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Yes, we will get a buyout check from Vandy unless they don't want to pay that, in which case they'll play the contractually obligated game. This was never a question -- we're getting a game from Vandy or we're getting a check.

He will need to work in 2020-2021.

Bryce's net worth between his Vandy contract (of which he will receive most if not all despite the firing), his NBA earnings, investments and his very respectable six-figure salary during his Valpo years is probably north of $25M. He won't "need" to work anywhere the rest of his life unless he wants to.

Look, I realize Bama is football-first but if that AD things Tide fans won't be all over him for hiring a guy who just got fired at Vandy, he thinks he's more invincible than he actually is. They'd hire a successful coach away from Vandy in a heartbeat, but one who just went winless in the SEC?

Bryce has two paths now -- go back to a midmajor and win for a few years and prove that the Vandy situation was a fluke, or go get a top assistant's gig at a P5 for a few years and continue kicking butt on the recruiting trail so that another school is willing to give him another chance with a high-major program because his ability to draw talent is undeniable.

I'll happily eat crow if I'm wrong on this but a fired HC with such a short track record at the P5 level is going to have a reeaallly hard time walking into another P5 job without a stopover somewhere else for a few seasons at least.

Also, y'all are nuts if you wouldn't trade him for Lottich in a heartbeat. (No, it won't happen for a number of reasons. But that still needs to be said).

Mass transfers means there's something fundamentally wrong with the coaching staff and program. Period. Find one healthy program who has lost this many transfers in one season. You can't.

Sorry, but anything short of a full cleaning of the house at this point is a reshuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Also, the last-minute nature of the NIT means fewer ticket sales. Most NBA buildings require a crowd of 7 or 8K to break even on the rental fees.

any new coach would be faced with a lot of the same obstacles.

Yes, they would if the change occurred in a vacuum. The assumption is that a coaching change would be accompanied by other investments and/or fundraising that recognize we're in a grown-up league with other grown-up programs now.

What we're seeing is that the Drew family, through force of personality and skill, was able to outcoach a level of complacency and mismanagement in other areas of the athletic dept. and we're paying the price for it now. How many times over the years did you hear some form of "we don't need to spend money on X because we're winning without that" or "we don't need a better facility when we don't sell out every game now" or "the ARC ain't pretty but it's a tough place to play for opponents!"

All those years of letting stuff slide are coming back around now. And spare me the "landscape has changed" stuff. We've known that for several years now. We've known it since P5s spent the entirely of Alec's junior year salivating and openly recruiting him. If Lottich wasn't addressing that reality until the season was over, especially when anyone with a set of eyes could tell you that Freeman would have had much bigger opportunities had he not signed early, then again, that's on our staff, not the "landscape." Players aren't dumb -- they can see when a staff and administration have no plan or commitment.

Rather than asking Valpo fans to swallow another season of certain mediocrity because they are too timid to cut their losses when they should, it'd be nice if they gave us some reason to believe that they get it and will invest in the program like we're in the Valley instead of the old Mid-Con.

Lottich should have hired the Donny Bosco Coach former almuni.  Would have kept Skara and had a good coach and recruiter on staff.  I bet Lottich was intimidated by him.  I promise we would be in a better situation than we are now.

No. A million times no. You don't let h.s. "coaches," player's relatives, or slimy street agents dictate your university's coaching hires. You can't. Once you've opened that pandora's box, it's over. Although Skara leaving hurt, you simply don't outsource hiring decisions like this to people not involved with the program and who are only looking out for their personal gain. Not now, not ever. This is one of the few decisions Lottich made that I back 100%. That would have been a shortcut that would have led to MAJOR problems for us somewhere down the road.

Man, that statement is infuriating and I was prepared to be infuriated when I started reading it.

No, no, no. If Greg wants the job, he can interview and beat out the top contenders from the national search. No more simply handing the program down to the next guy based on connections/religion/etc. We've hit our limitations on that.

That's because our athletic dept. always does everything on the cheap and it's finally caught up to them. They're gonna circle the wagons rather than act as responsible stewards of the program.

If there isn't a coaching change announced by this weekend, nobody should renew their season tickets. It's long past time for Valpo fans to put the pressure on the university to commit and invest in this program, or we will no longer continue to do so.

Then, go out and actually conduct a national coaching search. Despite our current sorry state, there are tons of experienced D1 head coaches and P5 assistants who would still leap at the chance to take over a program in the Valley with a long history of success as a program. No religious litmus tests, no garbage about "institutional fit," go hire the best available *coach*. And then give him the resources to succeed, and that includes announcing a plan for facilities improvements.

Lottich had one job to do once it became clear this season was going nowhere -- keep the talent in the program so we have a fighting chance at being an experienced and deep team next year. He failed at that, too. The most promising freshman we've had since Peters took a look at the program and said "nah." Along with two seniors. That's an across-the-board rejection of his leadership of the program and system.

I agree but who knows what will happen if there's a new coach in Muncie next year.

Ball State finished a losing season tonight and talk on the Twitter machine tonight is that they could be making a coaching change as well. So put that game into the "not finalized" category, too.

Probably not meant this way but this comes across so negative towards a move that I think most people in B. Drew's situation would make at the time. He's going from the Horizon League to the SEC fer christ's sake.

Hey, get paid. I won't blame you. I'd do it, too. But that comes at a price. Bryce left a gig where he had lifetime job security for the bright lights and the big money. No shame in that -- most people would make the same choice. However, there's a big string attached to all of that, as he's learning this season.

[junior college]

he will be the first coach in Valpo's D-I history to be fired for lack of performance.  That's about 40 years of time over five head coaches, including himself.  Think about that for a second. 

This is a bit misleading. We would have had previous coaches fired for poor performance if VU had given the slightest care about performance. In fact, one of the reason Tom Smith quit is that nobody in VU's administration cared enough to put him on the hot seat for lack of wins. Rochlitz was in that same boat, too -- he left VU for a junior college job because of the lack of institutional commitment to the basketball program.

Unfortunately, as we see with the facilities issue, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

He's not entirely wrong, though there is a chance the A-10 could end up being a one-bid league, as well. But 3 bids in a 14 team league is significantly better than being in a one-bid, 10, 11 or 12 team league. Let's even say that SLU was one of the ten. Well, that basically takes your odds of being a tourney team from 10% to 21.5% in any given year. That's huge.

Largest newspaper in Nashville saying that Bryce deserves to be fired, but likely won't be:

https://www.tennessean.com/story/sports/columnist/joe-rexrode/2019/03/13/vanderbilt-basketball-bryce-drew-stephanie-white-malcolm-turner/3127545002/

I know people (including Bryce) are gonna point to Homer's rough start at VU and cite that as evidence of why he should stay, but that's simply not gonna fly. For one thing, that was 30 years ago. For another, Homer was still being paid in the five digits at a program that had never won before (indeed, one where the "should we drop to Division II?" talk was an annual debate). There was almost no fan or media pressure calling for his job, because the Valpo program had little in the way of either fans or media attention at the time. Homer was a good representative of the program and there was no downside or risk in keeping him on as long as possible.

This ain't that. You have a coach with a nearly $17M contract going winless in the SEC in year three of his tenure. In a major city, in a major conference, with a history of success, with fans and big-market media with big-time expectations of their team. You can't take the big-league dough in the prestige conference and expect the same amount of slack your dad got at a struggling Mid-Con program in a town of 30,000 people three decades ago. This is a level of scrutiny that the Drew family has never been under (maybe Scott at Baylor a little bit, but media in Waco is not media in SEC-land).

Do I think Bryce should be fired? Of course not -- I want him to succeed at Vandy, and given the Garland injury, he should especially be given another year. But I don't think anyone should shed tears if Vandy decides otherwise. This is the business, which you fully accepted when you took the big payday, and coaches who have done better have been fired by other P5 schools in recent years.

The NCAA could make this process a lot easier and a lot more fair with a simple rule -- need to be above .500 in your conference to be eligible for an at-large berth. Anything less, win the auto-bid. It's a completely fair and reasonable standard to meet. At a certain point, you have to win games. Anything else rewards mediocrity.

Those arguing for the outdated notion that a Belmont couldn't compete in the B1G could easily prove that on the court by scheduling them. (The folks who argue this always omit the inconvenient fact that playing a B1G schedule would mean that they'd get 10 B1G teams going to Belmont's building and if there's one thing P5 teams hate, it's playing on the road). As it stands with our one data point, Belmont came closer to beating Purdue at Mackey than IU did.

What we've actually seen in the tourney is 7 midmajor teams in the Final Four the past 12 years and the top overall seed from the ACC getting smashed into oblivion by a 16 seed that was the 2nd place team in the America East. The paradigm has changed and the old arguments won't suffice anymore.

Are they on the Atlantic?.... or are in they in Missouri and in a valley?   

They can be data-driven or they can be self-congratulatory.

Or they can be in a multi-bid league consistently or one that is gonna struggle to send two.

(But seriously, they are in a league with five other Catholic institutions now, vs. joining a league with only one other. Don't undersell that -- it's probably a big reason they feel allegiance to the A-10 despite being out on an island geographically).

Only contracts I think are definite are GW at home and BSU on the road. Vandy is supposed to come here next year but like any P5 I'll believe that when I see the final schedule and not a moment before.

We're also in the Paradise Jam in the U.S. Virgin Islands along with Bowling Green, Cincinnati, Fordham, Grand Canyon, Illinois State, Nevada and Western Kentucky.

The other thing this guy should remember is that the HL , in the process of doing NKU a favor and admitting them a year before they were tourney-eligible almost certainly helped prevent VU from getting an at-large bid that year, even though we beat them handily twice. NKU was an absolute RPI anchor that year. If we had been able to replace even one of those two games with a Top 150 opponent, there's a good chance the Crusaders nab the at-large bid we just missed out on.

A more interesting question is "what are they spending it on?" Their spending is a huge outlier versus the rest of the conference, though it is pretty clear that they are not head and shoulders above the rest of the conference (like Gonzaga is in the WCC).

A chunk of it is on Moser's new contract, but most of the rest just started this year. If they continue to spend like that above the rest of the league year after year, they absolutely will eventually dominate the Valley like that. The correlation on this point is pretty clear at the mid-major level.

Yeah, although using the phrase "beneath us" is a realllly bad look for a team with NKU's, uh, very modest track record so far, he's got a point. We'd have been furious with a "showdown" like this putting the Summit League on equal footing with us when we were in the HL. Also, they've just seen the HL office lie to their membership in order to screw everyone besides Indy out of an opportunity to host the conference tournament. They're certainly justified in not taking anything that comes from the HL at face value and wanting to look for a new home.

(All that said, as a stand-alone scheduling agreement, it's harmless. Some of these teams definitely struggle to get decent home games in the non-conference, and this guarantees a midmajor home-and-home every two years).

Despite good things happening to a person that doesn't deserve them (Wardle), I'm instead going to glass-half-full this and choose to be very happy for the Bradley fan base. They are a loyal bunch and Peoria rallies around BU, win or lose, in a way I wish Valpo/NWI would with us. Good to see that loyalty rewarded with a bid to the Dance and I hope they get a winnable matchup.