(03-20-2020 07:32 PM)NH/JMU Saxkow Wrote:  

(03-20-2020 07:27 PM)KickItToScotty Wrote:  I'm disappointed but hopeful. If you had told me back in January he'd be the next guy I'd feel better about it than I do now. Back then we all talked about how no D1 HC who's had any amount of success if going to be interested and how we might have to go D2 if we don't want to go with an assistant. Since then though, the names that have popped up have better resumes than Byington in my opinion. Jones and Byington both took programs in a very tough position and turned them around.

Jones, in six years with full scholarships, got Radford to where their last three seasons were 23-13/12-6(T-2nd), 22-11/12-4(T-1st), 21-11/15-3(T-1st) with a tournament appearance. Byington, in seven years, got GSU to where their last three seasons were 21-12/11-7(3rd), 21-12/12-6(T-2nd), 20-13/12-8(T-4th) and he has no tournament appearances in his seven years. The Sun Belt is quite a bit stronger than the Big South though.

Even compared to Jones it's a little tough for me to understand choosing Byington if it's true that both wanted the job. Throw in some others that we heard tossed around or hoped for like Richey or especially JTIII and it's more disappointing.

However it's not too hard to find reason to be optimistic. I think we would all agree that JMU basketball should have a higher ceiling than Georgia Southern. He seemed to have hit his ceiling at Georgia Southern, maybe that's pretty much where the ceiling is there for just about anyone and hopefully his ceiling at JMU will be quite a bit higher. We'll see.

Do you think the 11 year age difference (43 vs 54) could be the difference? If both are interested for the same pay, maybe this is where you go with the younger guy. Especially if this is going to be 3 or 4 year process...you could be talking about Jones being 57/58 before JMU is even successful and you could be looking at around 10 years maximum with him.

Yeah I'm not real sure, the biggest positive I see for Byington over Jones is the conference. The press release from JMU talked quite a bit about the graduation and APR of his teams at GSU as well as his engagement in ticket sales, fundraising, boosting attendance, etc. so maybe a lot of those things in the interviews but that we don't see looking up records were big factors.

I also would guess it would take a higher salary to land Jones just based off of how much you see people expecting his next job to be bigger than JMU, his level of success in conference, and the fact he's got one more year with by far his leading scorer while Byington was losing his top scorer, #3 scorer, and top three rebounders.