Yada yada yada..new coach...new players...new expectations...and so it goes with the same old results. As the governor continues to remind us Montana is in a fiscal funk and nowhere more so than in higher ed where academics and athletics subsist on a Devil's Island diet. What to do? Well, anticipating Darwin's theory of natural selection we might consider proactively jumping the gun and assign one of the state's six languishing units to extinction. And that would be a campus with some market value...mmm... like UM.
Heresy you say, but then there's the upside. The lock-stock-and-barrel marketing of the Missoula campus would limit bidding to none other than the Jesuits and Christian Brothers - and maybe the Marists, but with a single iron clad restriction - that being a commitment to creating an uber competitive basketball program. There were no fewer than a dozen Catholic schools represented in this year's NCAA championships - and arguably anyone of them was superior to the Griz or any of its Big Sky brethren. At least the selection committee thought so - and seems to think so annually. The Griz, playing the close but no cigar role, have never matched the aforementioned " new expectations" since Jim Naismith hung the first peach basket.
Maybe it's time for something truly radical to change the fortunes of basketball, even if the University of Montana were to dissolve into something that hopefully might be named anything other than Saint Jude College. Why should a Gonzaga have all the fun?
Heresy you say, but then there's the upside. The lock-stock-and-barrel marketing of the Missoula campus would limit bidding to none other than the Jesuits and Christian Brothers - and maybe the Marists, but with a single iron clad restriction - that being a commitment to creating an uber competitive basketball program. There were no fewer than a dozen Catholic schools represented in this year's NCAA championships - and arguably anyone of them was superior to the Griz or any of its Big Sky brethren. At least the selection committee thought so - and seems to think so annually. The Griz, playing the close but no cigar role, have never matched the aforementioned " new expectations" since Jim Naismith hung the first peach basket.
Maybe it's time for something truly radical to change the fortunes of basketball, even if the University of Montana were to dissolve into something that hopefully might be named anything other than Saint Jude College. Why should a Gonzaga have all the fun?
