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There was a part in the article from hoopfactor.com about BG that said...."Still, if they (BG) can keep their core together they could be murder by the end of the season – and look out for next season…If is a scary word though."

I think that about sums it up best....."If." If we can keep these guys all together and at BG and not leaving, we could have had a damn good team again here at BG. The problem with all of these defections (transfers, quitting, leaving, etc.) is – it keeps putting us in a "rebuilding" mode year after year after year. We never get a chance to reload like we do in football because we keep having to rebuild our team. And you will not win the MAC in a rebuilding cycle. The teams that win the MAC are solid units, not patchwork teams.

It's true that players leave every school across the country, but there's no doubt we have had an alarming number of players leave (for whatever reason) over the past three or four seasons alone. I'm not pointing fingers at anyone, not Dakich, not the facilities, not the teammates – but clearly we have had our share of problems – whatever they are? I doubt we can find another D-I program that's lost as many players as we have in the last four years.

The bottom line is, until we can start keeping players here and produce some teams like we've had in 1997, 2000 and 2002, we're going to continue in the rebuilding mode and never get to where we want to be. But if we can finally start building and not rebuilding, we'll have a lot more positive stuff to talk about on the basketball board rather than our frustrations about the revolving door the program seems to have right now that is eating us diehards alive.

Defections are hard to take but at least when they happen now there's a feeling of "well he wouldn't have worked here anyways"...y'all still have some real good talent. There's 4/5 programs I can think of that rival or surpass BG in the defections department the last year or so -- and no I won't name them except for Butler who is losing guys like Big Baby Davis is losing lbs down at LSU. The thing I think most folks don't grasp sometimes is how you really can't compare the two major sports in the MAC. The MAC is a basketball league with 2 or 3 decent football teams and 1 or 2 very good football teams each year (obviously BG is among the top group). It's not real difficult comparably speaking to win 6 or 7 in football. It's usually damn difficult to win 17/18 in hoops. If the MAC takes the two games off the hoops schedule as planned the season after this, that will give the "smart" scheduling teams 2-3 more wins, which all of a sudden turns 17-19 wins into 19-21 wins, not to mention the squads that win 20/21 moving up into the "hey look at us" 23 win category (BG's last great season snub the exception). If you all of a sudden have 6-7 teams with 19-24 wins, along with the same 6-7 teams with the two less conference losses -- plus a MAC rep on the committee -- maybe then the MAC can garner the b-ball respect it deserves when it counts (like the Valley tends to get each year). I just think it's hard to look at the two as equal (football vs bball) within the MAC. If the football was as good -- top to bottom -- in the MAC as hoops, it would be considered BCS worthy. The fact is that NIU or Toledo or BG beating a top-thirty BCS school in regular season football has a much more dramatic effect than the same thing happening in basketball -- for multiple reasons. Just my long, drawn out 2 cents. Okay, you can kill me now!

"And you will not win the MAC in a rebuilding cycle. The teams that win the MAC are solid units, not patchwork teams. "

Maybe not but you can win the MAC tourney that way, and I would rather have that. Look at OU last year.

Ohio certainly did win the MAC title last year, and if you go back there's a threads I posted a couple months ago about how Ohio basically put together a blue print of how to win the MAC. But they weren't really in a rebuilding cycle at all. Ohio won by bring in talented guys who could play - RIGHT AWAY - and they weren't hit by a bunch of defections with players transfers and quitting the team in order to put together the team they had. Ohio had some hits via graduation prior to last season, but they've been bringing in big time players for the last couple recruiting classes and in their case, were better than some of the returners in order to fill those roles. If you remove a sophomore like Troutman and a JUCO like Green and have a top recruit like Williams not come to school because he was homesick (catch the BG drift in all of this?), Ohio isn't cutting down the nets in Gund Arena and going to the Big Dance. But if you keep all these guys and bring in recruits who can play now and not sit around on the bench for a few years, you'll can win.

Bottom line is, if we keep losing players, we keep in the cycle were in and we will never (which will still haven't done) win the MAC Championships. But if we keep the players in school, we get back to seasons like 1997, 2000 and 2002 and hopefully break through to the NCAAs for once.