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It was a long road, but year 6 at Memphis saw me cutting down the nets... in the NIT. I ultimately experienced my first firing in an FBCB game.
In my first season, there was a lot of talent but an extremely awkward roster fit. Not only was the roster pretty much exclusively perimeter players, but everyone must have had an extremely low personal foul rating (no exaggeration, the opposing team averaged 15 more free throw attempts per game even after I dialed press and trap down to 0). The offense was #1 in points per game, but the defense was near dead last thanks to all those free throws. To make matters worse, I just completely whiffed on every single PF/C recruit I targeted, even losing out on 2* JUCO guys to teams with ~20 prestige (I don't know what it is about this version of FBCB, but I always experience a huge disparity in recruiting guards vs. big men - my 3-man recruiting class that year was a shooting guard who was the #1 overall recruit, an All-American PG who was #24 overall, and a 1* JUCO big guy I got in April after missing out on everyone else)
The 2nd season was a bit of an improvement (won like 2 more games in the regular season, snuck into the tournament, and made the Sweet 16), but the SG was one-and-done and Memphis' prestige had dropped from 93 to 79 after those two seasons. From that point, I just alternated good seasons with 17-14, no postseason years thanks to early departures (and the bad kind where you find a 3* guy who leaves after averaging 8 PPG his sophomore season) and recruiting failures. The most extreme example was after starting to reverse the prestige drop with the NIT title followed by a Sweet 16 appearance, two underclassmen left early to be the 26th and 30th picks in the draft and I was the top school and only scholarship offer for 2 top-30 SGs from September-December only to have both players blow me off in January. When you talk about being one player short, we were a top-50 RPI team that shot 25% from 3 that year and missed the postseason altogether.
I definitely house-ruled myself out of a job between not recruiting foreign players (a free 4* guy every year once your prestige is over 50 or so), playing with early departures on (I recruited more first-round picks during my time at Memphis than any three AAC schools combined), and having the lowest possible amount of points in everything but scouting. This run definitely drove home how worthless scouting is in FBCB as I still experienced some major discrepancies in years I had a 20/20 head coach and lead scout.
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