A counter to that is SU has beefed up their hoops infrastructure following last summer's portal debacle. They added scouting and analytics leadership, supposedly pumped money into NIL, opted in to the player compensation cap, etc.
We'll see how that all pans out. Maybe it won't. But they have been acting like a program that recognizes they made serious mistakes and urgently need to fix them.
We will certainly see if these efforts bare fruit or are just smoke and mirrors lacking real teeth. I hope it's meaningful change, of course.
It’s not about being serious or not. It’s the heavy anchor we’ve been carrying around with us since the last years of the JB era. Because of all he did for the program and sustaining success for 40+ years, the powers that be felt they couldn’t fire him. Even when the mediocrity finally gave them the hand to push him out, we had to hire one of his guys or he and his supporters were gonna go scorched earth. We should have conducted a national search for a top proven coach, as many on here argued, but Wildhack didn’t have the stones to go his own way. Unlike Tom Jurich did at Louisville when he fired Crum 25 years ago. Loyalty and trying to keep it in the Cuse family means a lot to many people. But that doesn’t mean we’re not a serious program. It just means the AD didn’t have the stones to anger JB and his BOT supporters or the foresight to see that it’s what needed to be done.
If JW tried to go outside the program, he would have been fired.
He did what he was told by the decision makers above his pay garde - make it a loyalty hire and forgo a national search.
The Athletic Department has been used by the university as a cash cow for a long time and we're now in a changing world where that revenue needs to be fully or mostly re-invested back into the main sports to be competitive.
From the outside loooking in, it seems the administration is having a hard time with this new reality. They liked the teet of AD revenue and their ability to reallocate significant portions of that revenue to elsewhere in the university. They do not want that stream to dry up.
Also, the power dynamic with BOT and old guard supporters has negatively effected how the program is run. That is a big problem.
All schools deal with this to some degree, but its gotten to dysfunctional levels at SU and a lot of the decisions made look highly questionable with a long chain of missteps and bad decisions in succession.
What good decisions do we make?
How "serious" are we?
Do we make hard, positive decisions that really move the program forward or serial, poor half-measures that we try and PR-spin as meaningful change when it's not and/or move the goalposts when the results of those bad decisions come up woefully short??
The school seems much more focused on the latter than the former, hence why many feel the program suffers from serial poor decision making and mismanagement and why the program is unserious.
It's not like the evidence of all this isn't staring us in the face at this point.
