Attendance and replacing a coach

[IndyValpo]

Coaching can be tough.....

UTA needless firing of Cross doesn't fix the problem
By Mac Engel
tengel@star-telegram.com
March 27, 2018 12:08 PM

Upon hearing the news that UT Arlington fired Scott Cross, one Division I coach in the state said to me: "They did what? Didn't he win 20 games three straight years?"
Funny you should mention that.
Cross had one of the hardest jobs in the state, and he was caught up in not being the right guy, even if he was the right guy.
The day UTA opened the new College Park Center in the middle of its campus, Cross was put on notice. He had to win. And he had to fill up the new barn.
That same day in February 2012, the school introduced Jim Baker as the new athletic director. Without the benefit of having football, his main job is to fill up the $78 million, 7,000-seat arena.
What Baker, and no one at the administration wants to admit, is that UTA can win every game and the College Park Center will likely still have thousands of empties.
The arena isn't the problem, nor was Scott Cross. The problem is UTA.
Even if UTA hires Texas Tech assistant Chris Ogden, as speculated, he will learn this soon enough: Nothing is impossible, but filling up the College Park Center is close.
Cross won, and not enough people showed up.
UTA fired a good man, and now they are looking for the Ark of the Covenant without Indiana Jones — they need a coach who can win in the Sun Belt. Then he has to win the conference tournament title, because the Sun Belt will never receive an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament. Then he must generate enough interest on a mostly commuter campus in a large, metropolitan region where the preferred sports are pro, and in particular football.
TCU is in the Big 12 and had a top 10 football team in 2017. It had no sellouts. In men's basketball, it had an NCAA Tourney team this season, and routinely there were empties (not a lot) in the 6,800 Schollmaier Arena.
Shortly after he and his staff were fired on Monday, Cross issued a heartfelt and kind statement on social media.
Cross is a decent, kind man who loved UTA. You would send your kid to play for him.
UTA won 20 games in each of the past three seasons, and people didn't show.
UTA won games, including at Ohio State, Texas, St. Mary's and Memphis, and featured fun players to watch in Kevin Hervey and Erick Neal.
And yet in this three-year span of success ...
In 2017-18, the Mavericks averaged 2,345 fans in their 15 home games.
In 2016-17, the Mavericks averaged 2,798 fans in their 15 home games.
In 2015-16, the Mavericks averaged 2,888 fans in their 15 home games.
When your team wins and the fans don't show, the problem isn't the coach. The problem is much deeper.
Maybe Cross had grown stale at UTA, but the new guy is going to inherit the same issues as his predecessor — UTA is a commuter school located in a major metropolitan area where college basketball ranks way down the list of things to do.
Generating school spirit in the conventional sense on these campuses is difficult. The student body, which in UTA's case is more than 41,000, is varied. Oftentimes the students are adults with jobs, and sometimes with children. Going to a basketball game is a luxury.
UTA is no different from a lot of schools that invest heavily in athletics as a means of marketing to increase interest in the university, thereby spiking donations, applications and enrollment. When it works, such as the case with TCU, the move is worth hundreds of millions.
When the move doesn't work, it leaves school officials chasing green and white ghosts.
The problem with Cross is that moving into the new College Park Center did work — the UTA Mavericks won a lot games. What it didn't do was reach the NCAA Tournament. What administrators refuse to admit is that even the good teams in the one-bid NCAA Tournament leagues, like the Sun Belt, set up coaches to fail.
Loyola-Chicago reached the Final Four out of the Missouri Valley Conference, but people likely don't even know that the Ramblers nearly lost in the quarterfinals of the conference tourney against Northern Iowa. Had Sister Jean and the boys lost that day, they would not have been given an at-large bid despite what would have been a 25-6 record.
The only way in for UTA is the conference tourney. UTA was easily the best team in the Sun Belt last season, but the Mavericks lost in the semifinals of the conference tourney. They went to the NIT and lost in the quarterfinals.
The NCAA tourney system is rigged against schools such as UTA, and nothing the school did by firing Cross changes anything about its situation.
Ogden, or whoever, might be an upgrade over Cross, but the challenges are so big that Indiana Jones himself could find the Ark of the Covenant at UTA and it still might not fill up the College Park Center.

[valpotx]

Wow, that is ridiculous.  UTA is a commuter campus without any school pride among the students, whatsoever.  You go to UTD and UTA to live at home and go to school nearby...

[a3uge]

I don't know as much about this situation, but I remember everyone losing it when Wright State fired Donlon, which turned out to be a good move.

[usc4valpo]

And then there is the DePaul situation on the other end of the spectrum...