Following the win against Rochester College, Eastern Michigan University men’s basketball coach Rob Murphy expressed his thoughts on the media about criticism regarding the scheduling of games this season.
“I’ve been taught by experiences; from being a successful high school coach, working for a hall of fame coach, that you really have to ignore what the papers write,” Murphy said. “But we schedule the people we can afford to schedule, period. People complain, people write different things, but if some of those same people knew, they wouldn’t write some of the things that they write.”
Murphy dived into the specifics that come with home scheduling.
“It’s unfortunate for us [that] we don’t have 'buy money.' I would love to have a schedule full of division one teams coming into the Convo. That would be our goal," Murphy said. “But here at Eastern Michigan, we have to go raise money for our athletic department, which we do when we play Penn State, Louisville, and Michigan State this year. We raised that money.”
Murphy then moved on to the negative media around Eastern Michigan as a whole.
“The same folks who talk and write about our schedule, they say they are Eastern Michigan fans," Murphy said. "They love EMU, [then] they follow it up and say ‘Well we know what James Thompson can do. We’ve seen what he can do against Marygrove. Yeah, he had a double-double. Let’s see what he does moving forward,’ but he’s had four or five straight double-doubles. Why isn’t that written?”
Murphy continued to talk about lack of coverage on James Thompson's recent success.
“He followed it up at Madonna, he followed it up at Nebraska-Omaha, and he followed it up at Penn State. I don’t read that. But we want to belittle a performance because it’s Marygrove," Murphy said. "It’s the same clown show. I have a problem when writers belittle a program, belittle players and belittle a coach because they can. I can recall two years ago when Eastern Michigan had postseason play. We have a CIT game, and then we have clowns talking about the attendance in the media and putting it on a podcast."
Murphy concluded by defending his players and their work ethic.
“These guys come in here every single day and work their butts off," Murphy said. "My staff and I continue to work our butts off to get the program in the right direction; and all we read is who we’re playing, and what’s negative.”
The Eastern Echo welcomes thoughtful discussion on all of our stories, but please keep comments civil and on-topic. Read our full guidelines here.