(01-05-2023 07:28 PM)CollegeMan33 Wrote: BigRed, why do you think it’s been so hard to win at NIU in mens or womens basketball? The people that have coached all new the game of basketball front wards and backwards.
It's something I think about more than I probably should.
So, I'll give it a stab as to what my thoughts are (btw, my previous comment was total jest and just meant to be silly). Anyway, I'll just go back to the Patton era as that's really when I started getting good tv/streaming coverage to watch most games.
So, who was the best coach? Patton, Montgomery or Burno? I honestly don't know. It's probably fair to say they are pretty even with strengths and weakness and it all kind of balances out.
At that point, it flips to recruiting and who is the better recruiter. Well, I feel confident in saying Patton was the worst recruiter and it was of his own doing. He clearly could attract good players but whether it was stubbornness or his own ego, he alienated coaches and burned bridges (and seemed to hold grudges) leading to his own demise.
So, Monty or Burno for best recruiter. This is hard to say because Monty's resume is 5x longer than Burno's but it can't be ignored that Burno had to or chose to completely dismantle Montgomery's last team. And, after German left, those teams were really bad.
But Burno only has 2 recruiting classes and one of them didn't really have a senior season to play basketball for a coach to watch and/or evaluate. So that has to be factored in to the equation.
With that said, Montgomery seemed to recruit heavily from 3 distinct areas. #1 was southeast Michigan. #2 was Milwaukee. And #3 was the Chicago suburbs (and this was a more recent development and one that he targeted to do better in).
Burno on the other hand recruits from everywhere and globally. That says something about the connections (a popular topic around here lately) or the resources he has to tap into.
Montgomery had some good recruiting classes but most of them faltered for one reason or another and possibly his best class was undone by discipline issues. The problem with this is, you know there are going to be issues at times. These guys are not going to all be angels. But as is the life of a mid-major (and NIU is probably more of a mid-mid-major), mistakes get magnified and are much harder to overcome and can set a program back.
Why did I go into all of that? Because I think the answer is multi-layered and hard to answer. Why can't NIU succeed? Part of it is probably poor selection of coaches. Some of that is luck based. Take, for example, Porter Moser. He was fine at both Little Rock and Illinois State but he became almost a legend at Loyola (and probably shouldn't have left for Oklahoma...but I digress). Who could have predicted Moser would have been a national name when he was under .500 at ISU? Sometimes you get lucky with a guy and it just pops.
NIU hasn't had that happen. Heck, most teams don't.
IMO, Monty was a good hire coming off of Patton and Burno was a good hire coming off of Monty.
But I will say, Burno has a harder job of succeeding than any of his predecessors and that is because of the transfer portal and NIL money. And that, imo, makes it even harder for a cash-strapped school like NIU to succeed.
But, I'd rather be a fan of NIU in the MAC than some school in the MEAC or the SWAC or the Big West. Heck, even the Ohio Valley is looking pretty bleak right now. Those are truly low-mid-major programs and conferences.
Anyway...long story short...I don't know. It's probably a combination of bad luck, lack of focus for way too many years and an inability to carve out an identity in Big Ten country and just a little too far from Chicago to actually matter (not that UIC is making waves from within the city).