2025–26 Spider men's basketball schedule

It's disappointing, because I do think we should be an upper echelon mid major most years. Liberty has surpassed us in state I think.

I don't even think Mooney is a terrible coach when he has the players and motivation. But I do think he lost motivation. The model needs to be hire an up and coming coach - one that is just dying to get to the power conference level. Basically what VCU does. Or if not going that road and trying to get a proven, little older coach - has to be heavily incentivized to win, OR short contract and/or threat of losing job if repeated mediocre years. Ideally you just get a guy that wants to win so bad, no matter if he is older like Dutcher or younger like Will Wade was, or somewher in between. But yes scheduling is very very disappointing, and no one is held accountable. Our leader just whines about how hard it is , when reality he is trying to schedule wins, not strength.
 
vt4700 said:
97, I used to disagree when some of you mentioned this type of stuff in the past, but now I can't counter anything you just said in your post. You are 100% correct.
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Thanks. I can't tell you how much I wish I was wrong and to be proven wrong, as I want a strong MBB flagship level program at UR.

We are fully capable of that with our facilities, league affiliation, historical success and financial strength of our school. Unfortunately, our current leadership is not up to the task, in fact they don't even want to try to be up to the task, which as an alum makes me both sad and mad at the same.

At some point, Mooney and Hardt are not going to be here anymore, and when that happens we will have an opportunity to get our program back to the level is was at and should be at. Also, unfortunately, that timeline is undetermined and seems ever longer at present.
 
97spiderfan said:
The "boringness" is deliberate. The less people interested in our program and its mediocrity the better from their perspective. Meanwhile our crosstown neighbors use every opportunity to say "look at me" as they are the complete opposite trajectory of us both in terms of on court success and how they view athletics as a vital extension of their university.
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I doubt a goal of the program is to get less people interested in the team.
 
SFspidur said:
Recapping what we've learned so far about the schedule. By my count as of July 31, we have all 13 non-conference games accounted for.

10/25 - JMU (exhibition)
11/5 - Southern Virginia (D3)
11/8 - ECU
11/11 - W&M
11/19 - VMI
11/22 - Gardner–Webb
11/27 - vs Furman (Orlando)
11/28 - vs Charlotte or Illinois State (Orlando)
12/3 - at Belmont
12/6 - ODU
12/13 - Southern Illinois
12/17 - at Elon
12/20 - The Citadel
12/28 - Charleston Southern

9 home, 2 road, 2 neutral
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Don’t know why I’m thinking about this now. But do exhibitions count against the 31 game total?
 
fan2011 said:
I doubt a goal of the program is to get less people interested in the team.
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I used to think that was crazy talk, but what is our program doing to get interest up? I can't think of anything. Did we do any pre season events? Any "meet the team" nights? How many pre season practice videos did we see?

And, then there is the schedule. The f ing schedule. One thing they have done to me is make me lose interest I thought I would never lose. I have youtubetv and do not get espn right now. In past years, I would have paid big bucks to make sure I never missed a Spiders game. Now, I have no desire to pay to get tonight's game. Shoot, as I have said earlier, I doubt I would watch these boring games against boring opponents anyway. I will have enough interest to check the scores and read on here what everyone's thoughts were, so I am counting on some good details from the board. But, it sucks that we have no key games to look forward to until conference play in January. Just sucks. 2 months of garbage. Sucks.
 
vt4700 said:
I used to think that was crazy talk, but what is our program doing to get interest up? I can't think of anything. Did we do any pre season events? Any "meet the team" nights? How many pre season practice videos did we see?
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Exactly. Of course it is not a "stated goal" of the program to get less people interested. But they do nothing extra or special or at most the bare minimum to generate interest.

Take opening night:.

There was probably less than 50 students in the student section, so no or very little effort to engage the student body.
No halftime show for the fans (UR dance team came out and did a 2 minute dance)
No hype around the introduction of players (we previously had a great video where lights were dimmed and people used their phones)
Very little entertainment during the time outs
Very little use of the new video boards to show highlights during the game, they were largely static advertisements during timeouts
Maybe a total of 3000 fans in the building for opening night, the RC was dead.

It really looked like our game day operations turned the lights on to the Robins Center a hour before the game and that was the prep that went into opening night. Really sad.

Now maybe we are pulling out all of the stops for Saturday since we opened up with a D3 opponent that no one has ever heard of. But that is why you don't open up with a D3 opponent that no one has ever heard of to begin with.
 
I’m with VT. I can see the points that many have explained in the past here and can’t be refuted at this point. Our only preseason event was another preseason tipoff announced 2 days before and cost $200 a person to attend, which may have alienated many fans from attending due to quick announcement and cost. Otherwise, no other way to get hype. There was no preseason preview like we do for every other sport on YouTube. There is no excitement of getting people involved with NIL, which I am begging our athletic department to do.

While I’ve said in the past our coaching staff lack of social media presence shouldn’t be a negative, it’s certainly not a positive in generating excitement and buzz for our program either.

We come off an 8 D1 win season with the most uninspiring schedule in the history of the program trying to sell us on the idea that there are more home games to watch, when no one wants to go to these games.

And when we try to look in the future and see if there are any bright spots with our roster as the coaching staff has also been selling us on developing 4-5 year players here, we are bringing in guys with offers from low tier D1 programs with several recently redshirting, and many who have transferred after 1-2 years to lower programs the past few years.

I really want to be optimistic and have always been excited come basketball season to watch the team I care about most in all of sports, but it’s getting harder for me to do so.
 
Yep, most of the stuff we are doing now points to us operating like a D3 team, and not a team in the 8th ranked Kenpom conference. And yes the NIL is difficult and NCAA seems to have lost all control, but if feels like Mooney is secretly happy as hell, because he can use it as cover for the next 3-4 years as an adjustment period - instead of going all in each season. Like VCU is doing and other mid majors that are adapting on the fly.

Look who VCU is playing tonight - Utah State. Both these mid major programs have continued to thrive and both continue to have expectations every season.

Sad.
 
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