St. Joe's is fortunate to have fans that care this much about the program. I'm not sure that someone rooting for GW would do this. It certainly takes a lot of courage. I can't help but feel that the letter should have come out earlier in the year though.

You could certainly point to Billy Lange's tenure and say that the team has "improved" record-wise over his six years, but last year was so clearly the make-or-break year and the Hawks were unable to even get a top four seed in the A10 with Erik Reynolds, X Brown, and Rasheer Fleming. Despite that, the AD kept him on. This season was always going to be a step back for the Hawks.

SJU's AD makes me more appreciative of the job that Tanya Vogel did here. She was dealt a very difficult hand. Less support from the presidents and BoT than there is now. No AD is perfect, but at last she realized that neither MoJo nor Jamion were working out and cut ties before it became too late. For MoJo, the fact that he won 20 games with ML's guys made it difficult to move on from him after his interim year. Texas had the same problem with Rodney Terry before finally moving on this past offseason. On a side note, Jamion's Bryant team lost by 46 the other night to High Point...yikes.

I was personally against the firing of Martelli, because he dealt with so many injuries in his last couple years but making a change wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm not sure that Jameer Nelson would have been the answer, but I get why he had JNJ decommit given the way things were handled. Why Billy Lange, who did not win even 45% of his games at Navy, was chosen was always confusing. Yeah he had NBA ties and could certainly recruit, but building a team is only part of the job. His offensive philosophy was always so maddening. Hoist three after three and hope the shots go in. It's not hard to see how Joe's underachieved despite having good talent. He did go 5-2 against GW though, which is embarrassing.

The "ongoing and repeated loss of players to the transfer portal" part of the letter is BS though. Outside of X Brown to Oklahoma, I can't really think of a player that departed that would be considered a big loss for the Hawks. Every team loses players. If there was one thing Lange did do well, it was retaining important players. For whatever reason, he seemed to connect with players.

The mention of St. Joe's being a "premier mid-major program" is certainly interesting. In terms of producing NBA players, there may not be a program in the A10 that's produced more even compared to the VCUs, Daytons, and SLUs of the world. However, I'm not sure how premier the program is in the NIL era. At the end of the day, it's one of like 250+ programs that will be good or bad based on who they hire. They certainly don't have the resources of a Dayton or VCU where they are too big to fail. The letter is correct though in saying the Joe's should be better than they were under Lange.

As for the whole Steve Donahue situation, it definitely raises a red flag that the AD gave him a multi-year deal right off the bat. I get the idea that coaches will struggle to recruit if they are on the final year of their contract, but it's different for interims. In no world should Donahue be given more than the interim year until he proved himself. He was not great at Penn in his later years. I don't think giving him a multi-year deal will prevent players from portaling in the offseason either.

Finally, there's the whole Deuce Jones saga. I do think Donahue made the right decision in booting him from the team, although how players conduct themselves should be included in the NIL contract. There's rumors that Jones earned 500k and was being paid since June. For SJU's sake (and the boosters that pitched in), I hope not all of the money was guaranteed. Jones, X Brown, and Max Edwards are the last three A10 rookies of the year. One is no longer in the A10, and the other two are apparently head cases. None of the three are still with their original team. It's getting increasingly harder to get excited about good rookie players, although I'm not really sure what defines a "rookie" anymore either. Baylor just signed a former NBA draft pick who was nearly drafted in the first round. He also apparently has four years of eligibility. Players are also just joining teams midseason and becoming immediately eligible. The NCAA can't really enforce anything without getting taken to court. I'm not even sure we can call it "college basketball" anymore.