Could Cal Davis be the next Florida Gulf Coast?

[Chico]

Bradley's fans have been long time spoiled...
for over 30 years when we played at the Fieldhouse thru the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's...Bradley won 80% of home games

Well...I realize we aren't the power we once were - but still I expect we ought to win 2 out of 3 at home...guarantee 99% of BU fans would agree.
Versace sure exceeded that, Molinari exceeded that, and Les did as well...
This is just one more area we were promised way better but were given way less....
Dr. Cross & Geno both spoke many times of how they were going to guarantee we'd rebuild that home court aura, and take back the home court advantage. Yet we lost regularly to obscure lesser teams...

And we played a lot tougher schedule.

 

[MacabreMob]

UC-Davis finishes it's regular season by defeating UC-Irvine at home, winning the Big West at 14-2 and going undefeated at home for the season.

 

[tornado]

UC-Davis finishes it's regular season by defeating UC-Irvine at home, winning the Big West at 14-2 and going undefeated at home for the season.

anyone who stayed up & watched the free streaming** that the Big West has would have seen some very interesting things...
**MVC should consider this if they want to build a following..


-UC-Irvine threw a whole bunch of JUNK DEFENSES at UC-Davis - some zone, some man, and some box-and-one ..and actually frustrated the Aggies and Davis was down a couple points at the half. (sound familiar?)
But Davis made the adjustments, kept playing their game, and blew them out in the 2nd half for a 20 point blowout win. UC-Davis made nice adjustments on UCI's 6-10/7-6/7-2 front line and nullified them.

-Corey Hawkins had another record breaking 30-point game - UC-Davis finished a perfect 14-0 at home
"(Corey's) eighth career game with 30 or more points and his 38th time with 20 or more"

-a big crowd of 4400 - quadruple their historic usual attendance from just a couple years ago.

-they are 24-5 headed into the tourney and they have & are building a tremendous fan base plus student following.

-they don't dribble out 34 seconds then force a shot - they have a very active offense, pass sharply and hit shots - very fun to watch...
-again they were 8-16 from the arc and shot about 50% overall - Corey was only 1-4 from the arc (8-12 inside the arc) but the rest of the team was 7-12.

-at half the radio guy had a nice 20 minute interview with Hersey Hawkins - and he reiterated that Corey initially wanted to play for his state school, but when that didn't work out - the very first call went to Jim and he wanted to play for Jim no matter where that was. You might have thought he'd stay a zillion miles away from an obscure, terrible program like UC-Davis, but nope - he wanted to be where Jim was.

http://www.davisenterprise.com/files/2015/03/0308ucd-men5W-1024x682.jpg

One more interesting story - LINK

 

[Tommy]

Great to see Les doing so well with the Hawkins/Les combo, but so depressing to think that could have been us.

We have got to mend fences with Les and at least get him welcomed back onto campus as a legacy or something.

Sure hope to see UC Davis make some noise in the tourney.

 

[tornado]

... to think that could have been us....

could have - and look away if you don't want to know the facts..
two moves define the past 6 years..
firing Ken Kavanagh and firing the basketball coach..
these two moves altered the course of Bradley Athletic history tremendously and horribly..
We then hired a baseball coach who led us to bottom-dweller status when the other two finalist candidates that KK had, have both won MVC Coach of the Year and had astounding success.
then we had to spend $12-15 million trying to shore up the fallout from the other move, losing half our fan base and an enormous amount of donors & support... and we're still a last place team, dead in the water and bungling every move that's happened since from the Board Presidency on down.
Hopefully at least one of the next batch of "leaders" we get have some sense and help us make better moves.