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Message: [QUOTE="DomeHolmes, post: 5736999, member: 10113"] I keep seeing this debate rage on, and had lots of free time at the airport to take a look. Two years ago there were 21 teams that won 7 or fewer games. (Only 8 teams won 4 or fewer, so I increased the pool of teams I looked at to 7 or fewer). Of those teams, only 2 of 21 improved enough to make the tournament. Siena and LIU. Of those two, Siena had the greatest improvement in wins. (+19) of all 21 bad teams No team other than Siena or LIU won more than 18 games. So by using the standard of who improved their team the most, the answer is Gerry. Then I looked at all the teams that made the tournament as a mid major or low major this year seeded 10 or higher, and looked at their records two years ago to see where most tournament teams started from. Their win totals in 2024 were as follows: 25, 24, 18 , 20, 18, 11, 20, 15, 14, 20, 17, 17, 11, 19, 16, 23, 30, 24, 16, 15, 17, ……5 and 4. So most started with good enough teams/ and or programs to have won 15+ games 2 years ago. (South Florida was a 25 win team two years ago). Only four had fewer than 14 wins two years ago, and only two had 5 or fewer. Those two were Siena and Prairieview A&M. (Prairieview also got to the tournament by winning their conference tournament, but their record was nine and nine in conference, so Gerry’s conference record was better. So clearly this shows MOST tournament teams from the lower levels have been consistently competitive. And illustrates it’s VERY hard to take a bad non P5 team to the tournament in two years. The numbers don’t lie. By using the metric of who took the worst team and did the best with them, Gerry, by the numbers, did the best job. To be clear, this is no guarantee of his success here. I have maintained that anybody we hire except for a very select handful of $6+ million coaches, is not guaranteed success here or anywhere. But clearly he has done more than just have one close game versus Duke if you look at his body of coaching work. I don’t have any positive or negative feelings toward Hodgson. He may or may not have done well here. However, if we fired Red last year and not this year, we would be looking at him being a two-year coach at Arkansas State, who did not win their conference outright, and did not make the tournament. And everyone would be considering him as “unproven” just like Gerry. Then he took over a team that won 25 games two years ago, and brought them back to 25 wins. Now this year, if we passed on Gerry, and he got the one year experience at a higher level school Hodgson got, and he crushed it there, we would have zero chance of getting him here, because we would have a new coach locked into a five-year deal. A lot of people have said that every coach has “passion”, and there’s nothing unique about Gerry being a passionate guy . Bobby Knight said it best. “Plenty of people have the desire to win. Very few people have the desire to do the preparation it takes to win”. My personal opinion, and I could be wrong, Is Gerry is a winner, he will be better at the preparation that I believe Red failed at, and I believe he will find the right players, and require those players to operate the same way. [/QUOTE]

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