“On his weekly radio show Monday night, NC State basketball coach Herb Sendek offered an unusually blunt assessment of his team as it gets set to open ACC play at Miami this Sunday.”
There was a thread started by 1985 Grad on Pack Pride’s Message Boards about the comments. Unfortunetly, the thread degenerated into such utter idiocy (even quicker than most threads have recently), that I can’t bring myself to inter the fray to argue the ridiculous tangents that the thread has taken. (If someone is so absolutely stupid to try to compare Herb Sendek and Coach K, then nothing I am going to say to them is going to make any impact.)
On point – it is very nice to see Sendek’s comments and I am excited to the Pack acknowledge the need to make some changes and adjustments. I am equally happy to hear/see Sendek give some honest and interesting commentary about the current state of our basketball program as opposed to his usually hyper-predictable, boring coachspeak. It is very nice for Sendek to finally treat fans that care enough to listen his exhaustingly slow show and dedicate time reading about this currently tepid program with enough respect that they finally deserve some honest and accurate assessments from him.
Sarcastically – I am curious at the flip-flop that I am witnessing from so many of Sendek’s supporters.
There have been at least three articles written in local newspapers in the last week that all carry the similar theme and commentary – “NC State’s basketball season will be just fine”. The most prominent of which came a couple of days ago when Ned Barnett of the News and Observer proclaimed, “Ailing Pack will be just fine”.
(Of course, the term of “just fine” is defined by these less than motivated fans/writers as simply, “squeeking into the NCAA Basketball Tournament and nothing more.” I will leave the acceptability of using the long term standard of this once proud program as the minimum qualification of the NCAA Tournament for a future article).
These recent newspaper articles have been echoed by Sendek supporters as the gospel. For the last couple of weeks/months/years I have consistently read where “we will be fine”…”things are alright”…”we’ve just had injuries/sickness”… and “look at the past few years, we will still make the tournament”.
These opinions may be correct. I haven’t argued the point of if State will ultimately make the tournament with anyone. I do ask every person who proclaims this opinion, “WHY they think that we will ultimately make the tournament this season”. The overwhelming answer is, “because we have the last three seasons”. My befuddlement aside, I don’t argue the point since only time will tell.
HOWEVER, how can so many of the people who have been touting and endorsing that “things will be just fine” as they were last week, suddenly laud Sendek’s announcement of the need for change? If you thought that things were going to be fine…then how can you support a position of change from how you thought things were going? How exactly does that work?
GoPack.com quotes Sendek as saying:
“If you look at the bare facts, we have to get a lot better. We weren’t nearly good enough against West Virginia and we haven’t minced any words about St. John’s; we were horrible. But before we can start getting better with our team, we have to get better with our health. The latter isn’t happening until we get healthy. Hopefully this week we’ll turn the corner. Once we do, we’ve got to get better because right now, we’re not good enough.”
I’ve been saying for weeks that if you look at the bare facts that we have to get better and you crucify me. Today, the Pied Piper speaks it and the same people that have been criticizing me totally agree with him.
Welcome to the world of true bias, where it doesn’t matter what is said; it only matters who says it.
