With respect to the NCAA tourney.....
 

Danny Ainge's 4 years in Provo:
77-78 No tourney invite
78-79 First round choke
79-80 First round choke
80-81 BYU's last visit beyond round 2 and won as many tourney games as they have since.

Even the great Danny Ainge was part of back to back choke 1st round losses. I think that was with a great supporting cast, by BYU standards. What do we learn from this? BYU's NCAA tourney history has sucked ass for a long time and that all is not lost for next year.

I still believe this team was better than it showed against aTm, and if/when they get that monkey off their back it could be good ride. Even Archaea might smile.....

I think fans are irrational about tournament wins. Getting a win in the NCAA tournament is the same statistically as finishing in the top 10 in D-1 football. Neither has happened very often for the vast majority of D-1 sports programs.

Thanks, I was wondering how Ainge's first few years went. You must have read my mind.

I will smile with just one win, and I'd better record it for posterity as history shows us we might not do it again for two generations or a generation and a half. A generation is thirteen years. It's been more than a generation since our last tourney win and almost a generation since our last top ten finish in football.

It almost sounds as if BYU fans need to become the beneficiaries of generational cascading trusts in order to reap the benefits of BYU's tourney wins and Top Ten finishes in football.

But to be honest, with as solid as the Y has been over the past, you would think they could have pulled out at least one win. Yes, seeding has not been fabulous, but there have been many winnable games for them over the years.

Frank Arnold was a terrible coach and an awful human being. He buried his talents.

How do you figure? 32 teams get first round wins. I would say Sweet 16 is like the top 10 or a little lower.

BYU took third place in the WAC that Elite 8 year. Utah and Wyoming tied for first and Utah, by the way, went to the Sweet 16. This was their team:

"BYU made it to the NCAA Final 8 with a team starring future NBA players Danny Ainge, Greg Kite and Fred Roberts. Arnold struggled after the 1981 season and finished coaching at BYU in 1983."

Underachieved badly even that year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Arnold

I had forgotten that. When was the last BYU had three NBA players on the roster? Never.

Which is why people shouldn't be expecting BYU to ever get past the 2nd round. I'm not saying it won't ever happen, just that people shouldn't expect it.

I don't but I expect us to get past the first round now and then. And I expect it more often than once every two generations. Can I reasonably expect BYU to be one of the best 32 teams now and then? That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Apparently the aspirations I hold for our program are proving to be too difficult and too lofty.

Arch, you have a wealth of historical results on which to base your realistic expectations. You need to reconcile and embrace. But I'm now going to contradict myself and say that if Plaisted returns next year, you SHOULD expect us to get to the second round, but not the Sweet 16.

Winning the conference just doesn't mean as much if we're always one and done. Look at UNLV which lost a ton of recruits and players last year, and at least they won one game. Kruger did a marvelous job this year. Next year, UNLV could be scary good if the recruits get to stay. I'm starting to appreciate his coaching abilities more and more.

Rose appears to be a good, not a great coach. My main complaint about him is the failure to adjust to changes made by the other team and his half court pressure time offense. He gets the team to play decent, not great, defense and the running offense is quite good. Yet tourney games devolve into half court games, and that is the major weakness of most of his teams at BYU.

Why is that sports fans are so interested in what type of human being a coach is? It means nothing to us. Majerus, somebody I admire deeply, was worse as a human being than Arnold. Granted, neither was a Bronco Mendenhall or a Lavell Edwards. However, as long as Majerus won what type of person he was was pointless. Same with Arnold. As long as he won the fact he was abusive was going to be ignored. Once he stopped winning he was fired, not for being abusive but because he wasn't a reall good basketball coach.

Rose appears to be a great coach at an institution whose limitations force greatness to appear good. You are going down a Norm Chow road and it is silly.

Rose is not a legenday type of coach but if he were at Arizona the Wildcats would win more NCs than they would under Lute Olsen.

Div I Football - Top 10 of about 120 teams = 8% of teams are in the top 10.
Div I Basketball - 32 of about 340 teams = 9% of teams win a first round game.

Seems pretty similar to me.

A&M combined strong defense along with a large front line that dominated the boards.

You look at the MWC, and it is big-man-lite.

I didn't expect BYU to win.

Because Arnold was fired for being a terrible human being. If you're going to emotionally abuse the players you need to win a lot. He was terribly abusive which is why BYU fired him. He wasn't tough and disciplined and a hard ass like Majerus, he was emotionally out of control and a bad coach though he had a 60% overall winning pct. thanks to Ainge et al. He didn't get fired for wins and losses because they fired him after BYU tied for the league title with Utah (Utah beat BYU twice that year and was effectively the champ and got an NCAA bid and BYU didn't). And that year was only two seasons after Ainge/Elite 8.

I dare say that had we drawn Kent State we'd also have had the privilege of getting our asses handed to us by Kansas in the second round.

Just to be completely accurate, 79 and 80 were second round chokes. We got first round byes those years. In 79 we were the 5 seed and lost to the 4 seed in the second round. It was our first game, but not the same type of team we would have played in our first game under today's 65 team format. In 1980 we were the 3 seed and lost to 6 seeded Clemson who had just beaten 11 seed Utah State in the first round.

There are three times as many D1 teams in basketball as in football. So yes, you could say top 32 in basketball is like top 10 in football.