SFN Highlighted in Bruin Nation
A couple of weeks ago, we discussed some of the (much appreciated) recent attention that StateFansNation has been receiving from various media sources.
(We forgot to mention how this entry had previously been linked as a “Blog to Read” from the front page of SI On Campus about a six weeks ago.)
As we were surfing the internet the other night we were pleasantly surprised to randomly run across this entry from one of UCLA’s top blogs, BruinNation. They evidently ran across one of our first conversations related to Steve Lavin and took the opportunity to re-enforce their position on the difference between the quality of bloggers and idiots on message boards.
We love it!! And couldn’t agree more. This is why we have a comments policy that is much more targeted and restrictive than message boards.
Below are some excerpts from BruinNation:
For those of you who have been following O, A, and yours truly know one of the reasons we started blogging instead of writing on message boards is the stupidity we often see the message boards get inundated with. Looks like the dichotomy between bloggers and message boards exists within online communities of other school as well.
I indicated below how Lavin and NC State may be talking to each other. Look how some of the posters in the NC State Scout message board responded:
In contrast to those posters from Scout.com look how bloggers from StateFanNation (a great NC State blog) responded when they heard the Lavin news:
(1) Fans have a very bad habit of simply taking a coach’s overall record and latching on to it as if it would be transferrable to other jobs. Steve Lavin had one of the five best basketball jobs in AMERICA. His numbers look generally pretty good when you look at them without framing them against the backdrop of his resource base.
But, UCLA is UCLA…with little competition on the west coast; not to mention that Lavin inherited the program not too long after they won a National Championship. You need to analyze coaches in comparison to what they have done with their resource base. Lavin managed to go 10-19 in this sixth season (whatever happened to building a program?).
(2) Lavin has been trying to get back into coaching every year since he was fired by UCLA. Nobody has hired him. There is a reason for that. Even more troubling is the fact that despite Lavin’s experience as a top assistant coach at Purdue during Gene Keady’s best seasons, Purdue chose not to offer their job to Lavin when Keady announced his retirement a couple of years ago.
In the end, NC State needs to pay special attention to its brand management (which is something that Lee Fowler’s acceptance of poor performance and years of arguing with the fanbase indicates he can’t comprehend.) Why would NC State want to hire any coach that couldn’t get the job done to the standards of other schools?
Funny stuff. This tells us a little about the mentality of sports bloggers vs. some of those of lot of the dumbshit posters who often flood those scout and rival boards. After all in UCLA’s case – lot of those morons still think Dorrell is an “up and coming” football coach just because he won 10 games!
Anyways after all that … come on NC State … PLEASE HIRE LAVIN and take him off the ESPN studio set.
GO BRUINS.
When a void exists, a market is created. When the void of intelligent fan-interaction exists, great blogs are created…whether it be on the east coast or west coast.
Thanks a lot SFN. I don’t agree with everything y’all have to say but it does make for fun reading. Keep up the interesting work;>)
Thanks. And, that’s really the goal.
We can disagree on topics/issues without falling into the message board traps of personal attacks and stupidity.
StateFans: I am curious – do you guys truly believe that Lavin has been given an offer? And if so… approximately when do you believe it was given? What is confusing to me is that David Glenn reported that he heard about the offer EARLY LAST week.
SFN – Think that Glenn’s comments were a little vague about this the other day. Just because we may have been talking to Lavin early last week doesn’t mean an offer came.
Also, Glenn obviously has a direct tie to Lavin. So, odds are that Lavin is the one that has led Glenn to believe that the offer came early. Well, Lavin hasn’t been a real steward of virtue in this process – leaking stories and supposedly worrying about guaranteed money as this school is trying to help him break back into coaching without asking him to pay any dues proving his worth when other schools haven’t even interviewd him in the last three years?
Also, Glenn has real sources telling him things. Very good sources. But, some of these sources have NC State’s absolute best interest at heart. They aren’t dumb, and they won’t tell Glenn the truth about things that could hurt State. We know for a fact that one of his most quoted sources did not divulge all that he knew in some conversations last week.
As Glenn has stated before, he can only report what people tell him and try to pull together the puzzle from there. If someone doesn’t fully disclose something or blatantly lie to him, what can he do about it except run down as many sources as he can?
We have every reason to believe that IF an offer came to Lavin, it was definitely after Wednesday. Our hunch is that Fowler screwed up by offering the job to Lavin Friday without having all of the negotiations of the finer points put together. That’s an educated guess. There is divide amongst State’s big donors on Lavin. Add to the divide that the joker is whining about guaranteed money and immediately leaked to the media that he got the offer and we doubt that helped his case.
And of course Mike Decourcy “reported” it Friday evening. Now here is is Tuesday and nothing seems to have moved. IF an offer truly was given… I can’t quite comprehend the delay – I would think it would have progressed relatively quickly.
SFN – Maybe it did progress very quickly. Maybe it progressed to a “no” and we are trying to (mistakenly) save face with this bullshit about ‘guaranteed’ money.
Our opinion is that the offer should have been yanked the second that DeCourcy ran his piece and that NC State should have issued a public statement that the report was false. What a way to start off with your new coach leaking information supposedly of the highest confidence to his buddies in the media! Lie with dogs and you get flees
I’m guessing that it is possible that he WAS given an offer and turned it down, and we are on to the next option(which as you have pointed out may not be BLine. Thinking that Lavin has had an offer for approx. a week now with no word just doesn’t pass the sniff test for me…
SFN – You are right about the sniff test. Our opinion is that the window on Lavin started later than Glenn’s comments indicated and may be closed by now (but we don’t know about that).
FYI: Jay B is talking about Steve L and the NCSU job in the N&O this morning. This is the first time I’ve heard anything from ESPN on the subject. JB has some nice things to say about Steve L, I have a lot of respect for Jay B. I wonder if he is just being nice because of them both being at ESPN.
It’s nice to see that you guys aren’t the only ones out there. It took me awhile to truly understand what you were trying to do by ruling this board with an “iron fist”. But it’s obvious now that you are just trying to maintain the difference between an intelligent and educating source, and your average idiot spawning message board. Thanks for the work that you guys put into this blog as you have truly been my lifeline through this entire search.
I also appreciate the level of control that is maintained on this blog. They are LOGS afterall and logs shouldn’t contain an excessive amount of brain graffiti. I never once heard Cpt. Picard make a Captain’s Log entry that pertained to something that sucked, I hate that guy or the Holodeck is cool. And that is the standard by which all Logs should be judged.
SFN, how can you be so sure that Steve L leaked it to TSN? Could LF or one of his people leaked the story to get an idea of how we the fans would feel about it. I mean if one of the things LF is looking at is bringing the fan base back together wouldn’t this be important info? He couldn’t just run a poll at gopack.com asking “how does this hire make you fell”. If it is “leaked to the media” and the internet is either “Hell Yes” or “Hell No” then he(and his people) get the answer to their question as far as the fan base goes. Maybe I’m crazy but it’s just a thought, this whole thing has been crazy.
You know, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I actually signed up for a comments account here but never have for a message board…but this is exactly why. The attacks are few and far between, and while you still have to deal with people just stating opinion as fact and not backing it up (I mean, I’m guilty of that myself on occasion), it’s a lot more reasonable here. I’ve nothing against censoring out stupidity on a privately owned forum as long as any opinion (and not just the opinion of the hosts) can still be voiced in a respectable manner.
Like the first poster said. Don’t agree with you guys all the time (sometimes very rarely)…but I don’t see why I need to, nor any forcing on your part for my agreement, nor why that should be a problem.
I’ve slowly warmed up to ya. Thanks again!
Could LF or one of his people leaked the story to get an idea of how we the fans would feel about it.
Do you imply that LF gives a flying rat’s ass what the fans think?? If so, that’s laughable. He never has, and doesn’t now (unfortunately). I’d trust SFN saying Lavin leaked.
This situation is still unacceptable. SFN has done all that it can during this situation. I am sorry that I don’t have 20 million dollars to take control of my mismanged athletic department. I am sorry that my university does not see fit to keep us in the loop. I am sorry that my wolfpack club does not give a ratsXXX about the majority of the fan base. SFN do the best you can, you are all we have! Thanks
Its pretty well known that DeCourcey knows Lavin personally. Its also been well documented that Lavin personally called David Glenn. He even went so far as to apologize for not calling him earlier…. …. The whole thing feels more slimy than a Tijuana brothel, and while that may be a step up from John Calipari its still well below NC State University.
“Why would NC State want to hire any coach that couldn’t get the job done to the standards of other schools?”
Exactly. That’s why Beilein is an excellent candidate and Lavin is not. And Whittenburg should be the 2nd candidate ove Lavin, even without a mid-major or major head coach job on his resume. Good coaches do the best with the tools provided.
Great Job SFN. I know I can count on this site to maintain an intelligent discussion and to maintain civility. I hope that Lee Fowler has not allowed Lavin to jerk our chain. After all, Lavin is a TV analyst. Any deal could have been wrapped up with him completely under the radar because he has no current ties to any university. The fact that we are hearing so much about him at this stage of the search is what bothers me the most. If he is leaking information now, then we will end up with a self-promoter tied to television and LA. We need a coach who will promote NCSU, Raleigh, North Carolina and the ACC. Whittenburg is looking more and more like the best choice.
Keep up the good work, guys! I don’t know if you track “hits” but I’m sure this site has been on fire the last month. I know it’s the first place I come for news and thoughts.
I think (hope) the Lavin thing is an excellent smoke screen…my opinion (and hope) is that LF is getting Lavin (supposedly his buddy) to drop some publicity our way getting that NC State name to the front of the news, while things get ironed out (champagne toasted, cookouts had (in NH, very nice this time of year?), contracts worked out) for our new big time, big name coach who is gonna come in here and win us a national championship w/in 3 years.
Boy its fun to dream, we’ll see you shortly NIT, ack.
I agree with SFN, I believe any offer to Lavin should have been pulled with a quick denial in the press by LF. If these guys all have agents we are dealing with, why not hire an agent ourselves?? Obviously we (LF really) are getting duped in some of these negotiations with the other parties (sans RB) continually not showing “good faith” in the negotiations by leaking the offers to try to embarass us (LF) into upping the offer.
I say we hire our own agent who will be more adept at negotiations and tell these folks, “Any offer leaked will be quickly denied in the press and pulled from the negotiation table”. At this point, interviewing so many candidates that seem to be hellbent on squeezing every last penny from us, it makes me want to just give it to Whitt and see what he can do.
“We need a coach who will promote NCSU, Raleigh, North Carolina and the ACC. Whittenburg is looking more and more like the best choice.”
I’m not sure I completely agree that it’s a coach’s responsibility to “promote” the area and/or university. A coach’s responsibility is to run a clean program, graduate student athletes, and win ball games — I’m sure the order of those three is debateable. A coach who does those three things “promotes” the university in a good light simply by doing those things. i.e. Action speaks louder than words.
In principle, I agree with hoping the offer was yanked. But I’m so terrified about the fallout if Lavin doesn’t sign on…that I kind of hope it works out and he is the next coach. The idea of Beilein makes me sick, and I have a sinking feeling that Fowler would try to pull a Cheney and hire himself before giving a solid, unifying pick like Dereck Whittenburg the job.
Thanks for the props, Bruin Nation! I enjoyed watching Howland’s run this year (one more win and my wife would have won the office pool, damn it).
A nice little article in Spring issue of NC State Alumni mag by Tim Peeler about LF. The topic was on hiring and head coach’s and after pointing out his past hires (men’s and women’s tennis, softball, and volleyball) it gets into the process of how to go about landing the big ones.
Jeff: How can Lee Fowler talk about landing the big ones? His only “big hire” was at MTSU when he hired Randy Wiehl as basketball coach. Wiehl was a disaster and ended up getting fired. I can imagine that coaching search — Dean Smith called to support his former player. Lee Fowler was star struck and would never do anything that would potentially make someone like Smith disgruntled. And MTSU had their new basketball coach. 0 for 1
As to mentioning above that the leak might have came from our side, there was this written in the article. “There is always a big argument about letting the information out. But that is generally by the people who want to hash it on the internet sites or around the watercooler, and that doesn’t always make for hiring the best coach for the job.” -LF
Thanks for the plug guys. We have been reading you guys every day. Our heart goes out to State Fans who may have to deal with the HCing stint of Steve Lavin.
- From BruinNation
For all of you Whitt fans – I want to throw out a big word of caution. I had posted a week or so ago about the fact that I thought Sendek was a positive for NCSU for the first five years. He successfully rebuilt the program to respectability. It was his inability to get past that stage that was his problem. There is a VERY big difference in the skill set needed to “rebuild” a program versus “taking a program to the highest level”. So, while Sendek appeared to have the “rebuilding” skills, he did not have the other set. It’s rare that you find both skill sets in the same person. And THAT is my concern with Whitt. He clearly has the skill set to rebuild a program, but he may or may not have the skill set to take us to the next level. I think it is unlikely in fact…
New England really sucks this time of year. Lavin knows that by now and I’m affraid could be the next yankee transpant to land in Cary/Wakefield. Good plug coming from the Bruin’s camp, and keep up the good work. Your dead on about pulling a contract if there was one after Lavin made sure it went public.
People need to think with their mind instead of their heart. Whitt is not the answer for NCSU. I would hate to see another Matt Doherty or Jeff Jones situation. Sure Pack fans can say, “We would never to Whitt like they Doh”. Until we cross that bridge we do not know what the answer is. We are expecting BIG results within the next 5 years. Whitt would not be able to provide that for us IMO.
i am tired of these big name coaches being thrown at us. whitt or marshall would be a plus with me. the ad needs to act now.
SFN – Just curious…but, why does the AD need to act now? At this point after the AAU event in Houstont his weekend, what are the large negative impacts of being slow? Why just hire a coach for the sake of hiring a coach quickly?
Is Lavin in new england? I assumed he was in Hollywood since his gf, (very hot gf), is an actress or model.