Men's soccer eliminated by No. 10 Akron

by **redpony** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 11:46 am

It sucks that SO cares so little about our non-rev sports. Here is a team from akron, of all places, that hired a better coach (in about the same timeframe as we hired tmc) and then he obviously out recruits and out coaches us. I have to seriously doubt if akron started paying this guy any more than our coach. Had SO done any amount of dd then we might have been able to get a coach of this quality.
Of course this doesn't even begin to open the can of worms that exists with our women's soccer coach.

GO PONIES!!!

by **2ndandlong** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 11:55 am

He cares more about the non-revenue sports than he should.

by **redpony** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 12:03 pm

2nL- His actions speak a helluva lot louder than his words.

GO PONIES!!!

by **2ndandlong** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 12:10 pm

I was mostly kidding with that comment.

How do you propose he should split his focus between sports? Equal time for every sport? He has spent an awful lot of time on tennis and golf lately at the expense of soccer. Do you really think he should spend less time on football or basketball? BBall is about to get a ton of his time when they start the renovation.

by **redpony** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 12:43 pm

2nL-Had he done dd in the beginning this might not have been an issue. Yes, he is going to have to spend a lot of time on bball- probably looking for a new coach at the rate this season is going.

GO PONIES!!!

by **DallasDiehard** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 3:19 pm

redpony wrote:Please correct me if I am wrong but I thought our recruiting class two seasons ago was in the top 7 and I remember last year all of the info saying that our recruits were regional players of the year (or something similar). I know we lose some good experienced players but I would think the younger players should be able to step up and do the job.

Our tourney pairing this year stunk but that is the luck of the draw. I watched the first half of the game (via internet) and was a little disappointed at our passing and overall attack. We just didn't look like we were quite ready to play. Maybe next year we will have a better draw.

GO PONIES!!!

That's why, just like in football and basketball, ranking recruiting classes is at best subjective and done by computer nerds who have no way of seeing or knowing all that much about the players they are ranking. Maybe they know local players, and sure, if you have a 7-foot basketball player who scores 30 points a game you have a pretty good idea that the guy can play, but soccer is far more difficult to judge by people who aren't coaches. T.J. Nelson, for example, is small (5-8, 158 on the roster) and had modest stats (2 points on 2 assists), so to recruiting analysts, he might appear to be a bust ... but our coaches wouldn't trade him for anything in the world, and rightly so. He is an exceptional player.

The fact is that we have young players -- Juan Castillo (who hardly played in the postseason because he was hurt), Robbie Derschang, Zach Barnes, Tyler Engel, Emmet Kumeh, Jaime Ibarra -- with a hell of a lot of talent. Will Smith was a state player of the year last year but redshirted, and word is he's pretty damn good. There is talent there and more on the way. That's not an issue.

NickSMU17 wrote:Why don't we hire the akron coach away....?

Akron should be good at no sports, let alone dominating soccer....

Same thing we did with golf...

Not happening. Akron embraces soccer and treats it as a priority sport. The coach got a 10-year extension, and they have several thousand at EVERY game. They had fans fly to Dallas for Sunday's game, and surely will have fans fly to wherever the team plays. Their coach is an Indiana alum, I think, and young coaching hotshots like him (he recently got hired to coach the Under-23 national team) generally aren't available. Try prying Greg Schiano out of Rutgers or Scott Drew (puke) out of Baylor High -- he had early success and they locked him up, too.

Oh yeah ... we also don't hire him away because we have a coach, and a good one.

GiddyUp wrote:Our #17 is slow as can be, didn't have a chance with that matchup.

Not true. Our #17 -- Robbie Derschang -- is actually fast as hell and can run past virtually every player who tries to mark him. Their #17, who was marking him, should be on a track team.

redpony wrote:It sucks that SO cares so little about our non-rev sports. Here is a team from akron, of all places, that hired a better coach (in about the same timeframe as we hired tmc) and then he obviously out recruits and out coaches us. I have to seriously doubt if akron started paying this guy any more than our coach. Had SO done any amount of dd then we might have been able to get a coach of this quality.

I'd bet anything Akron pays Porter more. Soccer is a priority there, and unless your name is Jones or Doherty, SMU generally pays less than market value.

by **NickSMU17** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 3:54 pm

porter was making 100k before extension, so lets say they doubled it...

double that and he leaves.....Where is the COC for soccer?

by **redpony** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 4:18 pm

Aww c'mon Nick. That's about 5 good trading days you. Just spring for it man.

GO PONIES!!!

by **mustangbill67** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 8:24 pm

I am proud of our team, the coaches and the great season. We lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament to the defending national champ, which returned many of its players. It was obviously the better, more experienced team. I have followed SMU soccer since its club days. Even under Jimmy and Schellas, it was extremely difficult to win in the tournament even when we had many of the best players in the country. Non-revenue sport recruiting is always a challenge with limited ships and the cost to attend SMU compared to the public schools. Anyway we have a great program, which is probably about to enter the Big East that will be a small step up. Our day will come.

by **redpony** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 8:44 pm

MB67- I greatly respect your opinion. However, unless we get a coach who can both coach and also recruit top level players we will look like crap in the BE. TMc is a nice guy but he is not a national championship caliber coach. When you review our performance against top level teams we aren't very good. That did not used to be the situation when SH was here.

GO PONIES!!!

by **EastStang** » Wed Nov 23, 2011 4:50 pm

My view is that TMc is a fine coach and certainly got us to the tourney. We met the one team that probably would beat us 9 out of 10 times in the second round. The problem for us even when SH was coach was our finesse style of play works until you get into the NCAA tournament and meet a fast physical team that just beats you to a pulp. The BE is full of shin kickers. It will be a real test when we join that conference to compete. But I think we'll compete just fine. It will also help our ability to recruit some of the more bruising NE players. We have some great talent, but its homegrown talent with an international flair. With BE play comes some really good chances to add some national talent.

by **redpony** » Wed Nov 23, 2011 8:22 pm

Don't agree. Last year we got a lot further than getting knocked out in the first round. So, based on that we are regressing.
I have talked with MBill and respect his opinions. However, he is far more patient than I . If we aren't moving up and constantly improving then we need a change. IMO you just can't compare TMc with the top college coaches in soccer. He just doesn't have the pedigree nor the national championship experience to lead us to #1. JMHO.

GO PONIES!!!

by **PonyTales** » Thu Nov 24, 2011 2:12 am

This is idiotic. You keep comparing McClements to Schellas Hyndman ... who, as a great a coach as he is, never won a championship, either. You also fail to mention that our second-leading scorer barely played in the postseason (and when he did, was rarely effective) because of a concussion, or the fact that the Akron team we faced in the first game/second round this year was head and shoulders better than the teams we beat in last year's tournament (Creighton and William & Mary).

While you're at it, you also forgot to point out that McClements took a team that entered the Conference USA tournament seeded fifth and won the thing. Surely he gets no credit for that, right?

The fact is winning postseason games is very difficult. Good teams play other good teams. Half of them move on, the other half doesn't.

Look, we get the fact that you don't like McClements. But beating this dead horse is petty and small. Whatever axe you have to grind must be pretty sharp, but Coach McClements is not going to be ousted through this board ... nor should he.

by **gk00dad** » Thu Nov 24, 2011 2:26 pm

Here we go with the "this years team is way better than last years team" again.

"McClements took a team that entered the Conference USA tournament seeded fifth and won the thing."

This team was fifth because it dropped conference games that last years team didn't lose.

"the Akron team we faced in the first game/second round this year was head and shoulders better than the teams we beat in last year's tournament (Creighton and William & Mary)."

Akron lost a lot of their best players from last year and did not even get a seeding this year because they are not as good. They will go deep and could win it all, but they are not the same team. Creighton for the most part is the same as last year, they returned almost all of their starters and lest you forget we were 15 seconds from losing to them last year.
This is the first class that is not Schellas'. Lets see how many of these seniors get drafted to play pro. That is where you can say this group is better than that group. I predict that of this class, only Ivo and De Almeida are the only ones to go on.

No need to fire the coach, Tim has done a great job of getting the program back to being consistently good. Now the players have to make it take the next step. Like I've stated here before the players have to set the leadership tone for the team and at the end this team almost did that.

by **PonyTales** » Sat Nov 26, 2011 11:39 pm

Never said this year's team was better than last year's. All I said was that the assertion that McClements can't coach is inaccurate. Yes, we were fifth in the C-USA tournament because we lost some games, but we won it and deserved to. Likewise, Akron lost some key players to MLS and lost a couple of games late ... but that team was loaded. Regardless of which teams lost how many players from last year, that Akron team is stacked with talent. Can't comment on Creighton, since I haven't seen them. Didn't mean to disrespect last year's team. I just thought McClements and his staff did a great job of rallying the troops after in-season stumbles.