I will respectfully disagree. First, I do not think Jeter is such a bad coach. His record is right around .500, which, all things being equal, is where one would expect a record to be. He's had his ups and downs, most recently downs. But he has had some ups. He had a great year with what was left of Pearl's program, but there was not that much in the pipeline. And Jeter lost a bunch of the players left behind by Pearl. Some have suggested, unbelievable as it may seem, that perhaps Bruce did not always run the squeaky-cleanest program, or recruit the most dedicated and pure-of-heart student/athletes, and his successor had to clean things up. He did. Jeter went back to Square One and rebuilt the program. He got them a league championship, but they couldn't beat Butler. Along the way, he had some hits and misses. The big fat juco guy who scored lots of points was a hit. The two kids from Chicago Simeon who dropped out after a semester were misses. Those are the kids mid-major coaches have to take a chance on. Buzz would never have touched them. It seems to me he is getting a whole lot of money for a coach with a .500 record in a crummy conference, but part of that was the luck of signing a big contract so that he wouldn't go to Iowa State.

As for attendance, I take it with a grain of salt. Last year, UWM had reported attendance of about 4200. Pretty good for them, and significantly better than they had reached in recent years, including years when they were actually good, and drew a couple sell-out crowds at the Arena. They also moved back to campus, which suggests to me that the people at the games were almost all students who got in for free. I also suspect that they counted everyone who might have been on campus during a game or something. In any case, their attendance in recent years has been closer to 3000 most years. That might put them in the top X% in the country, but so what? If you look at the numbers, there are about 50 teams that average in five figures. (Marquette btw was 13th. That is seven spots lower than our new conference rival Creighton.) But after that bunch, there is a huge drop off. So top half or top quarter doesn't really matter. They are nowhere near the top 50 or so.

But there are not that many smaller programs that have had sustained success. You named most of them. And though teams can move up in the pecking order, it is really tough. Butler was good under a procession of coaches for the better part of two decades before they got into the A-10 and then the Big East, and even then, there was some luck involved. Stevens is a great coach, but making two consecutive finals is catching lightning in a bottle. Gonzaga has done it mostly under one coach who has shown a perverse refusal to go to a big school and chase lots of money. VCU is a bit more interesting, since it has experienced various degrees of success for decades, long before UWM even had a D-1 program. They were competitive in the Sun Belt, which got them into the Metro. They have had ups and downs as well, but they have done it for a long time.

More common are the mid-majors who come up and go down depending on one particular good coach. East Tennessee has done pretty well under Murry Bartow, so he'll probably get hired somewhere else. Not sure about Belmont. Long Beach is doing quite well under Don Monson. This is their first successful run since Seth Greenberg coached them in the 90's, which was their first successful run since Tark the Shark coached them in the 70's. Very few programs do it on a sustained basis. If UWM wanted to, it would have to make a commitment, stick to it, and spend significant money. Build a new practice facility. Get serious about an on-campus arena. A few things like that. And I have to question whether it is worth it. Do they get more bang for their buck doing that, or pouring their money into their engineering school? Even if they could have the long-term success of the likes of VCU or Davidson (and they have nowhere near the tradition or resources of Davidson) would it be worth it? I think it makes sense for a school like Loyola to jump at a chance to join the MVC. They can use the publicity. They can potentially recruit some local players, garner some local interest, and perhaps attract some more students. But UWM? Where is the payoff? They are going to get students anyway, and mostly the same type of students, regardless of athletics. Take a look at the MAC teams. Several of them are similar in attendance and enrollment to UWM. Yes, it is exciting on campus when Western Michigan wins, but they'll still be there if they lose. So where is the payoff? It seems to me that UWM might well create as much excitement and get as much coverage with a really competitive D-3 team, like Whitewater in football.