bobinator said:

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True, but if we're giving him credit for BCG and Turgeon, he also hired Kennedy.

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Very difficult to get hire after hire "right." See Kentucky basketball, Alabama football, or the "best" in any sport around. They can get anyone, they still get it wrong and go through rough patches.

At this point, I think Byrne is off the hook as far as Kennedy's continued employment with Texas A&M.

bobinator said:

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Tamu_mgm said:

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Which is also why I think Bill Byrne was a severely underrated AD. Seems like we were good to elite in every sport except for football during his tenure.

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I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but it's a lot easier to get good in sports that aren't football and men's basketball than it is in those two.

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Well, maybe. But its never easy to win national championships or have those kinds of perennially great programs.

Maybe other schools could have convinced Pat Henry to leave LSU and completed the historic run our track program had, but they didn't. Bill Byrne and Texas A&M had the best run for any track program, ever. (No pun intended.)

As far as women's basketball, since 1995, only 7 different programs have won the national championship.

One of those 7 is Texas A&M under a coach hired by Bill Byrne at a school that had zero basketball history, women's or men's.

If we were better in football, this isn't a conversation, I think. We're praising Bill Byrne and all our achievements under him. Even though our success in football really doesn't have anything to do with how difficult or easy it was for the basketball team, or track program, or whatever.

Sorry, I'll get off the Byrne train and not derail the thread anymore.

old yeller said:

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Austin Ag said:

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My point is we don't have to accept non-performing sports. We need to act like the big boys now.

Look what happens when you hire the very best coach in their field. We have seen it.

Gary Blair -- without a doubt a top 10 women's basketball coach when hired. 15 years of post season play out of his first 18 years of head coaching. The Aggie Women's Basketball program was a disaster. Before Blair the Aggies played 29 seasons and only made post season 3 times (2 NCAA and 1 NIT).

After Blair is hired the Aggies have made postseason every year but once (1 NIT and 10 straight NCAA)

By all accounts there is no way Gary Blair should have ever taken the Aggie job. I bet his friends were all saying WHAT? Wait for the Texas job to open up, or La Tech for that matter!

Pat Henry -- This one is even more crazy. In his 17 years at LSU, Henry won 27 national titles, 17 SEC titles, 15 SEC Coach of the Year awards, and five National Coach of the Year awards.

The ONLY coach to win Men's and Women's Track National Champions in the same year...and he did it 3 times at LSU.

Look at A&M track program history. There is none. One Big 12 Outdoor Companionship and a few individual awards.

After Henry takes over his first year is rough but then he rattles off 13 SEC Championships and 6 national championships.

Again. His friends must have thought him crazy. He went to a college that didn't even have a track that is good enough to host a High School Track Meet (AND STILL DOESN'T!!!)

We need to grow a pair and go out and hire the best in EVERY sport. The results will follow. And add gymnastics while we are at it.

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You can money whip coaches in lesser sports and, to be blunt, in sports that the majority of your fan base really don't care about. Not so in football and hoops.

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For Blair, we benefited a lot from the stupidity of their AD for women's sports, who basically drove him away by not extending his contract and then telling the university lawyers to handle things when Blair hired an agent (which means he worked there for 10 years without an agent!). I think he would have stayed there until retirement if that AD had handled it better... after all, his wife still lives there and works for the University. I think there might have been some agenda to have a woman coach the women. But after Blair's replacement cratered, they've had two male coaches. There are Arkansas WBB fans who are still mad about it.

Apparently Vic Schafer threw some shade at the Hogs recently for not giving him a look to replace Blair.

FWIW, when you said courtside, he probably thinks of the seats that at Reed Arena cost a minimum $3300, a piece, to get. They have a special system at KU for those particular seats, which up there come with their own private concessions/club area. And yeah, it's probably really pricey as that's where the universities top, top, top donors are going to be sitting.

They can't be be selling too many $125,000-$250,000 seats. They only have about $35 million in athletic wide ticket sales and donor contributions.

Or even too many $10000 seats.

I think he may have been exaggerating a bit.

Anyways, do they have more money though?

They still have an entire athletic department to fund. They make the choice to pay big bucks to retain a men's basketball coach but isn't that something A&M could do, but just seems unwilling to?