March Madness or Bust: Army Style
 

After reading a recent article about teams who had not ever made a March Madness appearance i got the idea to start a new dynasty. I was torn between two teams, Army and Northwestern. Having served in the Army i decided this would be a good place to start and then i could try and move up to Northwestern. The goal will be to take the team to March Madness and then decide whether to move on. Nothing fancy here, i will decide how much detail to go into as time goes on. Two mandatory teams to schedule will be Navy and Air Force each year no matter what team i am coaching.

Army plays in the Patriot League which has a 1 prestige. Our team starts off with a 10 prestige and expected to finish .500 in the conference. Our training facilities are rated a 10 and are 8th in the conference. We will be starting in the 2002 season and will start off scheduling the easiest games we can. We have two scholarships to fill this year. I prefer to build small teams that chuck lot of threes and can press all game long. I will let the computer recommend most things escpecially in the first couple of years.

The game i will using is FBCB. Okay so lets get started.

2002 Team Evaluation
 

Well simply put our team is not very good at anything other than handling the ball. We do not play defense all that well and our rebounding is pretty weak as well. On the offensive side we have one solid 3 point shooter. We will be graduating a senior C Matt Collins who is our second best ball handler and Sg Mike Canty who is pretty bad. We will definitely hard pressed to get our .500 conference record. On to the regular season.


Recruiting Round 1:

We put out some feelers to several players in the New York as well as the East Coast. Since it is early there is not a lot to report here.

Recruiting Round 2
 

Well our first round brings up a couple of decent prospects.

SG Irving Skiles (NY) - We offer Irving a scholarship and put a whole bunch of money into his recruiting. Our scouts rate Skiles a B in 3ps, Ft, Pas and an A in steals. We are encouraged by his high interest in Army.

PG Rubin Bellows (NY) - Bellows is rated an A in 3ps, Hdl and Steals The bad part is that Bellows only has an average interest in Army. We throw the rest of our budget at Bellows and offer him a scholarship.

There are 3 or 4 other players that would fit our system and have a high interest in Army but are not quite as good.

Recruiting Round 3
 

Well Skiles is still very high on Army which is great but Bellows just has an average interest. We throw everything at Skiles again and spead our budget out over 2 other players to cover our butt. Here is Skiles info.

Recruiting Round 4
 

Well Skiles is still on the radar but Bellows is still just average so we need to start focusing our efforts on someone else. A SG Owen Tillery is pretty interested in coming to Army so we place our focus on him.


It would really be nice to sign someone to fill one of our two scholarships soon.

November 2002 - Recruiting
 

Well the month starts off good with SG Owen Tillery committing to come play for Army. Skiles has offers from Long Island and Colgate and has yet to commit to us. We widen our search to include a couple other quality system guys.

How good are your scouts?

Army at Savannah State

We drop our first game due to poor defense and way too many fouls. We are led by SG Andy Smith who scores 18 and adds 5 rebounds. We get killed on the board 41-27 and send them to the charity strip 40 times to our 16 times. This is going to be a long season as we fall 69-60.

With the small budget i started with not very good. I will have to upgrade scouts in the offseason.

Army at Savannah State

We drop our first game due to poor defense and way too many fouls. We are led by SG Andy Smith who scores 18 and adds 5 rebounds. We get killed on the board 41-27 and send them to the charity strip 40 times to our 16 times. This is going to be a long season as we fall 69-60.