Mooney--an under appreciated coach.

I get it, we suck now, and this season is likely a throwaway. Hindsight is 20/20--promise me i want to win as much as anyone.

2020 - COVID- likely headed to NCAA
2021 - Rough/disjointed year with COVID but won at Kentucky and Vandy,
2022 - NCAA
2023 - rough year
2024 - reg season champs
2025 - rough year

That's 3 good years, 1 incomplete and 2 F's. At the time i made this post, 2026 was looking good--i know we had a weak n/c but i thought we had a lot of potential. People act like Mooney's track record is 5 straight losing years. That was reason for post.
Lmao labeling 2021 that way is a joke. Projected to finish 1st in the A10, finished 8th. If it weren’t for Covid those boys don’t get another year and have the same faith as Kendall and TJ. But hey at least we have players that play for our school!
 
I’m not sure how much Hardt can really do if finding a new head coach is off the table. From the start I’ve had the impression that Hardt reports to Mooney, as backwards as that may be. Hard for Hardt to really make any impact if that’s the case
Who actually reports to who is really Queeley's domain! So whatever he says!
 
I get it, we suck now, and this season is likely a throwaway. Hindsight is 20/20--promise me i want to win as much as anyone.

2020 - COVID- likely headed to NCAA
2021 - Rough/disjointed year with COVID but won at Kentucky and Vandy,
2022 - NCAA
2023 - rough year
2024 - reg season champs
2025 - rough year

That's 3 good years, 1 incomplete and 2 F's. At the time i made this post, 2026 was looking good--i know we had a weak n/c but i thought we had a lot of potential. People act like Mooney's track record is 5 straight losing years. That was reason for post.
I hear you and was also arguments I was making 2 years ago and even parts of last year. Mooney has also had other good teams from 2012-2019 that also didn’t make NCAAs but were solid seasons and while NCAA appearances are incredibly important, is not the only metric to look at. We’ve even had other bad years where I still would’ve advocated for Mooney to have stayed like 2018-2019. We had great core of Gilly/Golden/Sherod/Cayo and you could tell this team was going to be good and it turned out to be right with 2019-2020 being a great season and 2021-2022 was a championship and NCAA tournament year.

So for me while wins and losses are of course important, the way we are winning and losing also matter. I’ve said it a million already but that’s why trajectory is key. 2018-2019 was bad but the trajectory of our program was good for reasons I alluded to above.

There is absolutely nothing I can think of right now that shows next year/our trajectory will be any better. We play a bad schedule, have mediocre recruiting of high school transfers, have had good individual talented players as transfers but not enough to have a good A10 team. 2023-2024 was a great year but to replicate that means we need to find 3-4 great transfers who all gel and can play well together for 1-2 years. So far we’re 1 out of 4 years success with current NIL/transfer era. The staff is not giving me confidence that they can do that year-to-year. We only have Argabright as an A10 level player returning next year as a high school recruit - if he returns. Our high school upperclassmen Tyne, Walz, and Tanner have not developed well enough into A10 level players for me to think that the staff can developed Robinson, McGlothin or the other non-Argabright freshmen into A10 level players. Hence we’re going into next year somehow hoping we hit the lottery again with transfer recruits to be successful. This is not how a successful program is sustained
 
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I get it, we suck now, and this season is likely a throwaway. Hindsight is 20/20--promise me i want to win as much as anyone.

2020 - COVID- likely headed to NCAA
2021 - Rough/disjointed year with COVID but won at Kentucky and Vandy,
2022 - NCAA
2023 - rough year
2024 - reg season champs
2025 - rough year

That's 3 good years, 1 incomplete and 2 F's. At the time i made this post, 2026 was looking good--i know we had a weak n/c but i thought we had a lot of potential. People act like Mooney's track record is 5 straight losing years. That was reason for post.

we weren’t going to a NCAA in 2020. I don’t care about the record. That Dayton team was loaded that year…
I agree with 31 - - - A10 hasn't been swimming in at-large bids and our computer numbers at the time the season ended were borderline at best for at-large. Also, the 2022 NCAA was a bad, under performing year save for the late (really late) season heroics that provided cover. In retrospect, the worst thing that could have happened. And let's remember the 2 seasons before your scan were both 20 loss years and this year is a sh_t show no matter what the win total. So all the positive spin can really be looked through a very different lens.

But let's really consider the SpiderWill argument here which seems to be - "yeah we are bad - - just not as bad as some people think." And this is the positive spin side of things. For many, its lets look at a 9 year run and the only year we'd see as clearly great was the Covid year. The NCAA year was actually bad save Jacob saving them, the regular season champs year is tainted by the late collapse (and these two years illustrate that neither a shitty year and a great finish or a great year and a shitty finish amount to a great year). Add in this year and my count is one really good year (year shortened by covid); two OK years (NCAA and reg season champs); an incomplete (2021 covid part season) and 6 rough years. From a coach in his 2nd decade at the school and in the top tier of pay for our peer institutions. So that's the downside (realistic to many) spin.

And the defense to that is - - we aren't THAT bad. That's just sad that the program has fallen that far that the best argument (with spin) isn't even very strong.

And honestly, besides the "he isn't that bad argument" - what's the forward looking argument for keeping him around? At least last time his seat was this hot, like VT and others have said, we had some veterans coming back etc. and you could make an argument we might be headed on an upswing. Can anyone really argue that here and now?
 
We are regressing, I admit it. This post was created when we were 10-2 and easily could have been 11-1.

I admit too many creampuffs created some false optimism this year.

Will
FYI, we are not regressing. This is who CM is. Always has been. He will get hot from time to time, this year it was from a comically weak OOC schedule.

But otherwise he’s 55% and feeds off weaker competition, loses to better competition. Isn’t a great recruiter, isn’t a great in game coach, and isn’t super adaptable.
 
We were at 55% chance of an at large. Lose first game in A10 Tourney drop below 50% win and we were likely in.
Fully agreed we would have been in and brings back memories of my crazy pre Covid weekend flying into LGA from
Colorado for the tourney but then no tourney - but Peter L's still was open and shockingly my friends and I had a great weekend
 
I get it, we suck now, and this season is likely a throwaway. Hindsight is 20/20--promise me i want to win as much as anyone.

2020 - COVID- likely headed to NCAA
2021 - Rough/disjointed year with COVID but won at Kentucky and Vandy,
2022 - NCAA
2023 - rough year
2024 - reg season champs
2025 - rough year

That's 3 good years, 1 incomplete and 2 F's. At the time i made this post, 2026 was looking good--i know we had a weak n/c but i thought we had a lot of potential. People act like Mooney's track record is 5 straight losing years. That was reason for post.
This is for you and posted the other day. Long term 55 pct winning pct., 25 pct winning pct vs VCU, and 3 NCAA’s in 20 going on 21 years. That doesn’t scream success. But go ahead and try to do some justification on a 5 year snapshot if it makes you feel good. And be sure to include last year and throw in this year but exclude the pathetic OOC schedule which inflates wins.
 
I get it, we suck now, and this season is likely a throwaway. Hindsight is 20/20--promise me i want to win as much as anyone.

2020 - COVID- likely headed to NCAA
2021 - Rough/disjointed year with COVID but won at Kentucky and Vandy,
2022 - NCAA
2023 - rough year
2024 - reg season champs
2025 - rough year

That's 3 good years, 1 incomplete and 2 F's. At the time i made this post, 2026 was looking good--i know we had a weak n/c but i thought we had a lot of potential. People act like Mooney's track record is 5 straight losing years. That was reason for post.
Quad 1 record Quad 2 record Total games by year (No NET in 2018)

2018 1-3 1-3 12 of 32
2019 0-3 1-3 13 of 33
2020 3-4 3-2 24 of 31
2021 2-3 4-2 13 of 22
2022 2-4 6-8 24 of 37
2023 0-2 1-4 15 of 33
2024 1-4 5-4 23 of 33
2025 0-4 0-4 8 of 30
2026 1-1 0-1 12 of 20

Is that 10-28 21-31 144 of 238? So .605? But 31 of 90 in impactful games?
 
For the record, Hardt giving Mooney ANOTHER extension after the regular season title was AD malpractice, as many of us pointed out at the time, and should be grounds for termination at this point (assuming there's no easy out clause).

There was ZERO reason to extend him at that point. No one better than us was going to hire him, and he didn't want to leave. And we didn't even make the NCAAs that year. Just an absurd and completely unnecessary decision all around, again assuming that we are on the hook for the full amount through 28-29.
 
I get it, we suck now, and this season is likely a throwaway. Hindsight is 20/20--promise me i want to win as much as anyone.

2020 - COVID- likely headed to NCAA
2021 - Rough/disjointed year with COVID but won at Kentucky and Vandy,
2022 - NCAA
2023 - rough year
2024 - reg season champs
2025 - rough year

That's 3 good years, 1 incomplete and 2 F's. At the time i made this post, 2026 was looking good--i know we had a weak n/c but i thought we had a lot of potential. People act like Mooney's track record is 5 straight losing years. That was reason for post.

This would be more powerful if this was a coach in his 7th year with that resume, but we have a 21 year body of work to look at. And in those first 20 years, we’ve been in 3 NCAA tournaments which is the ultimate measure of success at our level - that’s not good.
 
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