I write this to apologize to Coach Kennedy. I doubted you were the right guy up until this year. We underachieved big time in your first 4 seasons. I thought 2 years ago was a fluke and you were lucky to grab Jones and House and have them as seniors the same year as Caruso. I thought getting that heralded freshman class of Davis, Hogg, and Gilder was also fluke.

But the fact is you just didn't have your guys. RW last year along with this year's amazing class have finally proven to me that your are the right man for the job. Thank you Coach for bringing this program to where it is today.

Sadly... I think at least 3 or 4 of "his guys" could be gone to the NBA at the end of the year.

Bob - you don't have to read or post. The thread title was pretty clear.

And to the OP - it is clear to me know that the Parkinson's diagnosis and initial treatment was a big ****ing deal. That may seem obvious but I think it's dirextly attributable to the performance of the the first three years. You could argue (accurately) that we should've moved him somewhere else in the AD and brought in a new guy, but I think we're seeing the coach that was hired.

You're right, I didn't have to post, but it's like a thread called "we should wear sandals instead of basketball shoes" or something.

Apologizing to Kennedy, to me, is patently ridiculous. At least in this sense. (I think a lot of the amatuer diagnosing of the severity of his disease over the last few years was probably worth apologizing for, but that's a separate thing.)

Just because we're in a good place now, doesn't mean the fans should apologize for questioning the past. If a ship captain needlessly sailed through a hurricane, it's not retroactively a good decision just because everyone lived.

Yes, we're very good this season. Yes, Kennedy deserves all the credit for that. Yes, we're all very excited about it.

But that doesn't retroactively excuse the fact that, just to pick one example, we fielded a team last season without a backcourt. Everyone points to the Caldwell decision, but even if we'd have had Caldwell we still would have been extremely shorthanded in the backcourt. And that was in Kennedy's SIXTH season as head coach.

I love where this team is headed, but I'll wait until we make it past the first game of the NCAA Tournament before I apologize to BK.

i dont know if bk is the reason we have all this ridiculous talent niw or not. i do kniw we are talented as hell and they are also playing great and looking well coached.

because of so many awful things i saw in past that looked like they were the doing ir failings of BK, im reserving judgment.

have always rooted for bk to succeed, but i concluded last year he was wrong guy for job. hope i continue to be wrong about that.

So what do you guys think is a better halftime show? Frisbee dogs? Blues Brothers?

bobinator said:

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You're right, I didn't have to post, but it's like a thread called "we should wear sandals instead of basketball shoes" or something.

Apologizing to Kennedy, to me, is patently ridiculous. At least in this sense. (I think a lot of the amatuer diagnosing of the severity of his disease over the last few years was probably worth apologizing for, but that's a separate thing.)

Just because we're in a good place now, doesn't mean the fans should apologize for questioning the past. If a ship captain needlessly sailed through a hurricane, it's not retroactively a good decision just because everyone lived.

Yes, we're very good this season. Yes, Kennedy deserves all the credit for that. Yes, we're all very excited about it.

But that doesn't retroactively excuse the fact that, just to pick one example, we fielded a team last season without a backcourt. Everyone points to the Caldwell decision, but even if we'd have had Caldwell we still would have been extremely shorthanded in the backcourt. And that was in Kennedy's SIXTH season as head coach.

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Just a wee bit whiny.... We're all going to enjoy this season in different ways. No harm/no foul in the OP.

The tenure is kind of my point - I am starting to consider this his 4th year and, in fact, he started from a hole at the beginning of that period because of the negative recruiting that was going on. If we'd seen:

Year 1 with a slide at the end to the NIT with the injury of our best player; great recruiting class
Year 2 conference championship and S16 with miracle finish in R32
Year 3 backslide on court with NCAA sitting a key player and another great recruiting class
Year 4 6-0 with two top 10 wins

... the perception of BK is totally different even though most of the gap in Y3 would still have been his fault. I think that's a reasonable reassessment of his tenure because of the very clear impact the disease had. And again, you can criticize the AD for not making him an emeritus of some kind (cutting him after the diagnosis would've been unacceptable to me as an Aggie) when it first came down, but that's not really on him unless you're asking a hyper competitive individual to voluntarily back down.

Baring those actual first three years, I think BK has proven pretty conclusively he can coach at this level.

However, in my mind, the need for apology doesn't come from those who legitimately criticized, but from the blind vitriol we saw persistently on this board (Ben Diamond and even XL). With that said - those guys aren't around any more - probably because of how well we're playing. They know they'd need to eat crow and apparently don't want to do that more than they want to join the guys here having a blast this season.

Yeah, my first post was probably more pithy than it really needed to be...

It just conjured up memories of Olin's 'Kennedy could have given the middle finger to the haters' column which I was already thinking about from another thread.

DavidAg02 said:

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Sadly... I think at least 3 or 4 of "his guys" could be gone to the NBA at the end of the year.

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If 3 or 4 of "his guys" go to the NBA after this season it isn't sad it's freakin awesome!

I'm curious why fans don't follow recruiting because that is a fairly accurate (certainly not perfect) barometer of what you will see on the court in 1-2 years. As soon as Williams announced his return, we knew this could be a special season. Thus, this season is not a surprise. And if you follow recruiting you'd also know that there is a possibility the team takes a step back over the next two years unless they pull a rabbit out of the hat during the spring signing period. I wonder if the OP will be back in two years with his pitchfork.

CapCityAg89 said:

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The tenure is kind of my point - I am starting to consider this his 4th year and, in fact, he started from a hole at the beginning of that period because of the negative recruiting that was going on. If we'd seen:

Year 1 with a slide at the end to the NIT with the injury of our best player; great recruiting class
Year 2 conference championship and S16 with miracle finish in R32
Year 3 backslide on court with NCAA sitting a key player and another great recruiting class
Year 4 6-0 with two top 10 wins

... the perception of BK is totally different even though most of the gap in Y3 would still have been his fault. I think that's a reasonable reassessment of his tenure because of the very clear impact the disease had. And again, you can criticize the AD for not making him an emeritus of some kind (cutting him after the diagnosis would've been unacceptable to me as an Aggie) when it first came down, but that's not really on him unless you're asking a hyper competitive individual to voluntarily back down.

Baring those actual first three years, I think BK has proven pretty conclusively he can coach at this level.

However, in my mind, the need for apology doesn't come from those who legitimately criticized, but from the blind vitriol we saw persistently on this board (Ben Diamond and even XL). With that said - those guys aren't around any more - probably because of how well we're playing. They know they'd need to eat crow and apparently don't want to do that more than they want to join the guys here having a blast this season.

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Freakin hilarious. If you ignore the 5 horrible seasons then all he does it make sweet 16s. Completely explains why you were just on another thread telling us how BK was only 1 more ncaat win from equalling what turge did and what bcg did while ignoring that it has taken BK twice as many seasons as either BCG or Turge to hopefully match their postseason win totals.

I made (I think) a cogent argument on why I think the latter 3.5 years of his tenure are more indicative of his true capability than the first 3.5. I'm guessing you believe you would perform just as well at your job after being diagnosed with a deadly disease while being attacked to your customers by competitors for having that disease. Perhaps instead of just pulling out the "that's so stupid", 5 year old's argument, you'd care to explain why what I said doesn't make sense.

I noted a couple of years ago that the quality of BK's system requires four- and five-star athletes that are likely to eventually be one-and-dones. I'm in if we are going to head down that path.

greg.w.h said:

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I noted a couple of years ago that the quality of [insert name of almost any football or basketball coach] system requires four- and five-star athletes

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CapCityAg89 said:

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I made (I think) a cogent argument on why I think the latter 3.5 years of his tenure are more indicative of his true capability than the first 3.5. I'm guessing you believe you would perform just as well at your job after being diagnosed with a deadly disease while being attacked to your customers by competitors for having that disease. Perhaps instead of just pulling out the "that's so stupid", 5 year old's argument, you'd care to explain why what I said doesn't make sense.

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No you didnt. You said youve decided to pretend the first 3 years didnt happen. Theres nothing cogent about you choosing to ignore reality. He gets it all, which right now is 1 amazing season (s16), 1 slightly below expectations season (nit) and 4 horrible seasons. Year 7 looks like it could be the best in school history. If that happens, he gets all the credit for it as well.

Fair enough - I'm getting my threads confused (old man disease). My argument was that all we heard for the first two years was that meds and diet made the diagnosis a non-factor. Given what came out that third year about the recruiting tactics used against him, that messaging certainly made sense. But if you look at coaching performance (recruiting, development, game preparation, in-game responses), what we've seen in all those categories the last 3-4 years looks absolutely nothing like the first 3-4 years. Unless he forgot how to coach and then suddenly remembered again, the only logical conclusion is that the Parkinson's ****ed him up for a while.

Kennedy was always going to be a guy to slowly adapt his team (true at all his gigs), but I think the expectation was that the roster was good enough to not need changes to have some success. The first team had great top line talent, but was paper thin. Layer the diagnosis and trial-and-error treatment on top and we are screwed.

Compare that to Sumlin - he inherited a talented, but thin team too. In 2012 we had no meaningful injuries and JM running wild. People discount those years for Sumlin because "he caught lightning in a bottle", but hold Kennedy to an expectation of poor coaching based on the same kind of factors (albeit in the negative).

I have no idea on his health and will take him at his word that the illness was never a factor - he missed zero games (cyp coached one exhibition and then billy was back) and now 7 years later he still hasnt missed a game and shows no signs of slowing down.

Hopefully he can string together 4 or 5 straight tourney trips and make Olins famous "f the haters" article come true.

expresswrittenconsent said:

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Hopefully he can string together 4 or 5 straight tourney trips and make Olins famous "f the haters" article come true.

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This is what I'm talking about, no matter what he does from here, it was still fair to criticize the missteps. Obviously we all hope that we win the National Championship for 10 straight years, but it doesn't change what already happened.

We all love Aggie basketball, and we all (presumably) want Billy Kennedy to succeed. He's doing a great job this year, not only in putting the roster together, but with our coaching and adjustments the last few games. We've basically pulled away down the stretch of every game so far.

And if we cut down some nets this season I'll be happy to help parade Billy Kennedy around Northgate on one of those things slaves carried pharaohs around on.

But it doesn't change the past and that's what irked me so much about that article at the time. It basically said that everyone who ever questioned Kennedy was wrong, which was certainly not the case.

The really annoying part of that "article" was that I never got the impression that it represented how BK felt, it was just 100% Olin choosing to be an antagonistic jerk to the paying (and non paying) customers of texags.

expresswrittenconsent said:

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I have no idea on his health and will take him at his word that the illness was never a factor - he missed zero games (cyp coached one exhibition and then billy was back) and now 7 years later he still hasnt missed a game and shows no signs of slowing down.

Hopefully he can string together 4 or 5 straight tourney trips and make Olins famous "f the haters" article come true.

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It doesn't even take 4 or 5 tourney trips. Just one of the right kind of tourney trips.

Hop said:

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I'm curious why fans don't follow recruiting because that is a fairly accurate (certainly not perfect) barometer of what you will see on the court in 1-2 years. As soon as Williams announced his return, we knew this could be a special season. Thus, this season is not a surprise. And if you follow recruiting you'd also know that there is a possibility the team takes a step back over the next two years unless they pull a rabbit out of the hat during the spring signing period. I wonder if the OP will be back in two years with his pitchfork.

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The information just doesn't seem to be there for basketball like it is for football. I'm sure that is different at some schools but for us it feels like there is a lack of available info or a lack of reporting. Not like football where you have both fans and reporters at pretty much all high school games and know all of the coach's and assistant coaches moves.

There is obviously a ton that contributes to that, not the least of which is the pool of potential prospects is very large compared to the number of slots available. Also recruiting for basketball seems to be more national than regional than football which also makes it tougher for services to connect with recruits.

All that being said, I agree with you entirely that in the evaluation of where a program stands future roster composition needs to be considered with as much diligence as historical results.

For me, I feel like you almost never truly get an idea of what players are like coming out of highschool due the cesspool that is AAU. Those guys aren't playing basketball. Again, just my impressions when I watch highlights that are posted.

expresswrittenconsent said:

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I have no idea on his health and will take him at his word that the illness was never a factor - he missed zero games (cyp coached one exhibition and then billy was back) and now 7 years later he still hasnt missed a game and shows no signs of slowing down.

Hopefully he can string together 4 or 5 straight tourney trips and make Olins famous "f the haters" article come true.

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Whether or not he can string together consecutive tourney trips, we'll see.

But regardless, I'd recommend to everyone to also just enjoy this current roster which really does seem like it has a chance to be 'special'. Coach Chew opined this was the most talented roster that he had worked with, more talented even than the Marquette team under Buzz that he was involved with that won the Big East and made the Elite Eight. Kennedy on his radio show Monday said that this was the deepest team he had coached in his 20 years as a HC, the only other team possibly comparable being his 30-win Murray State team. Others connected with this team have also opined similar thoughts.

Regardless of who the future Texas A&M coaches are, how long Kennedy is here, whether after him we hire John Wooden or Micky Mouse, it is very difficult for a truly 'special' roster potentially capable of winning it all to come together. You need not only some great recruiting but also a bit of luck. In A&M's case, this roster is the result of several factors: the stacking of three consecutive good recruiting classes (2015, 2016, 2017), nearly all of those recruits being a 'hit' (Davis, Hogg, Gilder, Williams, Caldwell, Starks, Flagg, Chandler), a one-and-done lottery pick talent making the unusual decision to come back to school, a guy like Trocha who loved A&M enough to want to both graduate as well as stay as long as possible even if he was coming off the bench, a very good grad transfer pickup in Duane Wilson who has seemed to fit in perfectly, several of the upper classman (Davis, Hogg, Gilder, Trocha, Wilson) who already have valuable experience on NCAA tournament teams, etc.

Enjoy the moment, because who knows how many years it will be until we again see a Aggie hoops roster quite this well constructed again. Hopefully, these guys can give us a special season.

Need a strong 2019 class. Win this season and they'll come.

CapCityAg89 said:

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Fair enough - I'm getting my threads confused (old man disease). My argument was that all we heard for the first two years was that meds and diet made the diagnosis a non-factor. Given what came out that third year about the recruiting tactics used against him, that messaging certainly made sense. But if you look at coaching performance (recruiting, development, game preparation, in-game responses), what we've seen in all those categories the last 3-4 years looks absolutely nothing like the first 3-4 years. Unless he forgot how to coach and then suddenly remembered again, the only logical conclusion is that the Parkinson's ****ed him up for a while.

Kennedy was always going to be a guy to slowly adapt his team (true at all his gigs), but I think the expectation was that the roster was good enough to not need changes to have some success. The first team had great top line talent, but was paper thin. Layer the diagnosis and trial-and-error treatment on top and we are screwed.

Compare that to Sumlin - he inherited a talented, but thin team too. In 2012 we had no meaningful injuries and JM running wild. People discount those years for Sumlin because "he caught lightning in a bottle", but hold Kennedy to an expectation of poor coaching based on the same kind of factors (albeit in the negative).

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Last year kinda sucked. Way underperformed.

We've taken off like a rocket this year. Hopefully, it's not an Icarus effects, but I think we have the depth. Hope to stay healthy.

Wasn't Stansbury the main driver behind the great recruiting classes we are benefitting from now?

And now that he is gone, Kennedy is (in Hop's words) needing to pull a rabbit out of a hat to salvage a decent class this year? Hopefully Kennedy has a better plan than that to get recruiting back to where it needs to be to be successful.

Stamsbury was a big part of the davis-hogg-gilder class, but not credited with williams, wilson, starks, trocha, chandler. I dont think stansbury was involved with caldwell but not 100% sure.

Avery Johnson Jr was the driving force in the Hogg, Gilder, David, Thomas class.

Stansbury is a very good game coach and I think that was his main contribution.

CapCityAg89 said:

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Avery Johnson Jr was the driving force in the Hogg, Gilder, David, Thomas class.

Stansbury is a very good game coach and I think that was his main contribution.

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Hop has stated on here literally dozens of times that it was 100% stansbury that got davis/hogg/gilder/thomas to commit to a&m. BK and Keller had been working on them for over a year and selling the vision of what they could accomplish here but Rick was the one who actually got them to all pull the trigger.

Maybe so. Maybe not. I just realized I've spent too long arguing with a probable sock for some yahoo who spent years saying things like "Kennedy sucks" and "Kennedy can never win" and is now too big a ***** to admit he might've been wrong.

I'm out.

CapCityAg89 said:

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Maybe so. Maybe not. I just realized I've spent too long arguing with a probable sock for some yahoo who spent years saying things like "Kennedy sucks" and "Kennedy can never win" and is now too big a ***** to admit he might've been wrong.

I'm out.

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There you go big guy. When you are wrong, rather than admitting it just change the subject to profanity filled personal attacks.

BillyPilgrim said:

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Wasn't Stansbury the main driver behind the great recruiting classes we are benefitting from now?

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From what I picked up in various interviews, statements, tidbits...regarding recruiters of current players.

-Stansbury helped close the 2015 Dallas guys (Gilder/Hogg/Thomas/Davis) which Kennedy/Keller had put a lot of previous work into (along with the signing of Avery Johnson Jr.). Admon Gilder mentioned when signing that Billy Kennedy personally attended more of his high school games than any other head coach.

-Stansbury was the primary recruiter for Caldwell.

-Robert Williams was Kennedy/Keller. I think I heard it mentioned that Kennedy had a prior personal relationship with a family member of Williams which started the ball rolling and then he put Keller on him. Savion Flagg was almost all Kennedy (his personal project).

-TJ Starks was Malagi.

-Duane Wilson was Chew. Chew was the one who had recruited Wilson out of HS to Marquette.

- Chandler was first primarily recruited by Stansbury while he was still at A&M, but then Stansbury took the WKU job and tried to recruit Chandler to go up there instead. Kennedy ending up cycling back around and re-recruiting Chandler (ultimately getting him to sign with the Aggies).

- Tonny Trocha was primarily Keller.

I think Trocha was primarily recruited by Barone