Don’t know where all these crazies have come from, but I hate being run off the forum by these guys spewing over the top trollish negativity. If you can’t have a reasonable discussion without mentioning CRB’s salary or making over the top insults of the staff, team, or individual players then please move on to one of the 10 other threads where like minded folks will welcome your venting.
Let the reasonable discussion begin!
Bravely posted…well done. For me, the disappointment comes from that same old sickening thought that we could, should be better than what we’ve seen so far. That our performance doesn’t match the talent on our team. That we are, once again, champions of underachievement. That we are what we were last year and we’re where we were last year, the year before, the year before that, etc. That we’re stuck in a hopeless fog of orange doom of mediocrity. That we’re above average on our best days but, across a season, still pretty average.
This past offseason gave me great hope because Barnes seemed to radically alter his recipe. He let go of a few players who couldn’t produce and replaced them with highly coveted replacements. He basically flipped the roster and rebuilt the team with obvious talent improvements. He recruited well. It was a very exciting offseason for me because it seemed Barnes had finally realized that his usual style or philosophy wasn’t working. He had upended the team with what looked to be fantastic improvements at various positions. To me, it looked like he was finally intent on hanging championship banners in TBO. No more of this underachieving, let’s make it to maybe the second round of the tourney, pat ourselves on the back and go home nonsense.
It certainly looked to me that Barnes was stepping way out of his comfort zone by doing this. He was taking a huge risk by stirring things up. Again, I interpreted this as Barnes honestly trying to build a championship basketball team. But then we look at the results, performances, and we start scratching our heads…again.
A key measure of improvement I looked for this season was the rotation that Barnes used game in endgame out. I believed from the start that we had the talent to sustain a rotation of 9-10 players every game. I still believe that. I haven’t been tracking the minutes played by our players every game, but when I have checked, we’ve had nine or 10 guys getting decent minutes most games. Barnes has experimented with his groupings and I applaud him for that. But our bench has either performed well in games or it has disappeared. He still hasn’t found a chemical reaction on the floor within the five players out there at one time. Sure, they’ve had flashes of greatness but nothing consistent. And we’ve had flashes of gross underachievement like we saw last night.
All this to ask: has Coach Barnes reached his ceiling? Can we honestly expect our team to reach 30 wins in a season? Maybe win the SEC tourney? Make the Sweet 16 or better? These seem to be utterly reasonable questions at this point.
