Majerus or Not, SLU is still SLU

Lets get one thing straight right now, Rick Majerus is a badass basketball coach. He's good. Check his credentials. He's on the map. His name can be whispered in the same sentence as Coach K, Roy Williams, and Bob Knight. Bottom line. He may not have the wins those three big timers have, but there's no doubt that, given the players they have, Majerus would be considered one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game.

SLU's hiring of him is a great move, probably the best move they could've made in terms of enhancing their basketball program. But there's one thing it seems all the big time professional columnists and experts are missing: SLU is still just SLU. In case you've never been to SLU's campus on a Friday afternoon, it resembles a nursing home at 1 o'clock in the morning. The place is a ghost town. It's dead. Lifeless. All the students are gone for the weekend, commuted back to their off-campus homes, out of the gates that surround the campus. There are no student demonstration rallies taking place, there are no students lounging in the grass, there are no students riding bikes or skate boards around the campus sidewalks. Everybody's gone. The biggest weekend gathering around SLU's campus, from what I can tell, is the post-bar munchie line at the Del Taco across the street. And rumor has it, Del Taco doesn't even exist anymore. Probably because their food sucks...but that's beside the point.

Tell me, how impressed is a student-athlete going to be when they get the routine campus tour of ghost-town on a spring time Friday afternoon? Probably not very impressed.

You want another reason Majerus will be incapable of turning this program into a national top 50 like everybody thinks he can, how about the other local schools he's competing against? We've got a top 25 Southern Illinois program just across the river, a respectable program in Illinois who's made a recent final four run, a solid rising program at Missouri State, and an improving Missouri Tiger team right up I-70. Every one of these schools has a campus life, whether it be Friday afternoon or Sunday evening. These campus' are alive with energy. They aren't commuter campus' that quickly release students when the weekends come around. The action is the campus. SLU has a broad downtown St. Louis that spreads everybody apart. They have Laclede's Landing as their party spot, a commuting distance from campus, that mixes SLU students with the local eight to fivers. It's easy to see, SLU simply is not conducent to student life. In reality, the only thing that seperates SLU from the often-dissed UMSL is a better education. How is SLU going to compete recruiting wise?

The only benefit they have at this point is Majerus. And let's be honest. A 59 year-old man that weighs around 350 pounds and has had a serious dose of heart problems that have caused him to quit midseason three different times isn't going to be around forever. Let's hope the best for his health and for this program. But don't buy into the Post Dispatch's frenzy about SLU all of a sudden being a midwest powerhouse. It simply won't happen. The best we can hope for is that Majerus straightens this awful program out and gets it moving in the right direction for the next guy in the coaching line.