College basketball coaching carousel

Looks like Larry Eustachy is headed for Colorado State. Not sure how done a deal that is. Yesterday, the story was Ernie Kent was CSU's guy. Today it's Eustachy.

Prevailing sentiment among Southern Miss fans is that if Larry leaves, the school's first call ought to be to Sean Woods, who's done a pretty solid job at Mississippi Valley State.

 

LSU stats show they averaged 8,661 for 15 home games, but we all know how that number sometimes isn't close to reality.

 

And TCU averaged 4,581 fans for 17 home games last season.

 

There were maybe 1-2 games where that many people were actually in the building. That's a paid attendance figure.

In other news, the Times-Picayune reports Johnny Jones interviewed with LSU and Reggie Theus and Tommy Amaker will be interviewed. A little underwhelming, eh?

 

Some mid/low major hires Wednesday: Jim Ferry to Duquense, Jack Perri to LIU.

Oregon was/still may be under NCAA investigation for extra benefits to players at the end of Ernie Kent's regime and he had a close connection with World Wide Wes. Maybe that scared Colorado State off.

 

I just don't think most colleges should be expected to "lock down" their area's top players. It's not like football. AAU basketball exposes players to the entire country and college ball is really just an extension of that. You want to go to the best team you can, wherever it is.

And I figure Eustachy to Colo. State might seem like a lateral move, but he was growing stale at S. Miss, and he might be able to establish some momentum at C State.

 

I was at TCU's home opener and counted less than 200 people in the stands 10 minutes before tip.

According to the box score (just looked it up), the attendance was 4,158. A complete and utter lie. It was more like a fourth of that. I wouldn't be shocked if it was actually a tenth of that.

 

TCU seems stuck on the 4, the 5, the 8 and the 1.

Seriously, do you think it's tickets sold? It doesn't bug me much because I know what's going on, but I know some people who get absolutely livid with it. They feel if you have game coverage and you have a box score with an attendance figure of 4,100 when there were actually 410 there, then it chips at your credibility. So they demand an "actual" attendance.

I'm not one who generally goes down that road, but I completely understand.

 

By the very definition, the "attendance" number needs to be the number of people who attended the event. If you want to announce the number of tickets sold, do that. But don't call it attendance, because that's not what it is. There's a difference.

And....when I was an SID intern many years back, the attendance number that an assistant SID came up with for every one of his games ended with 69. Women's basketball? 269. Baseball? 169. Football? 35,469.

 

"Growing stale?" Really?
Eustachy just had his best season at Southern Miss. A breakthrough season. They were 25-9 and a top-20 RPI program for much of the year.
They went to the tournament for the first time since 1991 and, given the turmoil and turnover at Mississippi State and the continued mediocrity at Ole Miss, there's a real chance for them to make some gains in in-state recruiting the next couple years.

 

Northern Arizona hires Memphis assistant Jack Murphy, a former Arizona assistant as well.

 

Agree. When I used to cover a D-II basketball program, I was once told by the SID that if his bosses informed him that if he ever announced an attendance lower than 1,000, he'd lose his job. So there could be 103 people in the place, and the "attendance" announced would be 1,454 or something like that.

It got to be a joke, where his assistant would need to fill in the attendance on the box score, and he'd ask the SID. The SID would look around the arena, then say "It looks to be about 1,631. Go with that."

I've always thought that would be a fun little throwaway feature, to send someone to one of these games and have them literally count people in the stands from the press box, and compare it to the announced total. Do it at several different games, at different colleges/teams, and see how big of an inflation it really is. Kind of a "What does 'attendance' really mean?"