Unless there are a rash of injuries next year, I think it's the Big Dance or bust concerning how I would feel about Trent Johnson being retained. I think we'll be much improved next year and get in somewhat easily (#5-8 seed).

Trent coached Nevada 4 years, and Stanford 4 years, and in Year 4 at both of those programs, they went 25-9 and 28-8 and both made it to the Sweet Sixteen. so i'd think those would be the expectations Trent would have had for himself at LSU and those would be fair expectations for all of us to have of him.

obviously, it's Year 4 here at LSU and for whatever reason, he didn't do here what he did at Utah and Stanford

it's interesting to think that for 7 straight seasons he led his teams to the NCAAT (5 times: '04, '05, '07, '08, '09) or the NIT (2 times: '03, '06), but for the last 2 seasons since then he hasn't even had a winning record (until this season, of course)

so the question to me is whether it was a problem with the LSU program or a problem with Trent. it could be that the LSU program was in such bad shape when Trent took over that nobody we could have gotten could have done a better job. or, it could be that the problem is something to do with Trent (maybe he could recruit great out West, but not so good in the South). but whatever it is, Alleva and his staff need to figure it out and make sure LSU has the best coach we can get, be it Trent Johnson or someone else

and on top of that, you have to wonder if a successful coach would even want to come here. you saw how Trent was a very successful coach before he ruined his career by coming to LSU. based on what happened to Trent, you'd think that successful coaches would think twice before coming here, especially given the lack of fan support for our basketball program

I've said this numerous times before, but there is no inherent reason LSU can't be a very good or even top basketball program. I won't even talk about the silly "football school" argument I've heard so many times, because that's been destroyed by Texas, Ohio State, OU, and Florida. Same goes for the "apathetic fans" argument. LSU never had problems filling up the PMAC in the 80s through even the late 90s. Louisiana typically has a decent talent pool, and LSU has no real in-state competition for a coach who really wants to tap that well.

One of the biggest questions is how committed the AD really is to creating a top program. You have to spend serious money to achieve that, and I see little evidence LSU is running on all cylinders to make that happen. Here's the total men's basketball operating budgets for SEC schools:

UK: $6.35M
Arky: $6.00M
UF: $4.87M
UT: $4.50M
Bama: $3.74M
AU: $3.62M
USCe: $3.29M
UGA: $2.80M
State: $2.61M
Ole Miss: $2.33M
LSU: $2.22M

I couldn't find info on Vandy since they're a private school. Source can be found here.

See a pattern here? You generally get what you pay for. Clearly, the basketball program is not a top priority for the AD. Basketball turns a decent profit, attendance is up 8% over last year, and that's all they care about. Trent was seen as a decent coach who could be hired for relatively little money to turn around a floundering program. Call it the Tom Benson school of management. Nobody in the AD appears to want to risk a huge, serious investment in obtaining top-level coaches, facilities, or marketing/promotion if there's no guaranteed return. And this isn't exactly an AD hurting for money.

LSU has many of the pieces to the puzzle of a top program, but somebody has to have the vision and financial will to pick them up and put them together.

Great points. Much of which I do agree with. I am somewhat perturbed by "ranting" fans who call for the LSU head coach's head in basketball almost at every turn--they equate it to football. Well, think again. the LSU AD does not equate basketball to football, perhaps not even baseball. You can see it in what they spend. And, yes, to some extent you get what you pay for. But, if you go back and look at LSU's basketball record, even in the "glory years" of Dale Brown's era, the school has always tried to get by... We'd be a top 4 sort of SEC basketball school, despite paying only in the top half to 2/3rds. Now, of course, we're sort of fighting to get back into the top half, with bottom 4th money.

Money's not everything, but there is a fundamental disconnect between the fans and the program. It's a chicken and egg problem. Is UK great because of Calipari? Or, are they great because they have 22K in the stands and sell-out crowds? A sell-out crowd for midnight madness? Does that kind of environment recruit, or does Calipari recruit? It all goes hand in hand. when LSU recruits talk of LSU they talk of loving to go to LSU football games on Saturday. that's not what Duke is selling, or UNC. They're selling their basketball program. I think ultimately, that's still why kids like Greg Monroe, Ricardo Gathers leave the state. They're basketball players, not football players. The era of Shaq, CJ, the covers of SI by LSU basketball players--that was an era that sold LSU basketball. Can we get back to that? Yes, I do believe we can, but it is going to take monumental effort. Not just changing directions and firing or hiring a coach. It's going to take players committing to come, coaches coaching, the administration pushing and fans supporting the program. You need a vision, passion and wins. I do see it with Nicki Caldwell, and well, you've got no complaints from me so far with her. She's got passion and presumably some basketball smarts--and she inherited a pretty stacked team.

Now, to be fair, some of this falls on Trent, but some of this also just falls on the program. A building one at that. It does start with building a foundation with good players, and coaching them up. As I've made the point before, I don't think anyone fully realizes what condition Brady left the program in when he was let go, particularly in the depth of talent beyond Trent's first year's starting 5. From a talent and APR situation, it was a mess. Whatever happens with Trent, I do think that fundamentally, some of the things he's worked on, beyond the W-Ls, has been admirable, and needed. Now, he just needs to keep recruiting good players and developing those players. Then the fans need to put butts in seats and $$s where their mouths are. That will create change.

But, more to come from me on the year in summary. I wanted to let the SECT happen first.

:geauxtige

I've been around long enough to remember fans calling for Dale Browns head on a yearly bases. "he can't get past 'one and done' in the tourney" or "he couldn't win a championship with Shaq, Jackson and Roberts...he never will".

The 86 team was a fluke. They were underachievers coached up to amazing potential but when the rubber hit the road they couldn't get past the upper echelon. In 79 they ran into Bobby Knight...don't think the Dale Brown 'era' was all roses and rainbows. He had streaks of barely making the NCAA or not at all and the morons would come out of the wood work...much like now.

I'm not sure what Johnson started with at those other schools to have success in year 4 but I bet it was much better than the players he had when he got here. He started with a senior laden team the fell into basically walk-ons. It takes time to build and I think he is going in the right direction. The rebuilding of LSU basketball is going to take time.

The ranters have little objectivity and think there's a magic bullet or coaching hire that will get things turned around yesterday. And for the reasons that have been well-documented here, that is extremely unlikely.

There's definitely a feedback loop in play between fans and the administration. But let's look a little deeper at the factors that determine fan support:

1. Marketing. Can anyone tell me how many billboards featuring the basketball team are in and around BR? Because I sure haven't seen many. How much engagement with the community has there been by the AD? I ask because I honestly don't know. As people have noted, this isn't football, where tradition and success allow the team to market itself.

2. Coaches. We can all agree Trent is no Dale Brown and won't be winning any charisma contests, but he's not nearly as abrasive toward fans and players as Brady was. A salesman like Bruce Pearl (insert joke here) can generate interest and draw attendance, but that isn't Trent's forte.

3. Tradition. All you lifelong and 40+ fans need to understand something. An example: I'm as close to a self-made fan as possible. Neither myself or my family had any interest in LSU athletics until I started attending school here, and that includes football. That means that the only "winning tradition" in basketball I've ever been exposed to were those sporadic years under Brady.

The point here is for people like me, and especially younger fans in their 20s, all the nostalgia over Shaq and CJ and the '86 team don't mean much of anything regarding the current program. It's ancient history. It might as well have happened 100 years ago as 30. You have an increasing number of younger fans who have never experienced the glory years of LSU basketball. And without the tradition LSU football had to get it through the 80s and 90s, you have a younger generation of fans with little connection to the program.

4. Star players. People will pay just to see them play. But the last ones we really had were Big Baby and Tyrus. Hamilton will be a good big man if he ever learns aggressiveness. Hickey and JOB will be solid players in time, but at this point nobody will confuse any of them for great talents that people just have to see.

Without those things in place, fan support will ultimately hinge on:

5. W/L record and style of play. And that has been too wildly inconsistent. LSU can rarely put entire games together, much less a streak of them. Defense has been decent, and the guys play hard, but offense and turnovers have been simply atrocious. By the admittedly low standards of recent years, we had pretty hot crowds for UK and Tennessee this year, only to go on to lay eggs in different ways. Only die-hards will pay money to see that kind of product on the floor.

LSU really doesn't have #3 going for it. Our choice for #2 isn't really the type to put himself out there to get fans to show up, and at this point in the rebuilding process, he doesn't seem particularly interested in #4. That leaves the AD to mount an aggressive, energetic marketing campaign (#1), and Trent to put a consistent winner on the floor (#5) to generate ticket sales. At least at the moment, neither of those have materialized.

/\

Just carrying your point a bit further. I was giving insight to what was the Dale Brown era. By no means was it all great. There were two Final Fours in 25+ years just put that in perspective. If his team made it out of the second round it was to the Final Four. I don't recall any teams bowing out in the 16 or 8. It was semi finals or second round. Feast or famine.

This is me, exactly. I'm 31 and started at LSU in 1999. I can tell you everything LSU that has occured since, but I barely knew who Kevin Faulk, Tommy Hodson, Pete Maravich, etc were. My first real exposure to LSU sports was a 3-8 football team, a SEC champion and Sweet 16 basketball team, and a national championship baseball team, and that's what I expected for the future because I didn't know anything else.

U.S. Basketball Writers Association named Trent Johnson the Coach of the Year for DISTRICT VII (Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana)

USBWA > News > 2011-12 Men's All-District Teams

Texas/Arkansas/Louisiana includes the following NCAA teams:

Sun Belt
Arkansas State (14-20, 6-10 in Sun Belt) -- John Brady is in 4th year as coach
AR Little Rock
ULL
North Texas
LA Monroe

Big 12
Baylor
Texas
Texas A&M
Texas Tech

SEC
Arkansas
LSU

C-USA
Tulane
Rice
Houston
SMU

SWAC
Southern
AR Pine Bluff
Grambling
Prairie View A&M
Texas Southern

WAC
Louisiana Tech

Southland
TX Arlington
Central Arkansas
McNeese St.
Northwestern St.
Nicholls
SE Louisiana
Stephen F. Austin
Sam Houston St.
Texas St.
TAMU Corpus Christi
Lamar
UT-San Antonio

Independent
Houston Baptist
TX Pan American


etc etc