are we gonna sign MO or not?

[BradleyBrave]

Yup...we don't need any help inside. In fact, I am not sure why we even bothered to recruit MO, we're fine!

[Out of Balance]

?? panic if you wish but..we have as deep of a team as we have had in years...
we have ten returning scholarship players..three seniors two of whom are 5th year seniors..
then we also have TB, WE, & AT for two more years, while we have Jake, DSE, and Milos for three more years each..
and Walter Lemon & Jordan Prosser for four more years.
Anyone else we get coming in will have to battle for playing timne, but I think we are as well set as anyone else in the Valley for several years to come..

Well put t With all this being said there is NO REASON for anything less than a MVC Championship and a trip to the Big Dance
Thanks for putting it all out there and opening our eyes

[BradleyBrave]

?? panic if you wish but..we have as deep of a team as we have had in years...
we have ten returning scholarship players..three seniors two of whom are 5th year seniors..
then we also have TB, WE, & AT for two more years, while we have Jake, DSE, and Milos for three more years each..
and Walter Lemon & Jordan Prosser for four more years.
Anyone else we get coming in will have to battle for playing timne, but I think we are as well set as anyone else in the Valley for several years to come..

Keep this post...because we had the same team coming back last year and experience was supposed to be one of our strengths. If we get off to a poor start or underachieve again, I sure don't want to hear "We are so young and inexperienced, with a freshman Jordan Prosser playing big minutes up front, and sophomores Dyricus Simms-Edwards and Jake Eastman playing significant roles". It was BS last year and it will be BS this year, so I hope we don't have to hear it.

And if it's OK for us to NOT land MO, why did we bother recruiting him? It wasn't like he was in Peoria and we just drove down the street to go recruit the kid. He was playing in the Canary Islands for God's sake.

With possibly 2 open scholarships going into next recruiting season, I can't see how we're going to be as 'well set' as anyone in the league. We're going to have zero margin for injury depth-wise after this season. Banking one scholarship is OK; banking two when you have an obvious need is not.

[wizard1]

Are we gonna sign MO or not?

T---I'm not in a panic mode but I am concerned. Our returning players are simply not talented enough to allow us to be a serious contender for the MVC championship. We may have a lot of returning lettermen and people who will be with us for several years but this won't do us any good if we cannot upgrade the talent level of our players.

Our players are great kids and some of them have some talent but not enough consistant high talent to carry us much beyond mid-level MVC performance. Are any of our players truly potential NBA players?

You reminisced recently about our successes in the 1980s---Think about it---Mitchell Anderson, David Thirdkill, Donald Reese, Willy Scott, Voise Winters, Jim Les, Hersey Hawkins, Anthony Manual, Etc.---We simply do not have these kind of talented players today and we must upgrade once again to this level if we are to ever again be consistantly successful in the conference or nationally.

I suggest we take off the rose colored glasses and get our heads out of the sand regarding where we are and where we need to be.

Again, clearly a group of nice kids who work hard but with mid level, mid-major talent and not very much beyond this other than a future for the BU program that may continue to be mediocre for a very long time.

Is this what you want? I suggest we raise the bar of our expectations.

[BradleyBrave]

Is this what you want? I suggest we raise the bar of our expectations.

I agree! I'd be content with just raising it back to the level of success we were accustomed to over previous two decades.

[wily coyote]

I'm guessing style of play has a LOT to do with it. Every coach that Les goes head-to-head with for a Big will play that card against BU.

You are 100% correct. That is happening. A father of a Valley coach told me that is happening when we were in St. Louis. The only way to change this perception is to change our 4 guard offense. Until we do we will have to live with this recruiting ploy. Its not a mistake we don't have a big that has committed.

[amckillip]

I agree! I'd be content with just raising it back to the level of success we were accustomed to over previous two decades.

What is this supposed success we enjoyed over the two previous decades??? I hear SO many detractors saying this it makes me sick. What did we do in the 90s? What? I was an AVID college basketball (worked all summer as a lifeguard and detasseling to buy U of I, IU, and Purdue basketball tickets) who grew up in the 90s, born in Galesburg and didn't even know that Bradley existed until my dad made be stop on the way home for thanksgiving in '03 to look at it for college, and even then I laughed at him. I love BU now, but to suggest in the 90's we had less success as whole than we have enjoyed under JL is a joke. We won one regular season title in the 90s, and other than that were mired in mediocrity.

[wily coyote]

?? panic if you wish but..we have as deep of a team as we have had in years...
we have ten returning scholarship players..three seniors two of whom are 5th year seniors..
then we also have TB, WE, & AT for two more years, while we have Jake, DSE, and Milos for three more years each..
and Walter Lemon & Jordan Prosser for four more years.
Anyone else we get coming in will have to battle for playing timne, but I think we are as well set as anyone else in the Valley for several years to come..

T, I like your rosey glasses but correct me if I'm wrong, we finished 5th with those guys and thats not acceptable next year. If you don't improve you end up going backwards. We have enough talent next year that I don't think we will go backwards, but I don't see us improving enough to pass many teams. Hope I'm wrong and somehow a big falls into our lap. Until that does I don't see us making much improvement next season.

[tornado]

Is this what you want? I suggest we raise the bar of our expectations.

I have as high of expectations as anyone....nobody likes winning any more than I do, but I won't be losing sleep every night over our current chances ...

I get a kick out all the posts that say essentially "we should have far better players"...


..as if they are out there hanging on a tree for the picking, and our stupid coaches are picking the wrong ones and leaving the good ones behind??

I would welcome those who post such to simply state the names of the recruits that would have come to Bradley that are better but that our guys simply didn't notice them...

[BradleyBrave]

What is this supposed success we enjoyed over the two previous decades??? I hear SO many detractors saying this it makes me sick. What did we do in the 90s? What? I was an AVID college basketball (worked all summer as a lifeguard and detasseling to buy U of I, IU, and Purdue basketball tickets) who grew up in the 90s, born in Galesburg and didn't even know that Bradley existed until my dad made be stop on the way home for thanksgiving in '03 to look at it for college, and even then I laughed at him. I love BU now, but to suggest in the 90's we had less success as whole than we have enjoyed under JL is a joke. We won one regular season title in the 90s, and other than that were mired in mediocrity.

Whether you knew about BU or not as a child is irrelevant. The mediocrity we had in the 90's would be viewed as major success relative to our performance in the 2000's. A conference title, several top 3 finishes, several NIT's. How about we get back to at least that? Or even .500 overall in conference? How about that? Wouldn't you rather have that than 4th-5th place every year? What is the standard of success at BU? Is it 4th or 5th every year?

[amckillip]

Whether you knew about BU or not as a child is irrelevant. The mediocrity we had in the 90's would be viewed as major success relative to our performance in the 2000's. A conference title, several top 3 finishes, several NIT's. How about we get back to at least that? Or even .500 overall in conference? How about that? Wouldn't you rather have that than 4th-5th place every year?

I would take JL's sweet 16, exciting play, lottery pick and decent non-con wins over Mo's one regular season title, .520 record or whatever in a lower top to bottom quality conference , and fall asleep play anyday of the week personally. I'm not saying everyone would, but to suggest we had so much more success in the 90s is a huge case of 'rose-colored glasses' as many here accuse others of.

And I'd say the fact I never heard of them despite attending 15+ college bball games a year and growing up in an MVC town, IS a big deal if we want to get recruits and garner a larger following. But EVERYONE in my home town knows BU after they're Kansas and Pitt wins...

[wily coyote]

I have as high of expectations as anyone....nobody likes winning any more than I do, but I won't be losing sleep every night over our current chances ...

I get a kick out all the posts that say essentially "we should have far better players"...


..as if they are out there hanging on a tree for the picking, and our stupid coaches are picking the wrong ones and leaving the good ones behind??

I would welcome those who post such to simply state the names of the recruits that would have come to Bradley that are better but that our guys simply didn't notice them...

I agree with you ,recruiting is not easy. I think our coaches do a good job identifing talent and we are getting the best we can. But please explain to us why ISU,UNI,once SIU and now MSU seem to be getting much better talent then us.Please don't attack me using SIU because I only used them for the pre Lowery era. I'm not degrading the fine young men we have but we need to step it up a notch and in a hurry. ISU (blue) is starting to make noise with the young men they are bring in and thats not going to play in Peoria.

[Future Walk-On]

Whether you knew about BU or not as a child is irrelevant. The mediocrity we had in the 90's would be viewed as major success relative to our performance in the 2000's. A conference title, several top 3 finishes, several NIT's. How about we get back to at least that? Or even .500 overall in conference? How about that? Wouldn't you rather have that than 4th-5th place every year? What is the standard of success at BU? Is it 4th or 5th every year?

actually it appears that 3rd will be ok.....according to the consensus on here....

[BradleyBrave]

I would take JL's sweet 16, exciting play, lottery pick and decent non-con wins over Mo's one regular season title, .520 record or whatever in a lower top to bottom quality conference , and fall asleep play anyday of the week personally. I'm not saying everyone would, but to suggest we had so much more success in the 90s is a huge case of 'rose-colored glasses' as many here accuse others of.

And I'd say the fact I never heard of them despite attending 15+ college bball games a year and growing up in an MVC town, IS a big deal if we want to get recruits and garner a larger following. But EVERYONE in my home town knows BU after they're Kansas and Pitt wins...

We did have more success. We won more. We had better league finishes. We went to more prestigious tournaments more often. Not sure what else to measure it by. A fluke few weeks a few years ago doesn't make up for a near decade of average to below average basketball. The records speak for themselves.

Define 'exciting play'. BU was plenty exciting back in the mid-90's. And we rarely lost at home, certainly not in-conference. We had the best player BU has seen since Hersey Hawkins. We had several HOFers who played then too. Just because you didn't pay attention doesn't mean that those teams weren't good. How could you judge how exciting they were if you didn't watch?

How about in the 80's? Do those standards not matter either? Did no one in your town know about BU when it was a top 15 program and had the national POY?

[Missouri Brave]

Definition of mediocre: "of only ordinary or moderate quality; neither good nor bad; barely adequate."

Based on this definition has the BU program been mediocre over the past 10 years or so? Yes. Has BU been mediocre during the Coach Les era? I believe so. Is 70-74 in the Valley mediocre? No doubt.

I loved Coach Les as a player. I like him as a coach. I think he's a very good man who represents the university and the community well. He's recruited well and consistently brought some talented, high class kids to BU.

Still, taking off my BU-colored glasses, I can't help but think Bradley has underachieved with a 70-74 Valley record, no finishes better than 4th in the conference with just one appearance in the NCAA (as great as it was) and one in the NIT. When someone names the best programs in the Valley, we aren't mentioned.

The glory years of the '50s and '60s are gone, never to be replicated, but why can't Bradley - with a better fan base and the proven ability to recruit well - be a Butler or Gonzaga?

Obviously, I wish nothing but success for Coach Les and hope 2010-11 is the year we get over the hump. But, based on history, I have my doubts.

PS: with five NIT trips and an NCAA appearance in one eight-year stretch under Jim Molinari, Bradley was consistently more successful than it has been of late. Again, I like Coach Les a lot, but facts are facts.