TL;DR:
Straight to the BottomI was reading the "cupboard bare" thread and realized something about our modes of communication in discussing Frank/Currie/oscar. There are publicly available stats, as well as largely agreed upon facts in what lead to the demise of Frank Martin's tenure at Kansas State and oscar's selection as our next Basketball coach by John Currie. Despite the basic outlines of a discussion being largely beyond argument, nearly everyone has adopted a narrative that fits in to an identifiable mold that limits the ability of these people to accept arguments that counter their conclusions on a number of issues. Essentially there are limits to what these party members are willing to accept, even in the face of empirical data. We have essentially turned our discussions into ideological sparring matches with two camps trolling each other: the Frank Martin loyalists and the Currie/oscar Revolutionaries.
This party identity has harmed discussion of Kansas State basketball through
1) The establishment of general rules of discourse for party members
2) The policing of rhetoric along the parties' ideological boundaries
3) Quick rejection of arguments that rely on any assumptions or empirical facts counter to a party's own ideology
4) A preference for only truly discussing K-State basketball within an ideological "safe zone"
I won't go through the endless examples of these ideologies in practice. Those of us that enjoy this board have been inundated with this on-going case study. But I would like to issue some ideological challenges to each group:
Frank Loyalists: Is it possible that Frank had lost enough of the team to seriously jeopardize the path going forward?
What value do you put on the image of a program? Did Frank compromise that? Will oscar improve it?
Think long and hard about what your vision is for K-State's Basketball program. What benchmarks do you have for progress?
Now compare those benchmarks to other Big 12 programs: who would have been fired based upon that criteria?
Would K-State be better off with your vocal support, then vocal criticism or with what you are doing now? If you feel like you are being fed propaganda, what would be the most effective response?
Would Frank's record at South Carolina and beyond inform any of your positions going forward? What would it say if he was a success? A failure? Had problems with professionalism/players leaving?
At what point will oscar be given credit for his successes and be responsible for his failures?
Currie/oscar Revolutionaries: What could Currie have done to keep Frank Martin?
Do you understand why people are disappointed with oscar's hiring?
Think long and hard about what your vision is for K-State's Basketball program. What benchmarks do you have for progress
What value do you place upon program visibility? How will we measure Frank's absence, how does oscar compensate?
At what point will oscar be given credit for his successes and be responsible for his failures?
My hope is not to have everything devolve in to Frank/Currie/oscar or to re-litigate our shared history and differing conclusions. Rather, I wish people would openly adopt these party identifications or seek to defeat them; one or the other. If people adopted these ideological limitations, then at least they could be upfront about them and accept that they are self-limiting before they attempt to engage in ideological battle on the Basketball board. For those of us that would like to actually discuss the team on its own merits without wading in to the midst of the battlefield, this would be a nice warning and a helpful reminder so that we could appropriately translate the post by someone in to reality.
But my hope would be that people would choose to reject this binary assessment of K-State fandom. I would instead encourage people to leave the comfort of this prism and find their own path. There are a number of resources available to help yourself make arguments about college basketball. In fact, I've compiled a short list:
K-State Sports.com- box scores for every game! Season stats! Historical data from the Frank years!
StatSheet.com Is freshman Will better than Angel? Are players really worse this year? Well, let's look at some stats! TOGETHER!
2013 P66 Tourney Bracket! No Wednesday's (formerly known as No Thursdays!)!
As if this wasn't a long enough post, I would like to take a moment to praise an example of discourse by some fire breathers.
http://goEMAW.com/forum/index.php?topic=25111.msg688311#msg688311Frank left behind a 5th place Big 12 team, that beat a C-USA team in the 1st round in the NCAA tourney.
yes. minimum expectations are to repeat last year. minimum. since we weren't that good last year, this should not be hard. 8 seed and one tourney win. anything less should be unacceptable.
Great posts here. Dax (an iconoclast if there ever was one) brings forward an empirical fact that challenges an assumption made by some Frank loyalists.
Assumption: "we are a Sweet 16 team this year, we are underperforming"Dax does this by reminding them of the actual achievements of last year's team. daris brings an expectation from the Loyalist camp that progress should be made due to the preponderance of minutes returning, but does so in a way that encourages further empirical discussion. Great discussion guys! Good job!
The views that are largely representative of goEMAW (loved Frank/hated Currie/hates oscar) are not representative of the typical K-Stater. So the discussions here are not going to prepare you for the minefield of attempting to actually discuss sports with the typical fan, but it is a step in the right direction for our own purposes.
TL;DR: We've moved in to ideological camps regarding Frank/Currie/oscar. This shift resembles the formation of political parties which I've termed: the Frank Martin Loyalists and the Currie Revolutionaries. This has had terrible consequences for rational thought and discussion of K-State hoops. Maybe we should examine this arrangement.
