(01-24-2017 08:18 PM)tribeinexile Wrote:  The past week has seen an explosion of topics suggested on this board by our poor performance at Elon. I wanted to touch on one, which is our expectations in the CAA.

Let's look at our competitors:

Southern Basketball Schools: UNC-W and CofC are basketball-only schools in towns of some size - in fact they are also the largest universities in those towns. Both seem to have upped their commitment to basketball and have excellent environments for recruiting (larger cities and flexible academic requirements). Their basketball budgets are significantly higher than W&M's. These two schools are the best in basketball this year and should always be near the top.

Nothern Basketball Schools: NE, Hofstra and Drexel are basketball-only schools in large cities which are focused on professional sports. This is reflected in their attendance. NE and Hofstra have basketball budgets higher than W&M's, befitting their status as basketball-only schools. Drexel seems to be the only school as academically constrained as W&M and I don't know what their budget is. The urban locations are very appealing to many recruits. Their success is dependent on having a coach who can work in their environment (e.g., Coen).

Public All-Sport Schools. Towson, JMU and Delaware are the closest to being our peer schools in the CAA. For all these schools, football is the big banana and all are located in small towns which would not be described as urban. I believe that in the last three years our football team is one game over .500 against these schools and our basketball team is one game over .500 as well. (My math is pretty shaky on this one.) Delaware seems to have upped its game this year, hiring a football coach from UR and an up-and-coming assistant from Notre Dame. I guess budgets are fairly similar to ours but recruiting constraints (i.e., academics) are not.

Elon: It's an unknown to me. Not enough history and not enough info about their commitment to athletics to draw any conclusions. I have seen us play at their gym and it is TINY which is a huge advantage to them.

The only school we have an intrinsic advantage over at this point is Drexel (and that is due to internal constraints there). You can argue that we have a natural advantage over Elon. Four of the other seven schools (NE, Hofstra, UNC-W and CofC) have larger budgets that we do; I don't believe that differential exists in football. Those that don't (Delaware, JMU and Towson) play us 50-50 in football so 50-50 in basketball is not surprising.

This is a very long-winded way of saying that if, in any given year, we are above .500 in the CAA we are doing something well and not simply inheriting our position as the big dog in the conference.

(01-26-2017 05:59 PM)zablenoise Wrote:  Which is good because Elon's football stadium is gorgeous but the basketball arena looks like it used to be a sanctuary and then one day they decided to put a basketball court in it. I usually like smaller gyms but not Alumni.