Soap opera at Ball State

Andy Katz touched on it briefly on ESPN's Web site, but there's quite a drama going on with the Ball State basketball program right now. Evidently Ronny Thompson, a member of the Georgetown Thomspon family, might be looking to get out after just one season, a nine-win season that was the worst in Ball State history. Katz took Ball State's AD at his word, but Thompson isn't talking.

What's really going on up on that Muncie campus these days????

 

Bring back Branch McCracken (psst... got a link on this stuff?)

 

Found this ESPN link, as well as another report that I saw elsewhere last week.

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/news/story?id=2932004

http://www.hoopwise.com/?p=212#more-212

 

Wow.. that hoopwise stuff is great...I am surprised that Thompson is alleged to have said not to trust some staffers because they are white.

 

Today's news: Women's volleyball coach says he was canned for reporting organized out-of-season practices by Thompson's team, an NCAA no-no....

Link:

http://www.thestarpress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070711/NEWS01/707110338

 

Ronny Thompson is not his daddy or his brother. The only thing he seems to have picked up from his dad's great Georgetown teams is the paranoia part. He's been a disaster in Muncie from the day he showed up. A complete disregard for the rules. A complete disregard for the people around him. And I've heard rumor that he's now been giving the school some veiled race card threats in order to leave on the windfall terms he wants. A bad hire all-around.

 

Boom goes the ... nah, too easy.

 

Bring back Majerus and the glory years, baby!

Go Cardinals!

Added: Hell, I'd be happy if we could steal Hunsaker back from Bumfuck Egypt, um, I mean Utah Valley State.

 

None of this would have happened with Steve Yoder in charge.

 

There is nothing that would make this alum happier than to see Thompson go.

I don't get around Muncie that much anymore, but I see folks who are around the program a lot, including media past and present, and I've never heard a good word about him. He is the prototype of someone who walked in the door and expected everyone to kiss his ass because of his name.

From a media relations standpoint, he's about as easy to deal with as a kick in the nuts. Aside from Doug Zaleski (longtime beat writer) and Morrie Mannies (the much beloved radio pbp man) and a quality student paper, there really isn't much media to deal with, but Thompson walked in there and went into Nick Saban mode. Dumb.

Ball State is generally a place where people are going to be pretty accepting of you from a win-loss standpoint, usually with a built-in honeymoon period of a year or two, so it takes a special kind of stupid to turn a place which already felt it hit rock bottom at the end of the Buckley era against you.

It doesn't help that Thompson plays the most boring style of basketball imaginable and went 9-20 with an RPI somewhere around 666th whilst doing it.

The race card thing is not without cause. A racist note was left in his office recently, the mystery being that there was no forced entry into the locked office area where it was left (last I read about it anyway) which has conspiracy theorists at Defcon-10. But whether it was or not, I'm not going to pretend that Muncie is some oasis of racial harmony, it isn't, so any racial bent to the turmoil is justified for Thompson to complain about as far as I'm concerned.

But the way I read it from afar, much of the animosity turned towards Thompson has a lot more to do with him being a dick than a racial thing.

HOLY FUCK! As I was writing this, a stack of media guides fell over and right on top is Ball State's media guide with Thompson looking directly at me in Paul Reiser Couplehood-esque head-on-fist pose. Your not-so-subtly concealed Rolex and two-day-old mustache don't scare me, Ronny!

 

Morrie Mannies is still there? Gawd, he was doing PXP there when I was in Kalamazoo 25 years ago...

 

Holy shit, Bubbles, you went to Ball State, too?

Me, Whitlock and verbose Brewers fans. Damn, they really do let anyone in.