views…..but sometimes you have to look at the bigger picture and see if here is an ‘error’ in the way things are looked at, and that’s what I see here in your response.
To say that ‘even if the coaches tried, since they didn’t accomplish that, they failed’ thus implying it’s their fault and they are failures. A very bold statement since there ARE limitations to what anyone can do. True, the coaches should have said “ok…we’ll give you $40,000 than we originally offered” or “Sure…..we’ll play you at your house with no return game here reulting in 4 home games and 11 away games this out of conference schedule”. Just some examples of how the coaches might have avoided this schedule….BUT UNREALISTIC solutions to the problem. Every staff has only so many $$$’s to offer and (I do believe) that is the root of this problem, combined with the other areas we have discussed on home advantage, style, home winnning percentage, etc.
Bottom line in most of your replies comes down to who is coming to the house and how that will effecively help us. My response to those is still based on ‘if you offer the most/best that you can, and they still won’t schedule you, then you HAVE done your best. I do ask you to look at the CU schedule and see if it’s that much better than ours and, in fact, it isn’t. So our players won’t get the best experience that they could pre-MWC play. They will have to take what they have and make the best of it. Hopefully next year will be a different one for scheduling. If it can’t be done at home, then we need to look (again, I commented on this before) at a bigger pre-season tourney to give us some tougher opponnents WITHOUT sacrificing and playing all games on the road.
Reference playing Denver, yes DU will provide execution, I give you that 100%. I question whether at this time and date that Coach Scott would truely want to play us. Just a thought in the back of my mind. I’d rather see the execution of paying an uptempo mid major such as Long Beach St or Northern Arizona to better exemplify what we will see in MWC action.
Keep posting.
BEAT NAVY
Keep hammering on AFA’s schedule, but I doubt it will make much difference. The only thing that will expose the idiocy of Reynolds scheduling is a 25 win season resulting in an NIT bid.
Thanks for comments. I’ll probably see both of you at the Stonybrook game on New Year’s Eve. They’ll be the three of us and about six other fans at the game.
The pessisism displayed by both of your comments are interesting and somewhat expected. If we are so blessed, with our OOC schedule AND our MWC opponents, to have a 25 win season AND be on the bubble for the NCAA’s and get an NIT bid, I would be happy. Obviously hoping for more but happy non-the-less. And since (I’ll assume here) you may never have been to an AF game on New Years eve David, you’ll be surprised to know that I’d expect Clune to be at least 50% full or 3000 plus folks there. Time will tell. GO FALCONS from a true Falcon Fan!
What’s the difference between a Falcons fan and a true Falcons fan? You’re sounding like Sarah Palin.