Some facts; Chapman Hall, how are we doing?

[BBFran]

I haven't posted since January 19th. I wanted to give the team the chance to win again before posting, but I didn't feel like waiting until next November. Maybe I should say at least until next November.

I see that a couple of the few remaining posters here are still excited about what Amanda Braun delivered when she announced new standards of excellence for our only revenue producing D1 program and took decisive action, setting in motion her carefully considered plan.  Here are some facts, in no particular order, that speak for themselves:


1. Over the last three seasons, we are 16-38 in regular season Horizon League play. Tied for last with Cleveland State.

2. Our average overall record for the last three seasons is 12-21. In the preceding three seasons it was 18-14.

3. We were outscored in the second half of 13 of our 18 HL games this season, and went 0 for the second time around the conference.

4. We had an 8 man rotation, like just about every team in the league, and a more experienced roster than several other league teams -- all of which finished ahead of us.

5. Our attendance, which had already collapsed from 2016 to 2018, was very clearly much worse this year than last.

6. Our current 11 game losing streak is the worst in the Horizon League since the 2002 Youngstown State team lost 13 in a row. (It is EXCEEDINGLY rare for a D1 team to lose as many as 11 games in a row.)

7. Out of 353 D1 teams. as far as can be determined, only two other teams were eliminated from any possibility of tournament play before ours. One was Cleveland State, only because their game ended an hour before ours. They won 4 of their last 6.

8. Against the worst of D1 (the bottom quartile, ranked 265 or worse in year-end rankings) we are 12-14 over the last three seasons, 8-11 over the last two, 2-6 this year. In the previous 11 seasons, we were 41-4.

In the business that I have been in for 40 years, we call facts "proof." They lead to conclusions. The only objective conclusion we can derive from the proof before us is that Milwaukee is now, without any serious competition, the WORST men's basketball program in the Horizon League. The fans have left, the donors have left, the sponsors have left, the wins have left. Well done, AD Braun -- your plan worked!

I believe this is live video from Chapman Hall:

[Cactus Panther]

Mar 3, 2019 16:15:27 GMT -6 BBFran said:

I haven't posted since January 19th. I wanted to give the team the chance to win again before posting, but I didn't feel like waiting until next November. Maybe I should say at least until next November.

I see that a couple of the few remaining posters here are still excited 

Thanks for the six week break. 

Being positively excited versus negatively cynical is a personal choice, especially when it comes to entertainment options that fans have no control over.  I am more comfortable choosing the former, but understand the need to vent when choosing the latter. Waiting to comment until at least November would have probably been a very long time to suppress the urge.

To more accurately address the decline, a complete listing of proven "facts" would date back fourteen years rather than just three. This has been debated ad nauseum. I do not want to re-list the facts during the first 11 years of that period. Refer to several of steveisback's past posts and a couple of mine.   

A lot could happen in the next 12 months. Let's see where things stand then.

[BBFran]

It's remarkable that we are preached patience in the face of the utter collapse of our program into the worst program in a bad league. This seems remarkably dissonant with earlier opinions. Where once we heard anger, frustration, rejection and demands for action, we now are told that mere factual observation of the shockingly worse status of our program is cynicism. "Don't worry" we are told, "be happy." How times have changed.

Bluntly, there were a very few, very loud people who gave our AD cover to tear the program apart. The vast majority of fans have voted about that decision with their feet. They're gone and there's no reason to think they'll be coming back. Can you imagine selling tickets this off-season? It will make last summer's hopeless exercise seem like convincing ten year olds to sample ice cream. "Come see the Panthers break their 11 game losing streak! The excitement awaits!" I assume the offer we all got to deposit $50 to "hold" our seats was just some droll comic relief from the losing streak. "Honey, we'd better send in our 100 bucks today, because I don't know if there will be any seats left in October!"

The fans have left, the donors have left, the sponsors have left, the wins have gone away. This board itself is a microcosm of what happened. It's down to a handful of people ignoring what's right before their own eyes because they don't want to admit that it all turned out as badly as many of us predicted it would. We are left with nothing but an objectively terrible team and absurd attendance claims. (And it bears repeating that even the claimed attendance is a shocking collapse from the worst attendance of the previous coaching regime.)

Remember Youngstown 10 years ago? We are Youngstown. We are now the program that the better programs in the league (i.e., all of them) wish the HL would cut loose. We are the anchor weighing everyone else down.

Now if you are Chapman Hall, do you care? We will know soon enough.

P.S. I can't resist noting that on Saturday morning I received an e-mail from the department trying to induce me to the game that evening. 4 hats, 4 pizzas, 4 sodas, 4 tickets -- for a mere $85! Such a deal!

Unfortunately, as explained later in the SAME e-mail: "This deal is not available on the day of the game. It must be ordered in advance." I kid you not.

There has been one constant in the UWM program since Bud Haidet retired: the utter incompetence of our athletic administration. We may very well have the worst coaching and roster since the Cobb years. Maybe the Swetalla years. But they still deserve better than the clown show "support" that they get from this department. Chapman Hall, do you care?

[PantherNation]

Serious question for you, Fran. What do we do about it to change the way things are?

You mention that we’ve lost donors, we’ve lost our biggest fans, we’ve lost attendance at games, and we’re in the midst of a pretty bad losing streak. I think we all understand that. But you’re preaching to about 5-10 active members on this board. What would you like for this small number of us to do? Stop going to games? Stop posting about the upcoming season?

Again, I’m being serious. Not going to games is out of the question because it’s something I enjoy and it’s something I do with my 3 year old son. But I do agree that we deserve a program that’s run better than the way it currently is being run (from an AD perspective, not from a coaching perspective). So what steps do we take?

[ghostofdylan]

Start a petition for the non-renewal of our current athletics director? Why should we all continue to be prisoners here?

[TonyTuba]

Dylan, not many of the students really care about it enough to get involved. its a dead petition from the start. Best thing to do it wait her out or stop renewing your season ticket and just watch on tv or at home somehow. the message needs to be sent whilst the petition is a great powerful one to send it would only work if it wasn't a vocal minority who care about the program in the school. Now, where do I sign though?

[BBFran]

What should we do? I'll be honest: if having the program's biggest donors (and perhaps the whole University's biggest or at least potentially biggest donors) saying "see ya!" wasn't enough to rouse Chapman Hall to do something, I'm hard pressed to know if there's anything the few remaining fans can do. TonyTuba is right -- the program has been so profoundly devalued that very, very few people actually care any more. And that's not just students. As I said, the desertion of posters from this board is a small scale demonstration of that sad fact. The large scale proof is the desertion of fans from the games themselves. This year's awful performance by the team obviously will continue to accelerate that erosion.

Fans aren't stupid. For at least the last five to seven years the message coming from the Pavilion may have been couched in SID blather, but the fans heard it in its apparent intent and in its real effect: the hell with men's basketball. And the fans reacted exactly as you would expect. They left.

Chapman Hall -- do you care?

I have never and will never recommend to anyone that they boycott the games. Neither has anyone else that I know of. The collapse in fan interest was entirely organic -- and entirely predictable. If Chapman Hall didn't see it coming, shame on them. It turns out that it's not so easy to find a new coach ready to succeed against the tide of an incompetent if not adversarial athletics administration at a fragile mid-major program, especially after firing a coach who was loyal, respected and well-liked. Gosh, who could have seen THAT coming?

Do I have a solution? Short of action by Chapman Hall, no. Through animus and incompetence this hole has been dug so deep you wouldn't see sunshine from it at noon on the summer solstice if you happened to blink at the wrong moment.

But if I I was king, here's what I'd do: beg Paul Plinske (or someone a lot like him) to come in as AD, have them create a real plan of support for the program and prop up Pat Baldwin as best they can next year, and go from there.

A reset not founded in lies and incompetence would at least create some hope and have the potential to repair the breach with the thousands of fans whose affections for the program this administration and its predecessor did so much to alienate. But let's not sugarcoat it: even after throwing three full seasons down the toilet, and no matter what Chapman Hall does, we are YEARS away from just getting the team and the fan support back to the level it was at in 2016. The decisions made now will determine whether we will EVER get back there.

What's your answer, Chapman Hall?

[Pantherholic]

When someone posted her contract extension, it said something to the degree of "your responsibilities & duties are outlined in the original contract". I'm curious as to what's stated in that contract.

[ghostofdylan]

Bluntly, I'm scared of what's stated in that original contract.

[BBFran]

Mar 4, 2019 19:32:58 GMT -6 ghostofdylan said:

Bluntly, I'm scared of what's stated in that original contract.

I have often wondered if it paraphrased right wing zealot Grover Norquist's statement about government: "We don't want you to abolish the men's basketball program. We simply want you to reduce it to the size where you can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

I mean, this can't be accidental, can it? You couldn't really do this much damage by accident!

[Spirit of Bruce]

Mar 3, 2019 19:23:52 GMT -6 Cactus Panther said:

Mar 3, 2019 16:15:27 GMT -6 BBFran said:

I haven't posted since January 19th. I wanted to give the team the chance to win again before posting, but I didn't feel like waiting until next November. Maybe I should say at least until next November.

I see that a couple of the few remaining posters here are still excited 

Thanks for the six week break. 

Being positively excited versus negatively cynical is a personal choice, especially when it comes to entertainment options that fans have no control over.  I am more comfortable choosing the former, but understand the need to vent when choosing the latter. Waiting to comment until at least November would have probably been a very long time to suppress the urge.

To more accurately address the decline, a complete listing of proven "facts" would date back fourteen years rather than just three. This has been debated ad nauseum. I do not want to re-list the facts during the first 11 years of that period. Refer to several of steveisback's past posts and a couple of mine.   

A lot could happen in the next 12 months. Let's see where things stand then.{/quote}

I'll predict you ask us to see where things stand in another 12 months, after your sunshine and rainbows aren't there at this time next year...

[Cactus Panther]

You must be eating some bad cheese in Kaukauna, Chad.

[Spirit of Bruce]

No, just tired of your little cartoon pissing in our hand and saying it's raining.

[PantherNation]

So if Amanda Braun did in fact push for TJ Oztelberger to be hired and Mark Mone put the kabosh on that... are we focusing our anger on the wrong person? Just curious because it sounds like he was ours if we wanted him. And she did. And he’s obviously having a huge amount of success as a head coach in his first three seasons. Primarily the last two.

Not trying to stir the pot. But it seems like she made a decision to fire Jeter and was ready to hire someone who would have brought the program back to relevance. That should count for something shouldn’t it?

Just wondering if this whole scenario would have played out differently had Mone not gotten involved and worried about the optics of the hire.

[Cactus Panther]

Mar 4, 2019 18:51:33 GMT -6 BBFran said:

What should we do? I'll be honest: if having the program's biggest donors (and perhaps the whole University's biggest or at least potentially biggest donors) saying "see ya!" wasn't enough to rouse Chapman Hall to do something, I'm hard pressed to know if there's anything the few remaining fans can do. TonyTuba is right -- the program has been so profoundly devalued that very, very few people actually care any more. And that's not just students. As I said, the desertion of posters from this board is a small scale demonstration of that sad fact. The large scale proof is the desertion of fans from the games themselves. This year's awful performance by the team obviously will continue to accelerate that erosion.

Fans aren't stupid. For at least the last five to seven years the message coming from the Pavilion may have been couched in SID blather, but the fans heard it in its apparent intent and in its real effect: the hell with men's basketball. And the fans reacted exactly as you would expect. They left.

Chapman Hall -- do you care?

I have never and will never recommend to anyone that they boycott the games. Neither has anyone else that I know of. The collapse in fan interest was entirely organic -- and entirely predictable. If Chapman Hall didn't see it coming, shame on them. It turns out that it's not so easy to find a new coach ready to succeed against the tide of an incompetent if not adversarial athletics administration at a fragile mid-major program, especially after firing a coach who was loyal, respected and well-liked. Gosh, who could have seen THAT coming?

Do I have a solution? Short of action by Chapman Hall, no. Through animus and incompetence this hole has been dug so deep you wouldn't see sunshine from it at noon on the summer solstice if you happened to blink at the wrong moment.

But if I I was king, here's what I'd do: beg Paul Plinske (or someone a lot like him) to come in as AD, have them create a real plan of support for the program and prop up Pat Baldwin as best they can next year, and go from there.

A reset not founded in lies and incompetence would at least create some hope and have the potential to repair the breach with the thousands of fans whose affections for the program this administration and its predecessor did so much to alienate. But let's not sugarcoat it: even after throwing three full seasons down the toilet, and no matter what Chapman Hall does, we are YEARS away from just getting the team and the fan support back to the level it was at in 2016. The decisions made now will determine whether we will EVER get back there.

What's your answer, Chapman Hall?

I agree with most of what you said. That is enough to deserve a "Like" from me.

The only thing I disagree with is your description of Jeter, and on that we will just have to agree to disagree. I think the disinterest in and dislike of athletics within Chapman Hall actually helped Jeter. The administration appeared to take the path of least resistance by putting up with the automatically renewing extensions in Jeter's contract even though many of us wanted him to be shown the door long before the end of his 11th year.

I don't know what Paul Plinske is doing these days, but we could sure use someone that would successfully sell Chapman Hall on the importance of the only revenue sport in the university. That is why I have advocated for a modern day Pat Richter to be the next AD.

Chapman Hall - do you care? It's a question I have been asking and discussing with the likes of GoD and others for several years.