SWAC is Far From the Limelight and Far From Successful

[MikeBigg]

8 team tournament, 7 teams with LOSING records, 1 team with a MEDIOCRE WINNING record = no one in the stands. we need to market our indiviual programs better for sure, but when you send you basktball team on the road for 10 straight beatdowns no one is going to respect you. your players are demoralized, your rpi sucks, and you can't recruit b/c prospects look at your 10-18 record and they don't care that you won 10 swac games and finished in the upper half of the conferece. all they care about is yall are a bunch of losers.

once apon a time the swac would have a least 2- 20 win teams every season. when was the last time a swac school won 20 games? was it bama state the first time they won the tourney 5 years ago 22-8? awful. and that's what alot of our fans see. they see teams that can't beat anyone and can't recruit anyone. instead of playing gt, bama, florida, ok, usc, tx and memphis all on the road to open the season, play some DIVISION I teams you can beat(lamar, centenary, ul-monroe, jax state, ut-martin) and get some home and home in your life. those money games are a quick fix w/ long term consequences. i.e. how many money games are you willing to play to give up the pay check and exposure you get from winning a ncaa tourney game like su did as a 14 seed?

once the our teams start winning our cupcake games we'll be able to recruit better, better players will mean better teams, better teams mean more fans in the stands and a real chance to win in the ncaa tourney. it will also mean we can let the southland and southern conference duke it out for the play in game.

This pretty much echos what I was saying in my earlier post. I used Grambling and Southern as an example of playing local in-state opponents.

Grambling loses out on some good local players to LaTech, ULM, Centenary, and Northwestern. I was talking to a good friend of mine who coached one of the local (Monroe area) teams to a State Championship about 3 years ago about recruiting more locally. He agreed that there was enuff talent along the I-20 corridor from Shreveport to Vicksburg to field a team capable of building a quality program. We even went a step further and discussed the teams from CenLa that are always perennial playoff teams. My point is that if we played and won (which is possible) these teams, we might stand a better chance of landing some of these local kids. These kids have family and friends who will help with attendance and increased local interest.

I give Larry Wright credit for doing a better job "recently" of getting local talent, but it would probably increase with games against these regional opponents. Now that we have a larger Arena (next year), we need to increase our home and home games against locals.