Jake does so many things that don’t show up in the box score, very cerebral player!
8 Likes
Graves aggravating his ankle injury just as game is being put away is a downer.
On the plus side, it’s nice to consistently win games just because we are better.
4 Likes
Good win !
can one of our 10 coaches please tell the bigs to stop chasing the guards at the top of the key or worse at half court !
2 Likes
Awesome for Brendan to hit the 3! And contested at that. Icing on the cake of a much improved 2nd half.
9 Likes
this has been an amazing season. The team has continued to ascend. And reach new heights. The expectations for this team were unknown considering the transformation from last year. I’m proud and I hope you all are too. Special thanks to the seniors BK and Mahi in particular. Lets go to Vegas and keep it rollin!!
12 Likes
With the win, Santa Clara is guaranteed to finish the season with single-digit losses. New record for WCC wins, and maybe, with luck, will finish (tied for) 2nd in the conference.
8 Likes
Most regular season wins since 1968-69…
Exceeding expectations in every way this year.
What a great group of Broncos.
13 Likes
Was able to attend this game LIVE. Spoke with the coaches. Seems they don’t even have to make the championship game - but WIN their first and that puts them in for NCAA tourney.
The Leavey 6th man is weak people! I could have pulled out my yarn and crocheted with as much excitement as that crowd.
The most reactive was Brandon’s 3. Which was fantastic BTW.
But jokes aside. Leavey crowd really needs work.
6 Likes
Any theories as to why does Santa Clara lack school spirit support as compared to Zags and SMC?
Greek life. Neither St. Mary’s nor Gonzaga has it.
Makes sense since back in my day (the Dick Garibaldi era), greek life was nonexistent. So have we now transformed into a party school?
1 Like
I pretty whole heartedly disagree with this…
I think making the tournament the last 10+ years for both these schools makes it much more relevant for their students than not having Greek life to turn to. There’s probably a schedule of the games hanging in every students dorm - whereas when I was at scu (‘14), 90% of students didn’t know there would be a game.
7 Likes
There’s a huge confluence of factors that can’t be boiled down a single thing - and I certainly don’t think it’s simply Greek life. I would also say from my experience talking the alumni that SCU was a far bigger party in the 1980s.
I would first suggest that the majority of the seats in the arena are sold to the public, not reserved for students. We struggle getting passionate fans in those seats far more than we struggle getting students in the building. It’s often obvious that huge chunks of tickets have been given away to local sports teams. We struggle to get fans in seats, which seems to be a Bay Area collegiate problem - see e.g., Stanford football even when they were good.
The overriding reason we, or any other WCC school, lacks school spirit as compared to Gonzaga or Saint Mary’s is pretty simple. Gonzaga is making their 27th or so straight NCAA tournament appearance, Saint Mary’s is making their 11th since 2000. They’ve been national brands for a long time.
We haven’t made the NCAA tournament for 30 years - ten years before more students were born.
It takes a long time for the average student or alumni to catch on… we will need to keep winning.
9 Likes
The student section is already probably 2-3x the size of what it was before the Broncos started turning a corner with Jalen/Podz. It leaves much to be desired still, but I have some hope that an NCAA Tournament bid will tear the seal off of it.
I am actually more disappointed in the failure to fill the lower seat back section. That’s the section that’s always on the screen and where most of the season ticket holders sit. The inability to fill that area is pretty embarrassing and is on the Athletic Department, in my opinion. Between lowering ticket prices and courting alums to fill that section every game, the AD should be filling that section for this caliber of team every night in WCC play.
8 Likes
WIN……and they will come!! Both GU and SMC have established a pattern of winning that INCLUDES getting to the dance with regularity. Want to echo some previous comments and thank all four seniors for their contributions. I wish them well both on the court for what lies ahead, and for their future endeavors off the court.
GO BRONCOS!!!
6 Likes
Man, when you put it that way, it really shows how grim it all has been.
4 Likes
This has been a known issue for 20+ years. A generation of Nash era fans got lost when the Administration deemphasized sports. After the Davey/Keating debacle with Dan Coonan stating a “new day” for SCU Athletics nothing happened. Keatings Bball budget 4 years into his tenure was ranked 331 in the NCAA. We just kept losing and no students are going to get jazzed about that.
Fast forward to now and it’s slowly getting better but there does not appear to be much marketing hyping outreach from Athletic Marketing staff. You don’t see our new AD at games or pregame interacting with people. While Renee was at least out there, Heather avoids.
One last rant. Last year at the WCC tourney there was a reception for Bronco season ticket holders and fans. There were about 85 ish there. Heather didn’t even go inside the room to interact with people. No blaming her, but she can drive effort to get more buns in seats but hard to do when you try to lead from the shadows. At senior night last night she didn’t even go out on the floor with Herb to show thanks to the honorees.
We are winning but still a LONG way to go to fill Leavey.
3 Likes
I also believe the Leavey Center is in need of refresh.
On a campus replete with classic, timeless mission-style collegiate buildings, it looks like a space ship and feels very “dot com bubble” - right down to the big banner behind the lower chairbacks proclaiming “SantaClaraBroncos.com” … advertising the actual URL of your website like that went out of fashion a decade ago.
On the exterior, San Jose Civic looks way more like a building that would be at home on our campus than Leavey, which looks fit to house Cisco’s accounting function.
Many of the displays seem frozen in time. They serve bottled beer out of tubs of ice… they’re lucky there’s no one there, because the bathroom and food facilities struggle when there’s a crowd.
USFs new club area is very nice. I know many unaffiliated folks who hold season tickets at War Memorial, and sadly, even a few Broncos.
Leavey feels antiseptic by comparison. I think the administration made a major misstep by pushing much of the “fun” off campus - the Bronco, the fun late night food hall, discontinued sales of beer, for example, while I was there. Un-affiliating the Greek life was meant to kill it, but all it did was remove oversight. Now all manner of unsafe behavior occurs on Bellomy street with no University control. It’s completely opposite to Stanfords approach.
For Students, I think Leavey can feel like an extension of the corny, un-fun, “we’re watching you” atmosphere that SCU can tend to create… perhaps it’s different now with lay leadership, but it previously felt like the Admin was administering a high school more than a college.
4 Likes
Re: the fan support…..it’s definitely not one thing and Greek life is pretty low on the long list. I don’t know when the Greek system started at SCU but it was well already well established when I arrived in 1988. Student and general fan support was far greater in those days (pre-Nash BTW) and was decent during the Nash era. As a young alum, I attended most home games and became a season ticket holder a year or two after graduating and it was solely or even mostly because of Nash.
Also, I wouldn’t put SMC in the same class as GU in this discussion. GU’s support is far greater than SMC’s. SMC’s gym is half the size as GU’s and SMC does not sell out consistently, they sell out GU and vs. Bay Area rivals but are typically several hundred seats short of sellout in other WCC games and vs. lessor non-con opponents. Meanwhile GU has sold out every game in a much larger arena for 20+ years; and they typically play a game per year in the 12,000+ seat Spokane Arena and sell that out.
Yes, SMC’s support is better at this time than SCU’s and that’s the main point of this discussion but I wouldn’t lump SMC and GU together in dissecting SCU shortcomings. As a Spokane resident, I can tell you firsthand that the dynamics at GU and in Spokane are vastly different than SCU/South Bay and SMC/East Bay. Shooting for SMC as the goal is reasonable. Trying to replicate GU and its support is nearly impossible and involves a very unique set of variables and supporting elements that simply don’t exist in the Bay Area.
4 Likes
Agreed re SMC….
The mighty Cal Bears, with a much wider appeal and larger fan base, and much better results on a last decade basis than SCU, had 5,000 in the seats at Haas yesterday in a critical game (in terms of their at-large chances) on a Saturday.
That’s about half (or less) of Haas’ capacity. It’s a worse proportion to capacity as Leavey attendance yesterday (2,400).
Stanford had 5k on hand, Maples holds about 7,000. A better opponent than Cal had.
I can only work with the posted numbers which only bear directional truth to reality.
A not insignificant factor for Gonzaga is the “only game in town” appeal. It’s not necessarily easy in the Eastern Washington winter to go to Pullman for a game, even.
With 18,000 fans at the Chase Center last night, plus Cal, Stanford, Saint Marys and Santa Clara all at home, some 30,000+ Bay Area residents went to a good college or pro hoops game yesterday…
3 Likes