I just want to see Bradley winning games again, beating good opponents, not cupcakes, playing in the NCAA tournament, and not being embarrassed by other programs that have no right being better than Bradley. I believe all Bradley fans just want to see a winning program being built.
We can point to esoteric numbers from Jim Les' first 3 years that seems to make some feel better about our losing now (though I won't allow posters to fudge the numbers). But my point was that in Jim Les' first 3 seasons we may not have had as much success as fans wanted, but most tuned-in fans could see the program was accumulating significant talent and clearly building toward something special that had not happened at Bradley in over 50 years.
Fast forward to the present- Fans could accept the record number of losses and unprecedented blowouts, if we could see the same kind of successful team-building. Recall that
Kirk Wessler told us that Geno Ford would avoid "rustling up a quick fix" by staying away from junior college and transfer players, and "establish a core that can win, and then win again". Note in that column, Kirk praised the first recruiting class of Devon Hodges, Jalen Crawford, and Shayok Shayok as possibly high-major recruits because "Xavier, Wisconsin and Texas Tech also recruited them".
Do you see that same kind of team-building happening as we saw 9-10 years ago? Do you see a Top 40 RPI, NCAA team here next year? Our current RPI (RPI 240) is worse than it was at any time during the Jim Les era.
Most fans don't see it happening, and that is the #1 reason they have bailed out in record numbers. There is a lot of failure and blame to go around, and most fans don't care about the blame game, they just want to see the problems corrected, and get back to winning.
But even Kirk doesn't believe that will happen soon, because
he wrote an entire column trying to prepare us fans for years of more rebuilding. I think there is still a chance to turn things around quicker than Kirk thinks. Its happened before, even in as short as 1 season (see 1979-->1980).
Now we are looking at more "rebuilding" but unlike the rebuilding that Kirk envisioned, we seem to be getting even more turnover of Geno's own recruits, and looking at more junior college recruits (remember this column:
Too Many Jucos for Bradley?), and more transfers. I wish I was wrong, but I have been right about everything else that I predicted and which has happened these last 3 years. Sorry that makes some people even angrier that, in addition to us fans suffering through all this losing, that I also happened to be right all along.