Orsini BlogSMU ReleaseDallas Morning NewsSMU broke ground on a new practice facility on Friday. The facility will honestly be as good as any facility in the country. Add to that new lights, a new scoreboard and a new floor for Moody and the building blocks for a first class basketball program seem to be in place.
SMU men’s basketball is ridiculously high in the
RPI and
Sagarin rankings. The RPI will start to plummet as SMU will play a couple of really low ranked Division I teams. Sagarin, I am not sure about-that one may stay up there a while. If I were to guess, the RPI drops into the 50’s by the Oklahoma game, even if SMU wins every game up to that game.
So the basketball team takes to the court tonight for the first time in seemingly forever. I am not going to be there, but I will make the game at TCU on the 21st.
The world is apparently ending because
NTSU hired a high school coach. Now, granted, Todd Dodge is a really frickin’ good high school coach. But he has never been a head coach at this level and we really don’t know how well he is going to be able to recruit to NTSU, though most think he will be a good recruiter and most think he is an offensive genius. Only time will tell.
My thoughts on this are pretty simple. The average SMU fan is so beaten down, it has started looking around for where the next punch will come from. Therefore, everything is a negative. And if SMU loses a game, SMU needs to fire the coach. And if the season doesn’t end with a bowl, SMU needs to fire the coach. It is just the nature of the “SMU condition.” SMU fans view potential offseason changes as the only excitement to be had. Yet hiring a new coach yields only temporary gratification if he isn’t immediately successful. And since success, let alone immediate success, is hard to come by at SMU, the SMU fan starts to look for the next coach.
Well, Steve Orsini thinks differently. He believes that the best thing for SMU is to keep the current coach. Steve Orsini believes Phil Bennett will be successful at SMU. Two thoughts oh that. First, it doesn’t matter what you or I believe because Steve Orsini is the one making the decision, and as long as he really believes it and actually cares, I am willing to go along with it. Second, assuming Orsini is right, Phil Bennett and SMU being successful is ultimately far more important than any instant gratification to be gained by hiring a new coach.
So best of luck to Todd Dodge; I hope SMU beats NTSU by 50.