re: Here's to Dale Brown!

Hey Puff, Dale WASN'T better than any player at LSU. During my freshmen and soph. years at LSU we had lines a mile long outside of the Ag. Center to watch Pistol play. It was impossible to get inside of that old place if LSU was playing Kentucky and the game was on TV to showcase Pistol and the great Kentucky teams. Dale had fantastic talent but couldn't coach. LSU was beating Indiana at one point during the NCAA tournament and Bobby Knight said that when he looked at the side and saw who was coaching LSU, he wasn't worried anymore. Indiana beat us too.

The one and the same Bobby, but a win is a win and he got one. Bobby didn't piss off the NCAA so he got away with crap. One day Indiana got fed up with his crap and fired him. LSU had the talent, but Dale just wasn't a good coach. Like a previous poster said, the assistants did a lot of the coaching. It was stated by Chris Jackson that if Rick Huckabee would have been the head coach, LSU would have won it all. Dale didn't listen to Rick when it counted and it cost LSU the game.

Dale Brown was a big disappointment. LSU should have won a national championship with Chris Jackson, Shaq and Stanley Roberts.

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Dale Brown was a big disappointment. LSU should have won a national championship with Chris Jackson, Shaq and Stanley Roberts.

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That goes well with your other stupid statement:

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I don't remember which year it was, but CJ averaged 50 points per game.

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LINK

Other than than Bob Petit and Pistol Pete, basketball was an afterthought at LSU. Dale Brown built a program and recruited quality talent to Baton Rouge. Give him credit and thanks for that.

Here's to the $90,000 dollar car that John Williams drove!

The witch hunt was on for a while. Dale spoke out vehemently against Proposition 48, along with others like John Thompson and Nolan Richardson.

Meanwhile, Dale was getting recruits from places that the program just never will today have a chance at. John Williams from Los Angeles; Ice Reynolds from Brooklyn; Bernard Woodside out of Hempstead, NY; Chris Jackson from his own mother and Miss State out of Gulfport (an area that was 100 percent pro State); Jose Vargas out of the Dominican Republic; Ricky Blanton out of Miami; Shaq at the age of 13 from Germany air force base and later San Antonio; Geert Hammick from Didam, The Netherlands; Mike Hansen from Barcelona via Tennessee Martin; Jamie Brandon from Chicago; Stanley Roberts (and his coach) from Hopkins, SC; Maurice Williamson from New Haven, CT; Justin Anderson from Long Beach, CA; and last but not least on my list - the shortlived Tito Horford. God thanks be that we parted ways with Tito when we did or else we might have seen the probation hammer ten years earlier.

Dale traveled a lot and therefore found a ton of weird and wild talent from Vargas to Hammick to some one game wonder named Hernand Montenegro (remember him???) to Horford out of the DR to Danny Moscovitz of Israel and Roman Roubenchenko from Romania. Jesus be blind if a fifth of all of the foreigners were worth a damn...but Dale wouldn't have it any other way. He'd recruit a Clarence Caesar from Iowa, LA...a Wayne Simms from DeRidder...and a Vernel Singleton from Natchez. Then, he'd go find bench warmer talent like Kyle McKenzie out of Cincinnati, OH or Richard Krejewski out of North Dakota. Hell, Dale was sent around the world to speak by NIKE and all sorts of groups and the university. I think he just made that his time to recruit. He'd see a Yetti in NePal and recruit it. He'd walk into a Turkish prison and assist one of the prisoners in escaping so that he could come to LSU and take 3 seasons to get eligible and play a combined 12 minutes. When it comes to unorthodox, see Dale Brown.

Despite the cheating, the hot temper that cost LSU the '92 SEC tourney and a much better seed, and all of the crazy recruiting of athletes who couldn't spell their own name or those who spoke not a word of English, Dale made things happen. From the Superdome to the '92 Duke game to the Final 4 appearance from a team that suffered through academic ineligibility and chicken pox, Dale was behind it all. LSU basketball was only known for Pistol Pete and bad NIT teams before Dale Brown. 1981 might be one of the greatest sports teams to not win a championship of all time. 17-1 in SEC play? Whoa. LSU is never going to be a basketball school and NEVER was even under Brown's continuous post season sppearances, but it sure was a helluva ride.

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Under Dale LSU made 10 ncaa tournaments in a row from the early 80s to the early 90s. During his time until the mid 90s LSU was a national program. Give him credit for that. At the end he most likely got too distracted with travel and his business ventures.

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I agree. Read my next post. I give Dale all of the credit. The man could put on a circus.

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Ronnie and Randy show didn't quite work out

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Indeed a shame. Randy was supposed to be the one that worked out....damn that knee. Ronnie, along with Maurice Carter, is the greatest LSU basketball player that 90 percent of fans between 25-35 couldn't tell you a thing about.

Imagine had Randy been healthy and Ronnie been even better as his compliment AND LSU had somehow gotten Othella Harrington to tell Georgetown to frick off and he become our center? That 1994-95 team - the first in over a decade to not go dancing - could have been as good as U Mass and Arkansas and UCLA, etc. Imagine:

G - Randy Livingston (100 percent healthy)
G - Ronnie Henderson
c - Othella Harrington
f - Clarence Caeasar
f - Jamie Brandon

off the bench - Andre Owens, Linear Burns, and what if we kept Paul Marshall and not let him transfer to NLU? Basically, we just needed a 4 star big man. We were so close to getting Harrington...story of our lives. It was similar to just missing out on DJ Augustine. Sometimes, one player is a 10-15 win differential.

Dale has probably 50 wins that are unforgettable while Brady had about ten and TJ currently has about three. The '90 Loyola Mmt and UNLV games were two of 50. The '89 Georgetown game, too.


What Dale's downfall was, however, was the big picture. Dale rarely kept teams together. Hell his last tourney team might as well have been a group of strangers meeting for the first time the day of the game. He always went for atheltes who were academic risks and/or NBA lotto picks before the NBA REALLY owned the shite outta college basketball.

He did miracles with underdogs - '86 and '87 as prime examples. Dale only went as far as the 2nd round there after. In '88-'89, he lost in the first rounds. He beaat 12 seed Nova in '90 as his first post season win since DePaul of '87. Dale's last tourney win was 2 years after in '92 over BYU. The 2nd round never ket hin out. Also, Dale struggled to get far in the SEC tourneys. LSU was bounced by an awful AUburn team two years in a row in '90 and '91. Dale managed to get off the bubble by beating what might have been Vandy's greatest all-time team in '93 and make it into the SEC tourney finals - first time since 1987. In '92, LSU might have won the SECT as they were red hot and finding their groove. The carlus Groves incident, which I have become tired of describing and reliving....well, it didn't have to be that bad and Dale made it turn into a spectacle that cost the Tigers a 4-5 seed as opposed to a 7 seed and an easy, easy way for the NCAA committee to once again find a way for Brown and Bob Knight to have another rematch. Basically, Dale was best friends to many, but worst enemy to himself.