quote:
Sounds like he has a pretty realistic and accurate understanding of how college basketball works these days: you don’t build a program you build a team. Basically, a new coach has one off-season to figure it out and put a team together. Gone are the days of planning to finally have a championship team 3-4 years down the road. It doesn’t work like that. The players will be gone long before then and the fans will already want you gone too.

This is what gets me as I read thread after thread about the same topic, stating: "You have to give the man at least three years to build his program".

Do these same people also believe that mail is still delivered on horseback? Basketball has always been a sport where you can build a team very quickly, due to the limited number of players who are needed compared to other sports. But in the old days, you couldn't just go out and get what you wanted without establishing some kind of model of success to attract better recruits who could get you over the top. The one and done age meant that every team who was any good was probably having to "rebuild" every year. Now, with the portal, one and done, and NIL, you can't make the excuse that you had too much roster turnover, when almost every team will have major turnover, every year; and you also have no excuse to not be able to construct a competitive roster at a place like LSU, pretty much immediately, if you are any good at recruiting and your team isn't absolutely terrible. But I don't know how well he's going to recruit if LSU struggles to even win another game this year.

So we'll see how that goes. But the whole "at least three years" thing is pretty unrealistic. If next year is like this one, I'd be stunned if he got a third year. If next year is a huge turnaround, then we won't be asking ourselves if he can build a winner by year three. He'd have already gotten it done. But then he'd need to get ready to prove he can sustain it... Because it's a year to year business now, more than it's ever been.

I firmly believe, despite the opinions expressed by many, that this roster was good enough on paper to win 8 or 9 league games this year. So I do not consider this season as just being a mulligan that we should write off. But I will say in McMahon's defense that it was a particularly short off-season, under the circumstances, and so while I don't think it's an excuse for being this bad, I think he should (and will, undoubtedly) get the opportunity to show what he can do with an entire off-season and recruiting cycle to see if he can get better players, and get the right players for his system. But that's it. If it's another terrible season, I don't think LSU waits around for year three.

This post was edited on 1/30/23 at 4:33 am