“I have never felt that he crossed the line,” Maurice Creek said during an interview with DC sports radio station WJFK.“This is 100% bullshit,” tweeted Isaiah Armwood after the Post’s story. “Verbal and emotional abuse. Are you serious? Players are soft.”
 

In the documentary, you see how convinced IU fans (before the video was released) the accusations were totally false simply because the team was successful so ergo the players and journalist must be lying to prevent any disruption.  They look utterly ridiculous.

If the allegations surface about a Coach who is losing however, off with his head get rid of this guy!  He must have done it!!

Putting the veracity of something so serious as player abuse of students, against something so trivial as college games simply based on W-Ls.  college athletics.   

Think about what that says about you as a person if you do that.

 

Great job Mentzinger though I believe that last reference belongs to Bob Tallent and not Pat.

So Dude, we're waiting.  I've given you names of Bob Knight's victims.  Mentzinger has given you names of Lonergan defenders.  Where are the names of Lonergan's victims and what did he specifically say or do to each of them?

Lonergan never touched any of his players.  That alone makes him so different than Bob Knight.  It's beyond insulting to link the two of them together.

Critical point which speaks to GWRising's general characterization of today's players.  Because they are coddled and told how great they are at such a young age, because many adults refuse to treat them as young men or challenge them in any way, I believe they are more easily offended and their egos are more easily bruised than those from past generations.  Lonergan coached for 30 some odd years.  He was old school.  He may have been slow to change with the times.  

Let's hypothetically use the P word as an example.  When he first got into coaching, you could likely call most most any player a pussy and nobody would think twice about it.  Language like this was simply part of the landscape.  Over the years, using the p word became less acceptable in society.  Yet, players like Zeke Armwood and Pato Garino would hypothetically not had any problem with it.  They knew that the word may have been used to motivate them as players, and they welcomed the chance for their coach to push them as players.  However, not everyone felt this way.  To others, the word ascribed to them was perceived as an inappropriate insult.  Like I said, their egos are more easily bruised.  This is one hypothetical example but you can take any of the sarcastic comments that ML allegedly said and the same principle.  Today, some might laugh, some might get motivated, and some might get their feelings hurt (with the latter group often not coincidentally correlating to a lack of playing time).   25 years ago, few if any would have felt insulted by this. 

It's just a theory but my guess is that Lonergan did verbally cross some lines without having any idea that he was crossing any lines.   Because he coached during a point in time where making the same statements would not have constituted crossing any lines.   This is the verbal abuse that has managed to keep him out of coaching.  You would had to have been there day in and day out to know how much of this was ML on his own vs. ML reacting to the latest inappropriate remark or action by Nero. 

 

Simply put, Bobby Knight is a jackass, who was entitled and empowered for too long.
But outside of us playing them in the NCAA's, don't see what that has to do with GW.
  Now, if you want another physical incident and a temper toward players that is more relevant to GW, along with a name swirling around other's sex scandals: another relevant point toward GW-- which cashiered a top administrator pick from the same school, then a certain Michigan State coach who is celebrated in the GW annals as a famous lifelong, incredibly close mentor to a player who left his program after two years, would be your man.

jf wrote:

Simply put, Bobby Knight is a jackass, who was entitled and empowered for too long.
But outside of us playing them in the NCAA's, don't see what that has to do with GW.
  Now, if you want another physical incident and a temper toward players that is more relevant to GW, along with a name swirling around other's sex scandals: another relevant point toward GW-- which cashiered a top administrator pick from the same school, then a certain Michigan State coach who is celebrated in the GW annals as a famous lifelong, incredibly close mentor to a player who left his program after two years, would be your man.

Agree that comparing the physical abuse of Bob Knight to anything related to the ML saga is incredibly dumb and just done to troll. 

There are plenty of other examples of coaches getting canned recently for "verbal abuse" such as Gregg Marshall at Wichita State (although he mixed in some physical abuse too) and Larry Eustachy at Colorado State.  Much easier to debate those similarities.  In fact, if you go to the Wichita State basketball message board ShockerNet you'll see their fans are having the same discussions as we did about whether "snowflakes" sabotaged their program and dismay that the school didn't perform a "nationwide search" and instead hired Isaac Brown who served as interim coach after the firing and did quite well with the former guy's players.  Sound familiar?

It's also dumb because as history has shown, once articles end up in the Washington Post, GW acts quickly in response.  GW does not have, nor ever had, boosters like IU that can influence the school's decision-making process.  At a BCS school ML probably gets suspended for a game or two a la "America's Greatest Coach" and his DUI.  At GW, ML gets fired.  ML defenders can call the article "fake news" all they want but there was a 0% chance it would've ended any other way once the Post hit print on the story. If GW wouldn't stand by KH after Omargate (which I would also categorize as "fake news"), they were not going to stand by ML after Ciminogate.

In any event, ML received his full contract so I don't really know why his "team" stays mad at GW except to do the very same trolling The Dude does.  

At some point the school, ML's defenders, and his detractors need to just move on.  I think the school has shown they have, time others do as well.
 

Last edited by GW0509 (1/04/2022 5:46 pm)

here (not  hear)

Joel Joseph wrote:

0509, the few of us GW fans left are not "ML Defenders" but rather "Die Hard GW Hoop Fans".
ML is very happy and financially secure in his early retirement thanks to our previous dumb ass GW leadership. 
Yet, hear we are after 5 1/2 long years from this boneheaded decision sitting in our own misery.
I have given up hope that GW will get over this fiasco until we hot double digit years.
Even Nero collected (stole) a cool $million from our university (that can't afford it) to go away quietly. That's what we do at GW - fuck things up and pay money to keep it under the rug.
Enjoy the ride because nothing will change in our life time. The Knapp/Nero/Maltzman curse continues!
Keep Raising High!

Right, so why can't us Die Hard GW Hoop Fans just say we are all thankful for the ML days and wish him well in his future endeavors?  And who knows, maybe in a few years he'll be welcomed back on campus for the induction of the 2015-16 NIT team into the HoF.

As I keep trying to bring up, the ML situation is not some one-off "only at GW" fuck up.  We are not cursed.  There was just a new "verbal abuse" story about the Hawaii Football HC.  One of the things he is accused of is "threatening players’ game time if they question him"  Another player was upset that the coach "ignored him." That doesn't sound like abuse to me but that's the world we live in now and it's enough to get an article written.  Either coaches accept it and change their coaching style, have "immunity" like Izzo, or get investigated and eventually fired.  It's irrelevant that players like Garino, Creek, and Armwood had ML's back.  As long as there was a Cimino or Jorgensen or Swan and the word "abuse" hit the Washington Post it's game over at a school like GW.

JC is now our coach and will succeed or fail irrespective of how it all went down 5 years ago.  The ML saga is not what is causing us to run a stagnant offense or losing to teams we should be beating.  Die Hard GW Hoops Fans should be hoping for the best and working to make the program great again instead of adopting some defeatist attitude because if we're being honest we all know GW can achieve things even greater than an NIT title, even on a shoestring budget.     

Last edited by GW0509 (1/04/2022 7:10 pm)

Because the coach "ignored" him? You can't make this stuff up. Even someone as good as Jarvis would be liable under that.
If ML is invited back (and credit JC for not running away from him or his legacy), that unlikely scenario would help heal from the bizarre NIT ring ceremony and revisionist history GW has put out.
But the situation not only bears on GW's reputation, honesty, morality, truthfulness, etc., it absolutely bears on the current situation.
  It cost a huge amount of money in a program that some here indicate cheapens out and whose limited budget scared away a worthy coaching successor. The payouts got close to $5 million of department and donor money with no value received. 
 It's why we are an embarrassment to the program's legacy, the A-10 and have us mentioned like Fordham in dragging down the league in recent years. So yeah, it's worthy of discussion in proper context.
   Once again, we literally debate things from 25 to 50 years or more, which personally I find enjoyable.
Why in the world would we want to pretend it went away or doesn't matter (perhaps if you don't like the discussion, skip over it--and it is fine to put the topic in Rewind). There are many less relevant to GW basketball or GW discussions here.
   However, agree on one point, the constant defamation of the former coach does bring it up often in non-relevant circumstances, where the topic could and should easily be avoided. However, it would be less than truthful (or honorable) not to correct it. A person's reputation is at stake, and we've already seen the cost.

Mentzinger wrote:

Several months before the Post story, Lonergan received official word from the school that its investigation of the verbal abuse charges was complete and that he had been cleared of all Title IX-related charges. GW provost Steven Lerman sent letters to the coach on school letterhead in the fall of 2015 declaring Lonergan formally cleared.

100% true

I spoke with ML a couple of weeks ago when Turgeon stepped down and his attitude is that he will never coach again, anywhere, because of the reputational damage, and he brought up the MD job bitterly, validating most of our beliefs that that was the one job he would have left GW for. BTW I'm still trying to get him recruited up here to UMaine, where even Patriska The Dancing Bear would decline a six figure offer.