Apparently, you can add Stephen F. Austin Team 2017-18 to the long list of things that millennials have ruined.
Coach Kyle Keller was understandably upset at this turn of events, and he blamed millennials. His team of college students is lousy with them, apparently.
“The millennials today, they don’t even watch college basketball,’’ he said after the game, per USA Today. “A lot of our guys didn’t even know who those cats [Texas Tech players] were because they don’t watch the game. They’re on their phone and doing that kind of stuff.
“I hate to say it, but as much as you or I or anybody in here watches the games, they don’t. Or the NBA. They might watch the slam-dunk contest in February on TNT or whatever, but that’s about the extent of it.”
The 50-year-old Keller’s job, then, is to try to form a bond with his young charges, who might not even be millennials anymore, but rather some newly named group of people who will proceed to ruin everything. Green beans are the answer, apparently.
“If I don’t read it and study it and learn and try to figure these kids out, I have no chance to coach. … Because the way I was taught as a child was, ‘Hey, you are going to eat what is on your plate, if not, you’re going to sit here.’ I had to sit at the kitchen table one Saturday afternoon because I didn’t want to eat green beans or salmon patties.
“So we have a lot of green beans on our team meals, and I tell that story to our guys. But you have to adjust. You’d better learn to give and some take with these kids, I think.’’
To be fair, Keller did say he felt bad for his seniors, who have been part of the most successful run in program history. The Lumberjacks have made the NCAA tournament in four of the past five seasons, even upsetting West Virginia as a No. 14 seed in 2016 before falling to Notre Dame by a single point in the round of 32.
“It’s a hard time to really collect my thoughts,” he said, per the AP. “We had three great seniors who came together. A lot of tears in the locker room after the game because of how much invested they had in our university. The thing I think that they did was we’ve been living off everybody else that had been before us, the players and coaches that had come before us.”
More on the NCAA tournament: