Thanks to the magic of DVR and some marginal weather that ruled out outdoor chores, I was able to watch a lot of wcbb this week. A lot. And here are a few conclusions that I've reached, that others may or may not agree with.
-- Any team that wants to beat South Carolina this season will have to defend, rebound, and shoot well. One or two of the three won't get it done. On a good night the Lady Vols can rebound and shoot, but I'm not sure their improving defense is up to the task yet.
-- Tenn has the talent and ability to upset UConn. They match up pretty well at every position except PG. There'll be no blowouts here unless the Huskies and their home crowd get into the LV's psyche. UConn looked dreadful against two teams -- Memphis and UCF -- that Tenn could handle. UConn is NOT a good road team. If this game was in Knoxfville I'd give the LV's a 50-50 chance. But, alas, it's not. But it's still far from a hopeless task, especially if they can protect the 3-pt line..
-- Without Ionescu Oregon would be only the fourth or fifth best team in the Pac 12. If she stays 100% all year, they're good. If not, they're in trouble.
-- When the Stanford freshman play like upper classmen they're very good. But when they don't....
-- Pac 12 is like the Conference that cried "wolf!" Every year the folks out west tell us this is the year you'll see that it's not Stanford, Oregon and 10 wannabes, and then there's some disappointment by the end of the season. Not this year. There are six legit contenders. They're going to beat each other up, but they'll be tough outs in the big tourney.
--Matthew Mitchell showed some class when he admitted that beating a Texas A&M team without Carter was not as big an achievement as it will look in the SEC standings. But he said he was still glad they got the win. Once again, injuries will cause some skewing of the SEC records and SEC Tourney seedings. But that's just a fact of life in a conference with a lot of competitive teams.
-- Robin Pingeton at Missouri is one of the best coaches in the SEC. Her defensive schemes and game plans are solid, and she gets her players to follow them, but her players haven't got the athletic skills to execute them consistently for anywhere close to four quarters. Yet despite their poor record, her players seem to be playing hard (spare me the "play dirty" comments) and enjoying themselves, and most get playing time (often as many as 9 players get 10 minutes or more) although part of that is because of their consistent foul trouble, a result of less athletic players trying to play tight defense on SEC stars. You can't build a program overnight in the SEC, she has a couple of good freshman, but the transfers haven't panned out as well yet as hoped. Folks note that they lost Cunningham, but they also lost their best forward and two best point guards from last year. Robin needs another good recruiting year and that might be very tough to get. (Okay, I'm prejudiced, I'm a Mizzou grad.)
