Duke of Earlington , this is not a Zero based budgeting exercise . It’s an incremental project with dips and rises along the way. Coach should have felt comfortable leaving in Stanley and Smith but he didn’t ! Champagnie AND Posh AND Wheeler in a tense end of game scenario severely underperformed. I was looking for Posh to create but he didn’t . Champ wanted no part of shooting late and yet he was left in. He should have gotten a severe tongue lashing. Wusu almost blindly without fear of failure keeps driving to the basket and has yet to figure out how to pump fake even once!Nyiwe has hands of stone! I’d say Wheeler has taken on more responsibility with smarts than anyone else.But these are kids not pros and they are supposed to be learning!
What I would love to see today. SJU has the ball at the De Paul basket. A timeout is called and with the ball back in play SJU runs a play consisting of a couple of picks which frees a man for an uncontested lay up. Has this ever happened in three years?
I posted last week that Cragg has to force Anderson to bring in an offensive minded coach but the more I think about it Anderson because of his years of experience and record would probably not want someone looking over his shoulder. Perhaps if he read Zachs piece about how easy it is to prepare for SJU he might consider bringing in someone to help set up a half court offense.
usguard Wrote: Beast ,like your optimism but disagree after 3 yrs that 9-10 is good and not going to an NCAA.Think that is a poor performance jmo
Nobody goes into a season and hopes for 9-10. We all want to do better in conference play and in general. Hopefully we beat DePaul today and also pick up one or two of the last games and wind up either 9-10 or 10-9. While we were all hoping for better this year, that hope was probably based in optimism because it went against any recent SJU trends.
The fact is that since Jarvis took a wrecking ball to our program, we have struggled. Over the last twenty years we have gone 128-221 in conference play (6.4 and 11 average record per season). In those twenty years we have been above five hundred in conference just four times. We have won more than 10 games in conference play only once (in 2010-11 when we went 12-6). The third season (which you judged at 9-10 to be so poor) for our last five coaches have produced no regular season conference winning seasons (see below) and no tournament appearances .
Anderson 7-9 so far
Mullin 4-14
Lavin 8-10
Roberts 7-9
Jarvis 8-8 (losing six of last eight regular season conference games and then getting blown out in the Big East Tournament)
The average conference records for our coaches over the last twenty seasons:
Anderson three seasons: 7.3-10.3
Mullin four seasons: 5-13
Lavin five seasons: 9.6-8.8
Roberts six seasons: 5.3-11.7
Jarvis/Clark last two seasons: 4-12
Winning in this conference is very tough. Our 10-9 record last year was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. Losing the bulk of last year's players to transfer set us back more than some of us expected it would. I would say we are playing much better late in the season and that improvement over the season has been a trend under Anderson that was not a staple of our previous regimes.
Despite some disappointments this year I still am rooting hard for success the rest of the way. Let us start by taking down DePaul today (not a simple task) and then winning out and following it with a nice run in the Big East tournament.
What I would love to see today. SJU has the ball at the De Paul basket. A timeout is called and with the ball back in play SJU runs a play consisting of a couple of picks which frees a man for an uncontested lay up. Has this ever happened in three years?
I posted last week that Cragg has to force Anderson to bring in an offensive minded coach but the more I think about it Anderson because of his years of experience and record would probably not want someone looking over his shoulder. Perhaps if he read Zachs piece about how easy it is to prepare for SJU he might consider bringing in someone to help set up a half court offense.
