RE: CofC 82 - #9 North Carolina 79 - Final
Early on in my career I was chastised once for speaking about an "indirect" victory by another sportswriter.
Let me show you how disingenuous this is. South Carolina beat Ole Miss in football this year. Ole Miss, in turn, beat Tennessee. Really badly- something like 42-17.
Ergo- South Carolina is a better team than Tennessee- right?
That explains why the Vols routed the Gamecocks when the two teams played on Halloween.
The ETSU program has fallen, as you stated. They are in the A-Sun now. This is all you need to know.
I'm not surprised there would have been a buzz on campus after ETSU beat Belmont and moreso than UTC. I remember when the football issue was open for discussion a student mentioned "Uh, hasn't the A-Sun been good to ETSU?"
For this guy, who evidently had not gone to school when ETSU was a SoCon member, the Bucs had always been an A-Sun team.
This is why I feel you can't rely too much on the students. An ETSU basketball game will have, at most, what, 500 students show up? That's 1/7 of the total attendance.
So 6/7 of the crowd are legitimate fans who are there to stay. A student base is always changing and will only be there for four years.
More points-
This board actually has had posts on other sports. I, for one, do care about ETSU baseball. I've had personal messages from a former ETSU women's basketball player thanking me for my support.
We've had posters talk about tennis matches they've attended, we've had posters brag on soccer, we've discussed golf. One poster said something along the lines of "ETSU is known for cross country," which surprised me, since I had no idea ANY school was known for cross country.
Sounds to me like a tough event to attend.
We do not harp on these sports because frankly, they are not as popular on the college level as men's basketball and football.
And this again shows you the flaws of the ETSU athletic department, and how far they have fallen, when you get these people in the administration who seemingly think they can stuff soccer down our throat and we'll just happily swallow it and the interest will be there on a par to the men's basketball team.
If you can't understand the flaw in that, you might as well just go home because you're not going to have any credibility outside of the offices in The Vault of Victory.
I think it is flawed to try to compare an all-sports trophy in a lesser league with, say, even finishing No. 2 in the country in rifle.
But, if you want to play that game, ETSU did win the All-Sports Trophy in the SoCon in 1983, and certainly the SoCon is a superior conference than the A-Sun.
So any way you slice it, Mullins is lying. 2007 was NOT the greatest year in the history of the program.
I had a three hour conversation with the officials at Jacksonville and they told me that many of their fans did actually harp and complain that their program wasn't what it was in 1970. Dolphins fans are upset at a decision made 20-25 years ago to deemphasize athletics, resulting in the program falling from the Sun Belt (which was a much better basketball conference then than it is now- it would have been somewhat comparable to C-USA now) in the late '80s to the A-Sun.
They are now trying to recover and rebuild.
Sound familiar?
Finally, this past NCAA team was one of the weakest, if not THE weakest, such tourney teams in the history of the program.
But regardless, a 3rd place regular season finisher winning the A-Sun tournament is simply never going to get a good seed. Conference DOES have a factor.
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