Sometime soon, Lamar University athletic director Billy Tubbs is going to sit down with basketball coach Steve Roccaforte and do his annual end-of-season review on Roc’s performance.  Vibes I’m getting suggest it could be the last one they do together, although I’m betting that’s not the case.

    Roc, as he should, is going to take a lot of heat for Lamar failing to make the Southland Conference tournament for the second consecutive  year. He got worked over by callers on his radio show Monday night, some season ticket holders are saying they won’t renew if a coaching change isn’t made and a newspaper poll has opened the door for fan “experts” to tee off on him.

    The bandwagon that was so crowded a couple of years ago, after the TJ graduate won the SLC East with a 13-3 record, has pretty much emptied.  In a relative blink of the eye, Roccaforte has gone from a promising young coach to one who folks want to run out of town. Frustration over a program that’s been down for most of the past quarter century is being unleashed.

    Even for those of us in Roc’s corner, and I’ve been there from the start, defending the last two seasons is difficult. When you follow a down 2008-09 season by again missing the tournament, by finishing with seven straight SLC losses, by suffering the most one-sided home defeat in 43-years, positives are few and far between.

    The negatives go beyond the losses to how the games were played. I’ve been around Lamar basketball since the 1960s and can’t remember a team that shot the ball worse. Overall, these Cardinals made only  42.4 percent from the field and a horrendous 26.7 on three pointers. In conference play, the numbers were a miserable 41.4 and 27.9.

    Nobody can win or be fun to watch with shooting like that.

    Because there was no reliable go-to guy offensively, too many Cardinal games were punctuated by lengthy scoring droughts and rushed shots late in possessions. All too often, the best chance to score was Justin Nabors putting back a missed shot. Opposing coaches knew that if you packed a zone around Nabors, Lamar would have a tough time getting the ball in the basket.

    The alarming thing about the poor shooting is it’s starting to look like a trend. Two years ago, when Lamar went in 13-3 league play and won the SLC East, it shot a very respectable 46.9 overall and 38.2 on treys. Last year, the Cardinals dropped to 44.1 and 31.7. As mentioned above, the marksmanship this past season tumbled to 42.4 and 26.7.

    Roc knew last March that it was imperative to recruit a couple of reliable shooters and genuinely believed he had. But the numbers tell a different story. Care to guess who Lamar’s two highest percentage three-point shooters were in SLC play?

    If you said Nabors (.429) and 6-11 Coy Custer (.360), you were paying attention. Point guard Anthony Miles, the team’s second leading scorer, finished at .283. Off-guard Kendrick Harris, third in scoring, was .310. Freshman Donley Minor was also .310, JC transfer Reggie Mathis was .150.

    Some contend that the poor shooting wasn’t all on the players, that Roc had them screwed down too tight, that he had them hesitant to shoot early in possessions. Maybe there’s some validity to that. Maybe not. What we know for sure is that Lamar was at a terrible disadvantage because it didn’t have a single guy who could turn a game with his shooting.

    Easily the most depressing moment of the season for me was watching Texas A&M-Corpus Christi blow out Lamar 79-55 in the Montagne Center, and thinking Nabors was the only Cardinal good enough to start for the Islanders. The same could be probably be said of Sam Houston State and possibly a couple of other SLC teams.

    A year ago at this time, in my wrap-up column on Lamar and Roc,  I wrote: “Ironically, after three years, the knock on him is more in the area of recruiting than coaching.” After watching another dismal season, I stand on that statement. Good players make good coaches. Not enough good ones get you fired.

    Roccaforte, for the record, is 32-32 in SLC games and 63-61 in all games. Interestingly, he’s the first Lamar coach since Pat Foster to be at least .500 in conference games. That’s certainly not anything to brag about, especially when playing in the SLC, but it underscores how long the program has been down.

    So is it time for the eighth LU basketball coach since 1986? Fan sentiment appears to be leaning heavily in that direction, and it’s my guess Roc’s internal support at Lamar has seriously eroded. But, since he’s the highest paid coach in the SLC at $135,000 per year, and there are two years left on his contract, it’s doubtful Lamar can afford a $270,000 buyout.

    That doesn’t necessarily mean Roc will be coaching the Cardinals next season. Two years ago he turned down a really attractive offer to join Buzz Williams’ staff at Marquette. He rejected more money to stay put because he loved being head coach at Lamar, was coming off a conference co-championship and had a solid core of returning players.

    A season-ending injury to Nabors, and a mid-season injury to star point guard Kenny Dawkins, changed all that, and it’s been pretty much downhill ever since. Given the way this past season played out, a 2010-11 schedule loaded with road games and a Lamar team likely to be worse, not better, if Roc can’t recruit a couple of excellent shooters, you have to think he’d be wise to say yes to a good opportunity as an assistant.

    In the meantime, Roc needs to recruit harder and better than he’s ever recruited before. His job depends on it.

    Sports editor Bob West can be e-mailed at rdwest@usa.net.