TARAN BUIE COMMITS TO PENN STATE

Between 2:30 and 3am.

and the only prescription is more siren!!

Can this night get any better for PSU basketball? Seriously, NIT Championship, 27 wins, and now an honest to goodness stud has committed to the program!! Somebody freakin pinch me!!

some very big names went there. i like how it’s a program that also helps kids with their OFF THE COURT behavior. sounds great.

I kinda thought it was New Kids on the Block…haha

…do you really think we’re the 66th overall team in the country? Really? Radford is better, just because they were a sacrificial 16th seed?

but i’ll keep saying it, you need to walk before you can run. you need to develop a fan base out of otherwise football fans before your players have something to play for. you can’t recruit bluechips w/o a fanbase. you can’t play decent OOC teams if you’re viewed as an RPI killer. you can’t go to the tourny w/o bluechips recruits and a decent OOC schedule…

these kids played their butts off, and our seniors came here at a time when basketball meant nothing — now it means something.

If you want a football analogy — this was the goal-line stand at Indiana.

For me, this was my first year watching PSU basketball — and I fell in love with the team and their heart. NIT or not, watching this team roll through Florida, Notre Dame, and Baylor fills me with pride.

In all seriousness, we aren’t the 66th best team. There are 32? or so automatic bids that go out to teams that we could probably run out of the gym, but winning their conference gets them in. Also, considering we beat MSU on their court means that we can beat a team in the final four of that other tournament. This is a good thing, and getting beat in the first round does not equal what was accomplished here.

We’re not celebrating the NIT championship like it’s the crowning achievement of a basketball program. Read the post below this one again. I specifically said, “I’m not foolish enough to think this makes Penn State basketball a national powerhouse.”

This season was just a step on a journey. We all want the same thing for Penn State basketball. We all want PSU to be a national player that routinely wins Big Ten championships and goes to the NCAA tournament and advances. The difference between you and us is that you are waiting for the team to get there before you are willing to offer your support. You, sir, are a front runner. I’ll admit that I was never much of a PSU basketball fan until two years ago. Mostly that was because I did not live in State College and I only had the opportunity to watch the team maybe once a year. The BTN has allowed me the opportunity to follow this team like I never could before. So I feel like I have suffered through the past two seasons with this team. This made the NIT championship so sweet because I appreciate the progress this team has made to get to this point. I certainly hope this isn’t the high water mark for PSU basketball going forward, but right now, at this point in our program, this win shows significant progress from the team that was only winning one conference game per year.

If I were sitting back waiting for this team to make the final four before I chose to support them, I guess this NIT championship wouldn’t thrill me either.

We are moving forward, I am pumped to see the students show up in the numbers they did. Do you know how many Bball fans were developed this year, and they will be there next year for our home games because now they see how fun PSU basketball can be. I would put this year on par with our sweet 16 year for success level and am very happy with where we are.

This “66th best team in America” stuff is total bullshit, and I suspect you know it. Do you really think that any of the 13-16 seeds were better teams than Penn State? That’s 16 teams right there. And if you don’t think that winning the NIT qualifes as success for this program, you could not possibly know how decimated this program was when Ed got here. Most of our best players fled the program (Marlon Smith, Jan Jagla, that guy who ended up at Wisconsin), and we were left with a bunch of guys who were lucky to be wearing a Division I uniform. There were guys like Jarrett Stephens and Geary Claxton, but that was just about all. There was absolutely nothing in the way of a bench — if our main guy wasn’t on fire, it was a loss. Occasionally, we got lucky when the lightbulb turned on for a guy like Travis Parker.

The point is, you can’t possibly know how beneficial this NIT was without understanding that the program was a smoldering fucking crater when Ed arrived, and the fact that a lot of our best players fled town set us back even further. Now we have something going.

(really, would a first round NCAA loss have felt better than this?)

Read this article…

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/columns/story?id=3630400

It’ll give you some perspective on where this program was.

You’ve responded toJonnyR44 much better than I could have. My first thought was to send Cornley over to his house!

If you didn’t get (positively) excited over the game last night, there is something wrong with you! JoePa, Russ Rose, Coquese Washington and who knows who else were all there showing that “They Are…Penn State”. (Course Joe took everybody over to Juniors in Brooklyn after the game!)

Really, to try to argue that we are #66, is ridiculous! Three weeks ago, I rooted like hell to get into the NCAA. I felt bad we didn’t make it. We were obviously better than many of the automatic bids. Do you really think some of the autotrons like UT-Chatt, Bobby Morris, Cornell(a 14th seed!), etc. were better competition than PSU? Sure, we might have been one and out, or a victory and out. But this team has also shown that it can run with some of the Bulls like MSU. So, who knows if they could have made a bit of a run.

 But that is not the NCAA. Rightfully so, the NCAA gives the “littler” guys a chance for their moment in the spotlight with the automatic bids. But those are not the 65 “best” teams in the NCAA!

In hindsight, I really feel this run to the NIT Championship was much more important to PSU Basketball than a NCAA 14-16 seed. Obviously, if they had lost early, the NIT bid would have meant little if nothing. That was like a PSU F-Ball game last night. What spirit!

Donovan went to the NIT in his 2nd season, the sweet sixteen in his third, and the national title game in his fourth.

If he wasn’t related to a current player and the family wasn’t openly talking about moving from upstate NY to State College.

This “#66” stuff was as predictable as the sunrise. Our basketball team exceeded expectations and provided our fans with two weeks of thrilling basketball. Their team shit the bed again, this time as a #1 seed. And they lost to a team from Philly, which really drives Pittsburghers insane.

They’re grasping at straws. We put more asses in the seats for a secondary tournament in New York City than Pitt will have at Heinz field for their first home game.

Let the Pitt fans be. The #66 talk is just a defense mechanism to cover for their athletic impotence and irrelevance.

Please do tell what else the future holds, oh might one…

You won’t celebrate anything this team does until they go to the final four? Why even be a fan? What joy could you possibly get out of watching any sport?

then you’d realistically understand that our team historically sucked.

This year, we far, far exceeded “suck”

Calling the team mediocre is unfair- they were in the last four teams out of the NCAA, and made the best of a bad situation and won the tournament they got into. They won’t make the top 25 poll, but that’s not what this is about- look at the program five years ago and tell me this isn’t progress. Tell me that Ed hasn’t started turning this thing around. I don’t care if other people think it’s a big deal- they don’t need to. Beating Indiana and MSU at the end of a meaningless football season didn’t mean much outside of PSU, but we saw where that led. We would rather have won NCAA’s or something, but it didn’t work out and the team made the best of it.

And I honestly don’t care if those 36 buses of people don’t become rabid fans- people like a winner. The student section at football games in ‘04 was awfully empty, too. What matters is that they did go, and gave the seniors a sendoff that they very much deserved. I hate the “true fan” argument- it’s not like you get a patch or pass a test to be one. But if you’re a fan, how can you be this upset about how it turned out? For better or worse, we were stuck in the NIT. I’d rather win the damn thing- with most of the games not especially close, I might add- than lose in it.

Is that a true “realist” would see this season for what it was. One of the five most successful seasons the program ever had. Arguably the best.

If you’re such a devoted fan, why not just enjoy the day? If you really did follow this team though it’s, many, many, shitty seasons, can’t you find any pleasure in a big win?

Basically, I don’t care if you went to every game, named your first born son Ed Fogel, and carried Jammele Cornley’s love child to full term in a surgically implanted womb. If you aren’t happy with the way this season ended, you’re no fan of this team or these kids. Last night was cause for a bit of celebration. To call it a “celebration of mediocrity” is being shitty just for the sake of it.

is why are you even a fan if you don’t even care when this team has had the most success they practically ever had?

You’re like they guy at the golf course who hates Tiger Woods because he made the game more popular and it’s harder for you to get a tee time.

Whoever said they should send Cornley over to my house…I know the guy. We’ve talked basketball.

actually means “I sat next to him once in one of my classes in the forum. I said ‘Nice game on Saturday.’”

Mediocre means ordinary. A dispassionate observer could not say that the 2008-2009 team was an ordinary Penn State basketball team. Clearly it’s above average, at least.

“No one is harder on him than himself, and I guaren damn tee you he wanted to get into the tourney and get a crack at somebody.”

Ever played a sport? Every true competitor who isn’t perfect feels exactly the same way. (Actually, a lot of amazing athletes who are practically perfect feel exactly the same way.) How someone could see this as a sign of mediocrity is beyond me.

I couldn’t agree more with your last paragraph. I am a relatively new PSU fan and now alum. I wasn’t a PSU fan at all until I went to school there (PSU is a little far away from Minnesota and all). But it seems like the other high points in previous seasons, particularly the sweet 16 run in 01 was like the MSU upset a few years ago, a simple game where they played way above themselves and happened to win 2 games. This whole season felt like a bigger better baseline. Instead of it being a season capping experience to beat MSU it was one of many good wins this year culminating in a NIT championship.