Goodness.....

by bk , Close enough, Monday, March 07, 2011, 13:20 (5531 days ago) @ Jay

Can we enjoy this season a bit before we go all "ND Fan" on the basketball team?

If we crap out in the first or second round after getting a 1 or 2 seed, my disappointment will come primarily from the squandered opportunity to take a big step as a program. We've gotten a ton of positive press and exposure out of this team's run. But for it to mean much in the grand scheme of things, we'll need to prove a little bit in the tourney.

The other thing I'd caution us about is acting like Purdue football fans. We're not a top-16 basketball program and haven't been for a long time. I'm not even sure we were that in the 80's, but we certainly were nothing close to it in the 90's. While what Brey has accomplished at ND isn't unprecedented in the school's history, it is certainly unprecedented in the conference environment we now play in. We shouldn't assume that because we did it in the 70's that we can (easily) do it again now. Even if we underperform in the tournament, bringing this team to a 1 or 2 seed shows continued (if slow) improvement of the program. Putting Brey on the hotseat would make him a victim of his own (regular season) success and us like fans that don't understand our basketball program's place in the current college-basketball landscape.