The unofficial online home for fans of the UAB Blazers. Part of Collegiate Sports Nation (CSN).

(01-09-2016 11:42 PM)The Answer UAB Wrote:  Sullivan has had a mostly good season, but he came in today and promptly got beat twice on defense, one for an and one three-point play.. He didn't deserve to play much today..

MB can say we are overly negative, but anyone with objective eyes would be worried about our defense. We looked pretty soft to me. We get a lot of nice highlight reel blocks, but we give up a ton of paint points and run outs when we failed to get back on defense..

You are being overly negative.

Thank you for allowing me to say that.

UABs attendance and school spirit have been bad ever since I have been a student, starting back in 2003. Those things were certainly better back in 2003, but they have steadily and markedly declined since then.

For a school with our history and success, there's no reason we should not be packing out Bartow 9 out of every 10 games. People at UAB have an inferiority complex or something. We feel like we aren't good enough to be on par with Alabama or Auburn. I don't understand it. A program with our past and current (2003-2006, some of the MD years, the last season, and current season) success, should have a better fan base. No excuses. Our fanbase mostly sucks. I know alumni very closely who are more interested in the Bama game on Monday than our game today. It's sad. I don't know how to change it.

Lots of factors - young school, mostly commuter school (until recent changes), poor game day experience, piss poor marketing, active sabetours from within and outside the school, Alabama as a state doesn't care about basketball (but worse programs in the state easily draw more than us), poor scheduling, poor conference opponents, etc etc. I still think given our history and success we should be drawing more than we do. It's sad.

Our attendance may increase temporarily if we go 2-0 on this upcoming road trip, but it it'll be an artificial number. We don't have real fans - outside of the blazertalkers and a few others

(01-09-2016 11:46 PM)Memphis Blazer Wrote:  

(01-09-2016 11:42 PM)The Answer UAB Wrote:  Sullivan has had a mostly good season, but he came in today and promptly got beat twice on defense, one for an and one three-point play.. He didn't deserve to play much today..

MB can say we are overly negative, but anyone with objective eyes would be worried about our defense. We looked pretty soft to me. We get a lot of nice highlight reel blocks, but we give up a ton of paint points and run outs when we failed to get back on defense..

You are being overly negative.

Thank you for allowing me to say that.

82 points to the 350th-ish ranked rpi team in D1

(01-09-2016 11:47 PM)The Answer UAB Wrote:  

(01-09-2016 11:46 PM)Memphis Blazer Wrote:  

(01-09-2016 11:42 PM)The Answer UAB Wrote:  Sullivan has had a mostly good season, but he came in today and promptly got beat twice on defense, one for an and one three-point play.. He didn't deserve to play much today..

MB can say we are overly negative, but anyone with objective eyes would be worried about our defense. We looked pretty soft to me. We get a lot of nice highlight reel blocks, but we give up a ton of paint points and run outs when we failed to get back on defense..

You are being overly negative.

Thank you for allowing me to say that.

82 points to the 350th-ish ranked rpi team in D1

thomas smallwood and lionel love played like the final 5 minutes of the game

Jack Williams
‏@repjack
#UAB football foundation board members recognized at today's UAB men's basketball game 4 raising $5 million in 2015.

(01-09-2016 11:46 PM)The Answer UAB Wrote:  UABs attendance and school spirit have been bad ever since I have been a student, starting back in 2003. Those things were certainly better back in 2003, but they have steadily and markedly declined since then.

For a school with our history and success, there's no reason we should not be packing out Bartow 9 out of every 10 games. People at UAB have an inferiority complex or something. We feel like we aren't good enough to be on par with Alabama or Auburn. I don't understand it. A program with our past and current (2003-2006, some of the MD years, the last season, and current season) success, should have a better fan base. No excuses. Our fanbase mostly sucks. I know alumni very closely who are more interested in the Bama game on Monday than our game today. It's sad. I don't know how to change it.

Lots of factors - young school, mostly commuter school (until recent changes), poor game day experience, piss poor marketing, active sabetours from within and outside the school, Alabama as a state doesn't care about basketball (but worse programs in the state easily draw more than us), poor scheduling, poor conference opponents, etc etc. I still think given our history and success we should be drawing more than we do. It's sad.

Our attendance may increase temporarily if we go 2-0 on this upcoming road trip, but it it'll be an artificial number. We don't have real fans - outside of the blazertalkers and a few others

+1 great analysis. The attendance problem is not caused by just one factor, but a variety of factors that combine into one crappy situation. Another possible cause I haven't seen mentioned is that there is a significantly more to do around the City of Birmingham even compared to 2003 or so, which of course draws the casual fan away from a sporting event they are only moderately interested in.

(01-09-2016 09:58 PM)Blazer_pidelta517 Wrote:  Why all of this doom and gloom? We WILL make the move up to AAC in the next couple of years at the very least. It may not be the same AAC that it is today, but it'll still function to bring better teams to Bartow.

Lipstick on a pig. Most of those teams didn't help UAB attendance when they were in CUSA.

Actually, I'm not as worried about the defense as a was at the beginning of the season. The interior defense is actually pretty solid. The team's biggest weakness, even more than their three point shooting, was their perimeter defense. Can't help guys getting hot or losing a guy in transition every once in a while, but, frankly, it was messy. Didn't matter if it was zone or man. Opposing teams could feast on us at the three point line because of poor rotations, misdiagnosing the screen, over pursuing, etc. Guys had good looks at will, and, even worse, bad perimeter defense weakens the interior by way of easy dribble penetration.

A team that had good, not even great, guard play could wreck us.

Thankfully, they tightened down. It reminds me a lot of how bad the defense was last year then they just got tremendously better. It wasn't something implemented or anything like that. It was just fundamentals being emphasized. Help getting there quicker, faster lateral movement, winning effort plays, etc.

There are three big reasons I feel like we're okay:

Rule changes
The game changed. We're seeing more possessions and more fouls. Scoring has went up as a direct result so you end up with some box scores that make it seem like more of a shootout than it really was. It was kind of rocky at first (especially at Auburn), but this benefits us in both facets of the game. Aside from the occasional we're-just-gonna-do-threes-no-matter-what games, the shot selection has been pretty good and I feel like the guys do well in transition. Also, the free throw percentage is high enough to make these changes favor us. A con is that it's harder to slow the tempo of the game down, but I don't necessarily think we have to resort to that.

Individual play
Not saying that anyone was garbage or anything. It was just that some guys had a tendency to get exploited. Not enough to make them a complete liability or anything like that, but still. There has definitely been some improvements and that's all you can really ask for. Another key thing to mention here is the poise. They don't panic and/or tense up the same way they did last season. They played through slumps, and the chemistry is back in a big way.

Offensive production
Those dry spells on the other end probably hurt more than the weak perimeter defense. There's a more natural flow to the offense now. It's cliche and all that, but being at least decent on offense helps the defense a lot. Just limiting the turnovers alone is making a big difference.

UAB is in good form right now. The offense is trending up, coach is doing good work with the lineups, and I think the defense is as good as it was at the end of last season right now. Yes, good guards and big men that can knock down jump shots are kind of scary, but that's for everybody. Either way, no major concerns for me right now. If a gun was put to my head, I'd admit that I'd like to see more mismatches forced because of the composition of the team. Can't always get what you want, though.

UTEP had 36 points with 14 minutes to go. The lead was close to 20. I think our defense is fine. UTSA has a guy go off with 11 made threes in a game we were leading by close to 30. The games were different after we held such big leads.
Getting your team to play hard in every game is a big challenge for coaching staffs.
Getting your team to play hard when leading by 19 and 28 in the second half is a bigger challenge. I thought the team continued to play hard but did not close out on some hot shooters that made shots.

(01-09-2016 11:46 PM)The Answer UAB Wrote:  UABs attendance and school spirit have been bad ever since I have been a student, starting back in 2003. Those things were certainly better back in 2003, but they have steadily and markedly declined since then.

For a school with our history and success, there's no reason we should not be packing out Bartow 9 out of every 10 games. People at UAB have an inferiority complex or something. We feel like we aren't good enough to be on par with Alabama or Auburn. I don't understand it. A program with our past and current (2003-2006, some of the MD years, the last season, and current season) success, should have a better fan base. No excuses. Our fanbase mostly sucks. I know alumni very closely who are more interested in the Bama game on Monday than our game today. It's sad. I don't know how to change it.

Lots of factors - young school, mostly commuter school (until recent changes), poor game day experience, piss poor marketing, active sabetours from within and outside the school, Alabama as a state doesn't care about basketball (but worse programs in the state easily draw more than us), poor scheduling, poor conference opponents, etc etc. I still think given our history and success we should be drawing more than we do. It's sad.

Our attendance may increase temporarily if we go 2-0 on this upcoming road trip, but it it'll be an artificial number. We don't have real fans - outside of the blazertalkers and a few others

I agree Answer. You and I are the same age. It's pretty frustrating to see our attendance where it is, but when we were in school, we still had C*USA 1.0, a solid 5-6 bid league (at least for the first couple of years).

Getting more people to adopt UAB is a 2-fold process for Birmingham: (1) We need to bring students in that will adopt UAB as their primary team. It's still not where it needs to be, but I can tell you I see more UAB shirts and less other shirts on campus than I did 10 years ago.

(2) We need to pull more people from out of state into UAB and Birmingham. That's the long-term solution. The Bammerist principles on which this state was founded are as strong as ever, and getting more implants to embrace Birmingham and Birmingham's team will grow the fan footprint.

The biggest problem is that the BHM MSA has only grown about 1.4% since the 2010 Census. We need to grow the metro area, which has and continues to suffer from brain drain. I certainly didn't help matters by getting the hell out last year.

We should just start an attendance thread and keep it going all season.

If we want to increase attendance, we need to bring in the Birmingham basketball fans who have no allegiance to the state teams. Before Alabama and Auburn started paying attention to basketball again, we could depend on those local fans to attend a few games per year. With those two schools trending upward and our weaker conference, it's just more difficult to bring in the casuals.

Better advertising will help, but until we're a consistently ranked team, or we're regularly playing ranked teams, attendance isn't going to improve drastically.

Yes

(01-10-2016 12:34 PM)jthrashr Wrote:  If we want to increase attendance, we need to bring in the Birmingham basketball fans who have no allegiance to the state teams.

Good idea. They could all ride together.

We NEED Tuscaloosa and API dirt road alumni. Hell, for all the flak Ingram gets, I've really enjoyed him giving UAB t-shirts to people in those schools' shirts in Bartow Arena.

(01-09-2016 11:46 PM)The Answer UAB Wrote:  We don't have real fans - outside of the blazertalkers and a few others

We should start a Blazertalk index and measure the growth of fan sentiment. It might not be accurate since it's mostly just the same 20 people who actively participate.

Back to the game. You know everyone has players and sometimes they make plays. You don't shut anyone out in basketball. Sometimes guys make plays and you simply tip your hat to them. It doesn't mean we are a bad defensive team. No one basketball player is perfect offensively or defensively. Someone scores on you it doesn't mean you played bad defense. Someone gets a rebound on you doesn't mean you didn't try. Just because you miss a shot doesn't mean you need to stop shooting.


Players make plays. It happens.

(01-10-2016 01:11 PM)ATTALLABLAZE Wrote:  Back to the game. You know everyone has players and sometimes they make plays. You don't shut anyone out in basketball. Sometimes guys make plays and you simply tip your hat to them. It doesn't mean we are a bad defensive team. No one basketball player is perfect offensively or defensively. Someone scores on you it doesn't mean you played bad defense. Someone gets a rebound on you doesn't mean you didn't try. Just because you miss a shot doesn't mean you need to stop shooting.


Players make plays. It happens.

To add to that, I think that from here on out we will be getting the other team's best shot. Our guys seems to be playing pretty consistent during this win streak. I think we are seeing other teams play over their head to compete with us though.

I think that has been evidenced by the fact that there has been a drastic degree of separation at some point in most of the recent games. If we can continue to play while keeping our foot on the gas, then we will be fine going through the conference slate.

I agree. Much like Memphis was the hunted it's our turn.

(01-10-2016 01:19 PM)ATTALLABLAZE Wrote:  I agree. Much like Memphis was the hunted it's our turn.

Let's go win some road games before we compare ourselves to Memphis. We have still not proven we can win consistently on the road.(although all last year I said we should grow from the close road losses). Getting dirk up to speed has really been the turning point to me. We actually have a handful of guys we can count on for a bucket now.

(01-10-2016 01:11 PM)ATTALLABLAZE Wrote:  Back to the game. You know everyone has players and sometimes they make plays. You don't shut anyone out in basketball. Sometimes guys make plays and you simply tip your hat to them. It doesn't mean we are a bad defensive team. No one basketball player is perfect offensively or defensively. Someone scores on you it doesn't mean you played bad defense. Someone gets a rebound on you doesn't mean you didn't try. Just because you miss a shot doesn't mean you need to stop shooting.


Players make plays. It happens.

We gave up at least 8 points on simple run out plays where we didn't get back after scoring baskets. That's on us for being lazy. It happened over and over again. Hopefully it's a point of emphasis before the next game. I don't remember us doing that very often before this game.

(01-10-2016 02:37 PM)blazers9911 Wrote:  

(01-10-2016 01:19 PM)ATTALLABLAZE Wrote:  I agree. Much like Memphis was the hunted it's our turn.

Let's go win some road games before we compare ourselves to Memphis. We have still not proven we can win consistently on the road.(although all last year I said we should grow from the close road losses). Getting dirk up to speed has really been the turning point to me. We actually have a handful of guys we can count on for a bucket now.

This ODU game is big. We are better on the road this year, but I agree that we have work to do. A big time team preparing for March would come to play in this game and take it.