23 and RichmondNative, I completely get where you’re coming from. Seeing the success of the women’s team in only 7 years under Roussell dispels the narrative that Richmond can’t be a premier program.
from 2020-2024 we had some great results and something Mooney and staff should absolutely get credit for. The issue I’m having with the men’s program now is, questioning whether we can have sustained success. I think we can all agree that our schedule stinks. Seeing us schedule such a bad OOC made me a bit more pessimistic about our team’s mentality going into the season and whether we want to build a program to have sustained success or just to save face. So I get where many of you are coming from when we look at the juxtaposition between our women’s program who is only getting better and our men’s program where our results have been all over the place the past few years. Here’s the men’s record below:
2021-2022 - we won A10 tourney
2022-2023 - went 13-14 and finished 11th in A10
2023-2024 - finished 1st A10 regular season
2024-2025 - went 10-22 and 13th in A10
It has been a roller coaster of emotions the past few years and I do think a sign of a good program, not just team, is some level of sustained success every year. Are there down years? Of course. But a down year shouldn’t be going from 1st to 13th. Just look at our women’s team who have a much higher floor and ceiling and this has been sustained in such a short turn around by Roussell.
But not to deviate too much from the essence of this post, which is that UR has repeatedly stated the value of athletics and have done a lot of things to show that. The actions I want to see from UR is to not just talk the talk but show it by paying Roussell the P4 money he deserves and give our women’s program the NIL to be a top 25 program. On the men’s side, I want to see us more vocal in advocating for better OOC and call out teams by name if need be. I want to see us have sustained success and not going into every season thinking “are we going to finish 1st or last?”. We need to do better with recruiting and better offense/defense schemes. This is ultimately the coach’s responsibility. If we finish with another bad year this year, then the action I want to see UR having is looking for another coach.
The talk is there and even the walk is there. We just need to walk the walk when it comes to making the hard decision like ponying up the salary for a once in a generation coach or potentially firing a coach (or mutually parting ways) who has been at UR for 20 years if need be.
