We seem to more consistently exceed expectations in basketball than football BUT the expectations in football are high and not so much in basketball.

Lots to digest here at least moving forward. A point could be made that the SEC overall has become a "basketball conference."As AggieEyes suggests, the portal will likely shake up the traditional blue bloods and second tier.

would be curious to see the same stats with march madness appearance rate, tourney W-L records, # round 32s or 16s, etc.

one can rack up wins easily in non-conf, strength of conference dictates the regular season, but at the end of the day it's dancing that matters.

that said, i'm not curious enough to look it up myself, lol

Its every game that matters

Most interesting is that I never really thought about how little success the coaches that have left here have had.

It seems like since BCG we haven't had a coach that has been good at engaging the fan base. May be a bit unfair to the coaches but given our football centric nature I think it's important to engage the students to get them out to Reed early in the season given the post football season hangover.

With all of those previous coaches, Bucky is without question the best offensive basketball coach of that group

I noticed a fairly large number of Ags who believed being a fringe tourney team was our ceiling. BK and Buzz lulled our fanbase to sleep believing that we couldn't do more than the rare Sweet 16 appearance. This just isn't true whatsoever. You don't need to be some historic juggernaut like Duke, UNC or Kansas to go on deep runs in the tournament or be a perennial contender. You simply need resources to keep up with your peers and THE coach.
A lot of SEC programs in particular abandoned irrelevance very quickly with the right coach. It's the coaches job to make BMDs care about the program. Guys like Nate Oats and Bruce Pearl are responsible for the influx of support for their programs to a degree they never had before. A&M is no different we have plenty of money sitting on the sidelines bc they haven't been given a reason to believe.
I think Bucky can and will be that guy for A&M. He has the hallmarks of a program builder, similar to what you see from Jamie Morrison. He has a burning hunger to win and be great, evidenced by how hard he worked as soon as he got here. That level of intensity was not seen during the last 2 coaches tenures. He wasn't sleeping scouting, recruiting and building a roster from nothing when he got here. He clearly had to rally funding in a short time too, it seems this roster is our most expensive to date.
Bucky is also a great basketball mind. It's early on but his style has clearly had a huge impact on our opponents. You can see in game that they can't maintain A&Ms level of intensity and that gives up short burst big runs that are difficult to counter. Many were worried about how his full court press would translate at this level, but it appears it works just fine when the athletes are scaled up for the level of competition. His game planning this season has also been elite. Against every SEC team he's found and exploited their biggest weaknesses and tweaks our system to cover our weaknesses.

We are a track and field school with a really good volleyball team until something changes that.

I dont disagree with the pro-Bucky sentiment, but do find it odd that "sweet-16 or bust" types are declaring victory in the first January.

Amazing what beating Texas does around here.

Alberts best be ready.

Let's pretend for a second that we get to the tournament and win a couple of games… That would be in year one of a brand new coach who started in April with 12 of 13 players being brand new. You better relieve someone will come hard after Bucky…Maybe Auburn if baby Pearl crashes and burns…he seems to love it here at A&M but is a Dixie/alabama man first. That may be hard to overcome or maybe he really has fallen in love with Aggieland and wants to stay here.

jeremy said:

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I have a theory. A&M IS a basketball school and this is a great place for success.

Our coaches have done better here than their next "winning program" gig ,dating back to Billy G.

Billy G. 70-26 at A&M, 40 and 27 at Kentucky

Mark Turgeon. 97-40 at A&M, 226 -116 at Maryland

Billy Kennedy 151-116 at A&M, no school due to health

Buzz Williams 120-73: so far at Maryland 7-10

We can win here and we can win big. Maybe we should stop selling ourselves short.

Maybe we are a good basketball school.

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A final 4/Natty here would be the equivalent of what happened with Cignetti. Like Indiana Football weve tasted success but never sustained never anything like what our main sports program has had in its history, but we're tired of it being an after thought (basketball used to be seen as the gap sport to get us to baseball, NO MORE). Bucky to me has already shown to have the goods if he just gets to the dance with this team. Predicted to be bottom quarter of tje conference by 99% of experts and he has us in position to be competitive with 0 time to hit the portal or get his kids.