Duke Basketball Report Has To Shut Down Message Boards After NCAA Loss

07-08 Basketball Fans118

Duke Basketball Report had to shut down their message board after today’s loss against West Virginia. I am not sure if you guys ever had the misfortune of reading “Carolina Blue” back in the 80’s and 90’s, but DBR’s propaganda would make John Kilgo blush. We can’t wait read their post game recap from the West Virginia game. Get ready for Coach Kool Aid.

We’re turning the board off for a bit. Some of you are out of control.

We will be back.

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07-08 Basketball Fans

118 Responses to Duke Basketball Report Has To Shut Down Message Boards After NCAA Loss

  1. ShootingGuard 03/24/2008 at 10:35 AM #

    “With the exception of four players (Horner, McCauley, Costner and Fells), next year’s squad will be all Lowe’s. Will people still be saying, “Wait till Lowe gets his own guys”?”

    I am not a Lowe apologist nor will I ever become one, but that’s quite a bit unfair. Lee Fowler set Lowe back one year by dragging out a humiliating coaching search and allowing committed recruits to bail on the program. By the time Lowe got on board, he had to scramble big time to put together bodies, so I wouldn’t really call some of the recruits he felt he had to take just to field a team as “his guys.” Lowe is in the mix with a number of high level recruits like Wall and Brown—those are the guys he wants to be “his.” If he gets them, he will likely do just fine. If he doesn’t, he should be gone—as Herb should have been in year 5 when he went 13-16 with a team completely composed of his guys, right?

    (I just hope Lee Fowler is long gone before anyone else…)

  2. Big Worm 03/24/2008 at 10:39 AM #

    “With the exception of four players (Horner, McCauley, Costner and Fells), next year’s squad will be all Lowe’s. Will people still be saying, “Wait till Lowe gets his own guys”?”

    Yes, and with good reason. The four players you mention are three of the top five and four of the top 7 players on this team.

    That’s why 98% of Div. I coaches are given at least four or five years to prove themselves. It takes that long for the old guard to graduate out and the new guard to step in and assume leadership positions on the team. Three years in, Sid will still have Herb’s players playing 60% of the available minutes for this team.

    Until Sid’s players comprise the overwhelming majority of the minutes played, how can anyone tell if the bigger issue with this team is Sid’s ability to coach/recruit or the quality of the talent he was left with?

  3. nycfan 03/24/2008 at 11:52 AM #

    Noah, not sure if your reference to NCSU “or Nike” for Wall is meant to refer to UNC, but I don’t think the Heels are still pursuing Wall since Dex Strickland committed … and I’m pretty sure Wall has been quoted as saying UNC is out b/c of Strickland’s commit. If the Nike reference was more generic Nike steering him to a Nike school, I have no idea.

  4. MrPlywood 03/24/2008 at 12:43 PM #

    Jay Bilas on the Jim Rome Show this morning:

    1) Duke had the flu, “but that’s no excuse”… sooooo, don’t bring it up;

    and

    2) Duke is a “vastly superior team” compared to Belmont…heh… Duke got carried into the second seed, and was lucky to win that game.

    Cowherd calls Duke the Notre Dame of basketball. I love that one.

    Stanford won and their coach wasn’t even on the floor. K needs to man up.

  5. PackerInRussia 03/24/2008 at 2:28 PM #

    “Will people still be saying, “Wait till Lowe gets his own guys”?”

    I’ve been saying “Wait till next year” as long as I’ve been a State fan. Why not change a few words?

  6. Noah 03/24/2008 at 2:45 PM #

    1) I don’t know how bad next year’s team will be. Are they going to act like a bunch of 12-year-old girls and pout for three months? This year’s squad was far more talented than the record showed. I honestly don’t know what to say to someone who thinks that ECU was better than us…or that UVa was *actually* thirty points better than us.

    2) The fact remains that 3/4 of next year’s squad will be Lowe’s recruits. That he chose to go out and hand out scholarship’s like they were flyers for a Crazy Bob’s Mattress Sale is HIS fault, no one else’s. Lowe-apologists are running out of excuses.

    3) Ninety-eight percent of college coaches are given plenty of time because 98 percent of them don’t crap the bed the way Lowe has. They don’t blow off one year of recruiting and blow off another year of S&C. They actually have…ya know…a plan. No one has to tell them that it’s important to have a point guard and for your players to be able to run from one end of the court to the other.

    4) The “nike” reference is not code for UNC. We are the only non-Nike school in Wall’s final list. The others are Memphis, Okie State and Oregon. There might be one more that I’m forgetting. No, it’s not an accident that the other schools are affiliated with Nike.

  7. ShootingGuard 03/24/2008 at 3:18 PM #

    “Lowe-apologists are running out of excuses.”

    In year 2? Not at NC State. Excuses don’t run out at NC State until year 6. Then, you either step down as Les did or you finally execute Stage 1 of “the plan” and get someone else in to install a new “offense” and coach the team for you while simultaneously promising a top 5 recruit that he will be handed the entire program to carry on his skinny Harlem back. Stage 2 of “the plan” is to get a point guard—this usually happens around year 11. Then, it is straight up gold from there like a venture capitalist hockey stick projection circa 1999…

  8. choppack1 03/24/2008 at 4:25 PM #

    Noah – Do you think Lowe “blew off” recruiting for this year? (The class w/ CJ Williams and Julius Mays).

    You can’t really hold him responsible for the 1 man class he “inherited” when he got here since he wasn’t even announced until after the signing period had long since expired.

  9. Rick 03/24/2008 at 5:40 PM #

    When it comes to noah’s hatred of Lowe he can and does blame him for anything and everything.

  10. Noah 03/24/2008 at 7:22 PM #

    I blame him for anything and everything that he actually did.

    And yes, I blame him for signing a bunch of wing players this year. I blame him for giving scholarships to people like Degand and M. Johnson and f-ing Bartosz Lewandowski (a firable offense in it’s own right).

    SFN: I’ve got no problem with criticizing the Marques Johnson move. But, the Degand move is still in the assessment period and right now I don’t see how that was a bad move.

    Additionally, the Lewandowski move is completely irrelevant and made no impact on the program. So we used one of our multiple available scholarships on a 7’5 guy for only one year? That didn’t hurt anyone. If a 7’5 guy shows promise then you’ve gotten something that nobody else has. If he doesn’t, then he moves on into the abyss. That is exactly what happened. No scholarship impact to us at all. How could something so benign and irrelevant be such a bad thing?

    The REAL story there is that we had so many UNUSED scholarships because the previous staff (and AD’s struggles in the search process) left the cupboard bare of not only talent, but also numbers.

  11. blackdom 03/24/2008 at 8:40 PM #

    Noah : You are correct Sid is to blame for that product on the floor and for moe ,larry and curly pt guards he brought in as HIS recruits. Also responsible for a system,discipline,offense and defense.
    He must be made of teflon because most of you all give him a lot a slack,you want to give him 5,6 years open your eyes I think you see where we are heading .

  12. StateFans 03/25/2008 at 7:10 AM #

    ^ How is wanting to give the coach 3 to 4 years the same as giving him 5 or 6 years?

    Most people whom I respect are consistent on giving Coach Lowe a fair shake for 3 to 4 years. That isn’t asking so much.

  13. Classof89 03/25/2008 at 8:25 AM #

    I wonder if we have a seven win season next year if the powers that be will have the cajones to pull the plug the way UNC did on Matt Doherty…

  14. Noah 03/25/2008 at 8:35 AM #

    I couldn’t disagree more with SFN on Lewandowski. You can blow it off all you want by saying, “Well, that guy’s gone so it doesn’t matter.” However, It completely ignores the fact that Sidney Lowe decided to allocate 8.5 percent of his total scholarships to a guy who would NEVER contribute a thing to his basketball program…a guy who would never do anything but sit at the end of the bench and clap for his teammates. Lowe got bailed out of that horrible decision by a terrible knee injury.

    And yes, I would criticize Herb Sendek for giving Adam Simons and the Flatt kid (Jeremy?) scholarships too. I actually don’t have a problem with holding back scholarships. It’s far easier to find and sign an ACC caliber player in the future than it is to turn a non-ACC caliber player into a guy who can help you.

    Why is it a big deal? Because it is illustrative of horrible judgement. And have we not seen that over and over again from Lowe? It’s poor judgement to ignore strength and conditioning. It’s poor judgement to ignore a cancerous rift in your team. There’s more to this and as it comes to light, we’ll come back to it.

    Degand is, on his best day with two healthy knees, basically a backup point guard. With him, we still lost to ECU and we still looked horrible down in the Old Spice tourney.

    Why was it a bad move? Because he was the third-string point guard on a crappy Iowa State team. You can sort of rationalize Marques Johnson, if you ignore the fact that the coaches had tape on him that they could have looked at and which would have told them everything they needed to know. Tennessee was a good team with a ton of point guards and Johnson was sort of squeezed out.

    But Iowa State sucked. And there were two people that were better than Degand. You want to take a backup from UCLA? Okay, maybe there’s something there. But the STARTERS at Iowa State wouldn’t help you.

    I don’t need to look at a single bit of tape of the third-string quarterback at Rice or Sam Houston State to know that he can’t play quarterback at NC State. No matter how bad Daniel Evans is, you won’t solve that problem by bringing in a scrub off a terrible team.

    Lowe IS going to get a long time to prove himself. I’d be willing to bet that unless he removes himself from the equation, he’ll get the better part of a decade. It’s worth repeating…the only basketball coach to ever get fired from NC State was Jim Valvano.

    But I was horribly opposed to Lowe from the start. I said on this board that he would be a specatcular disaster. NOTHING has happened to change my opinion of that. On the court, off the court, he has been every bit the disaster that I thought Lowe (and Steve Lavin) would be. A couple of days of hot shooting by Brandon Costner last March have not erased two years of terrible leadership.

  15. ShootingGuard 03/25/2008 at 1:40 PM #

    Like SFN, I can see questioning one of the offers like say MJ as a bad move but not all of them. For example, Degand was brought in completely as insurance should Chris Wright not come through—and to act like Lee Fowler isn’t to blame for the recruiting mess Lowe found himself in is completely stupid as Chris Wright PUBLICLY stated he couldn’t figure out why NC State couldn’t get a coach weeks into the search. Gee, I wonder if that just *might* have had him second guess NC State a little bit in addition to allowing Freeman and others to jump in and re-recruit Wright while Fowler was busy trying to read Beilein’s out clause.

    It’s pretty sad to guys apt to defend Herb’s great use of scholarships for Justin Flatt, Adam Simons, and others (just not a point guard) totally trashing Sid in year 2—as if Lee Fowler had ANY other options as far as coaches go after exhausting all of his options like the great Steve Lavin. Hell, even Sid was smart enough to recognize what a totally mess of a program Fowler had made and got a 6th year after agreeing to a 5 yr deal—it was THAT bad.

  16. Noah 03/26/2008 at 8:05 AM #

    Okay, first of all…you need to re-read what I said. I am not defending Herb at all for bringing in Flatt and Adam Simons. I’m attacking Herb for doing that. There is NO POINT whatsoever in bringing in non-ACC players if you have any hope of fielding a competitive team. It’s far FAR better to simply hold on to those scholarships and try again next year than to be saddled with a guy for four years (or talk the guy into transferring) who can’t help you one damn bit.

    Secondly, as far as bringing in someone for insurance — why not bring me in? I still have five years of eligibility.

    Farnold Degand had proven that he couldn’t play in the ACC. It was quantifiable. He couldn’t beat out two other scrub point guards for a crappy Iowa State team…but he’s going to help us? No.

  17. Noah 03/26/2008 at 8:07 AM #

    Whoops…I just looked upstream and either my previous post about Simons and Flatt has been deleted or simply went missing.

    So…ignore my exasperation in the previous post.

  18. ShootingGuard 03/27/2008 at 11:53 AM #

    Noah,

    I don’t disagree with some of your questioning with regard to scholarships (or the S&C either for that matter).

    I just think you are incredibly short-sided and ridiculous with regard to:

    LOWE: By the time Lee Fowler finally got to Lowe, there was no other choice—so maybe your disdain for Lowe should first be directed at getting rid of Fowler so that we have some shot at getting a decent coach when Lowe fails as you have predicted. So, get rid of Fowler first. Then, fire away at Lowe—who was hired by Lee Fowler.

    INSURANCE: In building a program, you have to get momentum early and have some luck. Pete Gillen was a successful college coach prior to UVA. He chose to run everyone off at UVA when he came in and free up scholarships and was able to bring in 2 McD AA’s in Mapp and Watson immediately. Unfortunately, he chose NOT to go the insurance route, so, when Mapp went down, Gillen was pretty much cooked and NEVER recovered, even though he had a McD AA stud in Watson down low. Lowe & Co. chose to go the insurance route with Degand. While you can question buying too much insurance after that, based on the NC State injury history, needing to have bodies and hopefully get early momentum for program rebuild, and the fact that only UNC and other similar programs get stars to come sit the bench, I don’t have a problem with Lowe spending a scholarship on Degand’s speed, etc. as insurance. Plus, kids like Chris Wright build their relationships years in advance—Chris got to know Herb when he was in the 9th grade—so not only was there no one left on the recruiting heap, it was pre-determined that Lowe would need a full recruiting cycle to even have a chance at catching up with other coaches except for a few special situations. (Before you jump on the “THAT’S WHY I WANTED A COLLEGE COACH AND HATE LOWE BLAH BLAH BLAH” please refer back to the fact that you weren’t the AD, Lee Fowler was, Lee Fowler couldn’t get anyone else to take the job, and we have Lowe as a result.)

    (As another aside, as terrible as Degand was and the team at the Old Spice, didn’t we beat a Sweet 16 team there and do better at that crappy tourney than at least 2 other NCAA teams? Didn’t we beat another Sweet 16 team like a week later with crappy Degand at the helm?)

    LEE FOWLER’S IMPACT ON RECRUITING & A QUICK START: I think you totally and completely misjudge this for some reason. It makes no sense. How the hell do you act like Lee Fowler’s drag on humiliating coaching search did not damage the program badly and set Lowe’s efforts back on the recruiting trail. You would think the public questioning by Chris Wright would be enough for you as well as Davis and Werner making it pretty clear they were likely to head out—BEFORE Lowe was named coach. It may be ruined now based on this season’s results, but Lowe got on the top 2-3 lists of a bunch of top recruits for 2009 once he got a little time in—despite Fowler’s waste of time and national humiliation of the program. If Lowe doesn’t come through with a 2009 class, he will surely fail. (Before you start the “YOU CAN’T KEEP SID BASED ON A FUTURE RECRUITING CLASS BLAH BLAH BLAH WTNY BLAH BLAH BLAH” again please refer back to the fact that you aren’t the AD, Lee Fowler is unfortunately, and since Lee Fowler couldn’t get anyone else to take the job when he had the chance, it matters not what Lowe does or who Lowe recruits because the program is fighting a real uphill battle until it gets rid of “Coach” Fowler.)

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