I didn't know where else to put this, so I'll just link it and quote it:

Carolina March: Wake Forest, Trying Desperately to Regress to the Mean

Also thanks to Quzybuk for the analysis in the previous two fanposts. As you can tell from its brevity, this FanPost is only meant to be observational, not analytical.

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Just when you thought the Washington Redskins couldn't get any more petty, a Washington Post article reveals how the team asked the newspaper to stop using "Redskins" in the name of its blog about the team.

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I was having this conversation with RA and I thought this convo. deserved a forum of its own. If you don't think Bzdelik will be fired, it doesn't matter, treat it for fun then. For the seeming majority of alums & fans/the rest of us who'd like Bzdelik to be fired at season's end and tie off this season before we discover just how far the bottom is, suggest which GOOD head coach you'd want as Wake Forest's head coach to replace this lame-duck!

I'm starting with listing a few suggestions. Suggest yours and have fun!

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Wake ranks 11th in the ACC in scoring offense, 12th (last) in scoring defense, 12th (last) in scoring margin, 11th in FG%, 12th (last) in FG% defense, 12th in rebounding-margin, 12th in assists, 12th in TO-margin, 11th in steals, and 12th in assist/turnover ratio.

In short, the cold, hard evidence confirms what 90+% of us already know & feel, it's gone from bad and embarrassing in losing against the lowest of the low mid-majors, to additional losses against more mid-majors, to worse losses with zero credibility against marginal ACC opposition. Our margin of loss remains a shade over 25 points per game, and our closest ACC loss was by 19 points. Wake hoops has become a sick joke, even before the latest 20+ loss to Maryland, guess how many field goals we made in the first half against Florida St.? 7.

Here is an annotated collection of what Tomahawk Nation had to say about us pre-game, what their regional newspaper had to say post-game, and what the Winston-Salem Journal said post-game, more on what our dumpster fire smells like to kindred spirits after the jump...

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It's becoming increasingly chronicled in major media that Wake Forest has consecutively regressed in every major offensive and defensive category over the course of this 2/3 of a season, losing by 26+ on average in ACC play, and setting historical records for awfulness. But what's drawing increasing attention, is the impact Bzdelik basketball is having on the Wake Forest basketball program's long-term future in terms of recruits. This article from the Fayetteville Observer was particularly enlightening, I've got the link for you and paraphrased the most germane stuff for easier reading (it's pleasantly a surprisingly lengthy piece). More on Bzdelik's wrecking-ball impact on our recruiting futures after the jump..

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In response to Ron Wellman's pitiful effort to rehabilitate the shattered credibility of pal Jeff Bzdelik, we should take measure of how truly bizarro Wellman's world has to be in order to take his word for granted. If you can read his defense without laughing to yourself and wondering to yourself, "Are we watching the same team?", there's a painful reality we should take measure of that challenges Wellman's fantasy.

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This was written largely because the "according to my eyeball test + I'm more optimistic than you" is a tired response that's neither grounded nor as proactive as many if not most Wake fans/alums want us to be towards our most important program, and because our crown jewel shouldn't be treated casually.

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Bemused by the naiveté of a post actually affirming this season of Wake hoops even looking towards the future, I feel compelled to assess Wake's basketball's historic failure under Jeff Bdzelik by examining the team's larger body of work rather than cherrypicking arbitrarily curiously selected stats. using small sample sizes & often mutating categories & benchmarks. I don't say this to be rude, but if you reduce the two line paragraphs, and assess the numbers isolated by the previous commenter, we're essentially reducing Bdzelik's dumpster fire of a season to the shooting percentages during the Duke game at home, point-in-the-paint numbers against Georgia Tech, points in the paint, off turnovers, & off fast breaks against Maryland & Virginia Tech, strange tangents drawn between the numbers of our opponents playing each other, and chalking up what's left to questionable officiating. This ignores completely both crushing losses against the likes of Stetson, Wilmington, Presbyterian, Richmond, Virginia Commonwealth, and Winthrop - and a squeak of a win against UNC-Greensboro - and Wake's aggregate margin of victory loss against our ACC brethren. So I don't know about you, but I think only wildly unscientific conclusions follow sample sizes that arbitrarily selected, small, and ever morphing.

This season has been abysmal in historic proportions, and I think given our patience and the hard work of predecessors like Skip Prosser & Dino Gaudio during the upward trajectory of the Wake Forest basketball program, and the sufficient window of opportunity Coach Buzzkill's had adapt & improve over the course of 2/3 of a season, mostly against the very lowest of the low mid-majors, and the weakest the ACC has to offer, Jeff Bdzelik's standard of competitiveness is not remotely on par with Wake Forest's standard of excellence. Wake Forest fans/alums deserve better, and we should demand more.

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I sincerely hope that this abides BSD's ettiquette, I'm lifting verbatim a really well-written post I just caught (I swear by another person, MarkDeac1/not me) from page 6 of the Wake message board thread "The Jeff Bzdelik Replacement Thread":

For half a century the archetypal Wake head coach has been a middle to upper middle aged man who was the perfect gentleman (except for the pub-crawling and quickly fired Bob Staak) and was either the Mr. Chips type (Skip), Mr. Peepers (Odom) or Mr. Rogers (Bzz). 

The Wake archetype is very non-threatening to other ACC coaches, to referees, and to our own prima donna players auditioning for the NBA or for Sportscenter.  And very non-threatening to the AD.

And this archetype has made us the Least Hated Team in the ACC, the team everybody likes second best, and fears not.  It has also given us a program characterized by mediocrity for 50 years.  We haven't even sniffed a Final Four since 1962, the closest being a halftime lead against Marquette that we blew.

It's time to break the Wake mold and bring in somebody who is young, energetic, intense, confrontational, and who is fearless and backs down from no one, not from K (or the refs K has intimidated), not from his own prima donna, showboating players, not from ADs who won't devote the resources necessary to become a national elite program, not from anybody.  A coach who not only lives to win, but dies when losing, and demands the same intensity from his players or they ride the pine.  We need a coach whom other fans love to hate, because we are not backing off from them, physically or mentally, and not apologizing for it.

...

(They) are out there, I just don't know whether Ron Wellman or Hatch want anything other than the Wake archetype, the Mr. Rogers type.

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I was at the game, it seemed like the entire team, including but not only CP3, was just not in it. It’s very difficult to quantify but if you were there you could just feel it, there was a conspicuous and equally strange lack of enthusiasm & energy from our players tonight, like they just didn’t care.

The Bad:

1) Why is CP3 taking 9 shots? I have a theory/feel like there is a legitimate but difficult to prove answer here: Paul is (over)compensating for the past years where he had to be the scorer and the distributor, but now overcompensating because he thinks we have a good enough supporting cast that he can continue to solidify his name in the history books as an unselfish team leader that could be the attention-grabbing shooter if he wanted to be but didn’t need to be. Does that make sense? Call it a hunch, but this is something I really, strongly feel is at work here.
1 Cont’d) If true CP3 needs to wake up, he is a PG and the load is off of his shoulders but he still needs to take as many shots as his backcourt counterparts, especially against a defensively-challenged fast-break team like the Knicks.
2) I won’t be redundant, the defense was atrocious. CP3 couldn’t stop awful Raymond Felton, Okafor rebounded incredibly but defensively was sliced like warm butter by Stoudemire, and we were lit up from behind the arc by guys named Wilson Chandler and Shawne Williams.
3) Our 3 point shooting is very bad – Ariza’s inability to make 3’s is especially disturbing; we knew he was a low-percentage shooter, but his incapacity to make scantly challenged treys is something I at least did not expect and expect him to improve pretty soon or he’s going to have to see his shots reduced, because people are going to let him drift out to the arc and let him clang those all day.
4) The backcourt bench of Pondexter, Thornton, Jack, & Green was punchless.
5) We only had 2 blocked shots (both by DJ Mbenga) against a team that flies by the seat of its pants/offers copious blocked shot opportunities

The Good:

1) We rebounded like monsters again, 47-29 overall and had 11 offensive rebounds to NY’s 6. Okafor and Ariza especially were monsters off the glass, nabbing 14 and 9.
2) Disclosure: I like DJ Mbenga. That being said, he was extremely helpful tonight, scoring a bucket with a pretty hook, making both of his free throws, grabbing 3 rebounds, 2 steals, and 2 blocks while fouling only once in 9 minutes. Let’s hear it for the (popularly voted) 6th man of the game.
3) Jason Smith was terrific. In only 15 minutes he made 5 of 8, shot cleanly from the charity stripe, grabbed 5 rebounds and showed along with Mbenga about the only glimpses of energy from Hornets players tonight, especially on that nasty put-back dunk early in the game.

My take is it’s really hard to lose it with Ariza taking 21 shots, since we’re not used to having usually durable Mr. West out of games. That being said, to me the most objectively disturbing stat. is CP3 taking 9 shots. There is no possible rationale for that, and it hurt us badly. I hope he learns that he himself needs to use his sick skills to nail a reasonable amount of buckets, but I strongly feel like he associates any scoring mentality with/like turning back the clock to the old, bad days where he had to play 45 minutes a game, was the sole focus of the offense and had to score 25+ for us to win. Come on CP3, we love your unselfishness but you’re overcompensating.

With David West, I think we can take the Knicks easily. His offense would have been much more more helpful than our tactic tonight of going small re the 2nd-team with the ineffectual quartet of Pondexter, Thornton, Jack, & Green.

Also, I was stunned to hear alot of uninformed fans around me screaming for Monty to speed up the offense. As stated in the post, this is ridiculous, the way to lose against the Knicks is by playing their style of game, allowing them to essentially race you to a win rather than beating them by slowing the pace down to how we’ve played consistently and more effectively against better (and similarly slower) teams like Portland this year. I say keep this offense slow (although that to me smells like an undeserved euphemism for afraid, stupid, or plainly bad), methodical, and deliberate. We have so many good niche personnel, with a floor chief like CP3 marshaling the offense with these guys, being conservative is much more effective/likely to lead to Ws than going to the races and seeing if we can perchance win there.

How Should We Guesstimate Paul's Expectations?

It's tough & I have the least faith in my reasoning here. Personally I think the Miami 3 are probably the best practical analogy from which to infer Paul's expectations, since CP3 has according to some sources followed LBJ w/extreme deference & loyalty, coupled with the fact that he left 'Octagon' & is now relying on LBJ’s cabal. I'll try to sum up my own thoughts on the possible comparisons & inferences we can draw from them.

While Wade had to endure one epically bad season in South Beach, he could probably still rely on trust with Riley & MIA's ownership to do all the right things consistently in good-faith, unlike the ownership here, & the recent head-coach revolving door. James obviously wagged the entire Cleveland franchise. As did Bosh with Colangelo in TOR re moves like re-signing Calderon, signing Hedo to make the franchise seem like a convincing enough contender in the long-term.

Our Potential Credibility Problems:
1. We have George Shinn, someone you have to go to tremendous lengths to simply convince others that he’s not one of the most irredeemably terrible owners in the NBA. And then there's Chouest, who is a plus for us but makes the enigmatic ownership flux at best, murkily hopeful.
2. We had Jeff Bower, who despite some unknown # of online fans here (including me, until this year’s draft that is), was someone CP evidently didn’t agree with on some key personnel issues.
3. We got an - at worst, mild, at best, non-existent - pie in our face because we went for Tom Thibodeaux while CP purportedly desired Monty Williams for HC, we subsequently were either ignored or rejected by Thibodeaux, & ultimately hired Monty Williams pretty much by default, which may or may not have hurt our credibility in Paul's eyes.
4. Our most recent draft, however economically practical, was primarily rooted in cost-cutting (moving Mo-Pete) rather than directly acquiring desperately needed personnel (bona fide reliable big man), & didn’t receive a numerous enough number of acclaims/rave reviews from people outside of ATH to offset the possible perception on CP's part that relatively immediate gratification (a winning team/deep playoff contender) was not on his horizon in the near-term.

What Could Demps & Shinn Say to Convince CP?
There's a smattering of practical args that Demps may make to rehabilitate our credibility, such as good-faith attempts like Posey's signing after the Spurs series in order to help put us over the top, & signing Okafor based on Chandler’s mounting injury history & inconsistent production. However, this seems, to me, an uphill, not impossible, but difficult, situation for Chouest dam*it get here fast & save us! Demps and Shinn to navigate well enough to enduringly restore our credibility in CP's eyes.

I think it’s better to just ignore the past because it’s too marred with an association w/Bower & bad contracts and/or bad players, & for Demps to emphasize:

1. The expiring contracts we have.

2. That even if some of our personnel are duplicative it can be turned into a tremendous advantage because we can move certain players without having to necessarily replace them at that position.

3. And big-picture, the imminent flexibility we’re potentially going to enjoy as a result of these two plus potentially new ownership.

4. A reasonably specific near-term plan that has built-in contingencies in case any unanticipated events disarticulate it.

I just hope Shinn stays out of the room during Demps's 1-on-1 with CP, if he entered & I were Paul, I’d have as much faith in his assurances as I would w/Matthew Lesko. Agree/disagree?