Losing to UMass and giving up 91 points in the process is a bad, bad loss for Travis Ford and SLU. There’s no way around it and no one is really saying otherwise. However, the loss brought out calls from a small minority of SLU fans for Travis Ford’s firing.
To put it bluntly, such calls are extremely premature. Travis Ford has seen both his share of successes and frustrations at Saint Louis University since he undertook the task of reviving the program from the Jim Crews era. He’s won 100 games as the Billiken head coach, recruited some of the top talent in the St. Louis area, including Jordan Goodwin, Yuri Collins, Terrence Hargrove, and Jordan Nesbitt, made a NCAA tournament and turned SLU into a consistently good team that has a chance to compete for an at-large bid and win their league every year. Prior to Ford, the only coach to do that for SLU is Rick Majerus, a Hall of Famer and one of the greatest college basketball coaches of all time, and Eddie Hickey, who coached in the...
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