re: After the Brown years and the Brady resurgence, did LSU basketball become unprioritized?

Right now... MBB should be at 5 or hell, more likely ranked at 10.

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Hard to recover from losing everyone. NIL? Recruiting in general?

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He’s in year 3 and has recruited just fine. He’s yet to prove he can coach in the SEC. That’s the problem.

Dale hung on too long and then the NCAA came along. Pretty much killed the program.

Brady brought it back some but it lacked the excitement and star power of earlier years. I mean, we would go toe to toe with the big boys during the regular season, Kentucky, North Carolina, Duke, uNVL, Arizona, Loyola Marymount, etc.

The administration has not exactly made basketball a priority either. Wade was the first coach we've had since Brown who generated some excitement in the program. Hence one reason many are sore about how it all went down.

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here was little to no marketing of the program.

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I really don't think marketing is the issue, a dynamic coach whose team wins is the only marketing that will make a difference. And even then unless you get a Unicorn like a Pearl or Mulkey even that will take years to change the culture.

The point is Houston has been doing it without highly ranked recruits. By comparison we’ve had more 4 and 5* recruits than Houston during Sampson’s tenure there so they’re not winning with highly skilled guys, they’re using raw athletic players and highly aggressive defense to get it done which is something we can copy. I’m not suggesting we exclusively use local kids but you use them to create a foundation with a couple guys here and there sprinkled in. They’re also not an overly big team, their bigs usually range from 6-7 to 6-9 and are physical but not what you’d consider highly skilled. They’re bangers not the 6-10 and up more potentially skilled and polished guys we tend to chase. It provides some advantages, you don’t have to develop guys as much and you’ll keep guys longer in your system. For what our state provides you can copy their model.

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when did the student section move from the side to behind the goal? a pary of LSU basketball died when that happened...

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Me too. I believe it was 2010 (maybe 2011). Apparently more revenue could be made from the side court seats.

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True. But Dale was a helluva a promoter for LSU basketball. He understood marketing.

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He was very much like Pearl in many ways. Both had the media coming to them for quotes - but my point is these focused marketing campaigns won't move the needle much. It's got to driven by personality and success IMHO.

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No one said otherwise. But we had some success under Brady and it just didn't catch fire.

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Brady’s teams were wildly inconsistent. We’d have a good season and start to get some traction and then we’d follow it up with a mediocre or bad season.

And then his personality was just the icing.

Basketball has never been prioritized. Maybe in the 80s it had a surge but once baseball exploded it took 2nd place for good. After Shaq and then probation all the air was let out of the program and nobody has been able to get it back. Even the 2006 year I remember being at a game that Jan and the crowd was small. It wasn’t until the end of that season that fans really started showing up. We haven’t repeated anything close to that success since. We haven’t been able to consistently compete on a national level and the fans ultimately don’t care about an average program.

There’s just no reason to get excited. No NBA caliber studs to promote. No coach that is out there ripping his shirt off like Bruce Pearl. Just an avg coach and team that plays well some games.