Captaincoop said:
Well, to be fair to Brad and Donahue, BC has put some pretty excellent teams on the court over the last twenty years and still had a lousy "gameday experience" most of the time.
It used to drive me nuts when we had a team that was competing for NCAA tourney bids, winning the Big East title, etc., and there would still be 3,000 people there for a weeknight conference game.
I'm not trying to be a jerk ( very difficult on my end) but is it p[ossible that BC is just NOT a basketball school?? As you say Captain, even when they had good, competitive teams the program didn't draw very well. Obviously if it went 24-4 or something like that every year and was a perennial Sweet 16 or Elite 8 team it might be different but really it has only done that in spurts over the years ( the Dudley years, Michael Adams and John Bagley way back when, Billy Curley teams) but nothing really consistent.
I think if you had a total mindset change and BC opted to "allow" that change to happen and they got a charismatic, young coach it might be different story. But as it is structured now, with Lousiville coming into the ACC next year and Syracuse, UNC, Duke already entrenched, and lesser teams who are still better programs than BC (Pitt, Miami, NC State), where does BC fit in all this other than a schedule filler?
As I have said many times, to me BC is to the ACC what Northwestern is to the B1G. It has generally a decent but not great football team with a generally mediocre/poor hoops team and a handful of OK olympic sports teams. Both schools are academically strong but are in pro sports towns and have geography and really no tradition, especially in hoops, working against them. The Wildcats rarely if ever get a Chicago kid ( Imean a real blue chip) for hoops and are competing not only against B1G schools but also BE schools in their backyard like DePaul and Marquette. Same thing with BC, they not only have to deal with Syracuse and other ACC schools, they have Providence and UConn snatching guys away from them. I find both programs very similar in many ways. As I said, unless they loosen the academic thing over there and either allow the "one and done" gig or admit less qualified kids and tutor and unlimit test them ala Georgetown in the Ewing days, they are an occasional nice story but predominently a second division program.