Every couple years. I'm not even saying every year. Couple years in a row. Miss a year or two and back. I'm not talking KY.
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Which is what I laid out in my earlier post - at our best under Williams and Stans we typically built toward a JR/Sr laiden team - basically had 2 down years at 16-18 wins, then made the ncaas for 2 years as the group matured and won 22ish games. We've been a bubble team for the past 3 years. Hell we came damn close to winning the NIT - which gave us 25 wins for only the 4th time ever. We've won 10 or more SEC games the past 2 seasons. Know how many other times we've done that over the past 30 years? 7. We've been doing exactly what you say you want. Sorry covid screwed up a second NCAA bid.
You have what, 30, seconds to shoot? First lets try to, set up, a shot as early as possible instead of dribbling for 20 secs. There is a time for dribbling and there is a time to just pass the ball. We need to figure out which is which.
If two OR more people are guarding you, somebody is WIDE open.
TS had four on him one time last night and he still tried to shoot it.
Figure out as early as possible how the game is being called. Last night from the get go, they let them play. Do not drive in looking for a foul, you will just loose the ball, pass more!
The last 3 years, the sec has 15 1st round picks. Of the 15 picks, its spread among 8 teams...
Kentucky - 5
Bama - 2
Auburn - 2
Vandy - 2
Georgia - 2
Mizzou - 1
Tenn - 1
aTm - 1
We have zero 1st rounders, so the talk of nba players we've had rings sorta hollow to me.
At this point, if we could make the NCAAs every third year and make the NIT the other 2 years most fans would be plenty happy with that. From 01-09 we went to the NCAAs 6 out of 8 years but we will likely never see that again in our lifetimes with our pathetic support of men's basketball. Stansbury had it rolling during that span but after Kirby left and Sidney did his damage it all went to pot from a culture standpoint. Now we've only been to the NCAAs once in a decade. My biggest complaint with Howland is he is just lifeless to garner any energy in his fanbase. Part of it is his age and part is his personality but even when he wins some its only the hardcore MSU sports fans that know or care. Until he hires an assistant to help with in game offensive adjustment on the court and is willing to get out and promote his program some nothing will ever get any better with him because he can't win at the level needed to generate excitement just off of on court success alone. I do believe a younger, more energetic coach would help. And I think a lot of Howland as a person but other than showing up for practices and games he seems pretty detached from the university.
I don't think people are taking into account nearly enough the unique circumstances of this season and how they've disproportionately affected young teams. I've been as disappointed with our inconsistency as anyone, but it's still no small feat to have a winning record with mostly newcomers and very little preseason. I'm not saying it's a complete excuse since a lot of the usual complaints with Howland's teams here are still showing up, but this year should be considered a gimme for everyone even more so than football.
When Howland took over, we were the worst team in an awful league.
We have improved tremendously since he took over. I think it's only natural we expect moderate improvements from year to year, with the occasional bad year to rebuild. We aren't Kentucky.
The frustration for me is the head scratching losses. Even two years ago, we had several inexcusable losses and we ended up a 5 seed in the NCAA tournament. We likely would have been in the 10-13 seed range last year( with a win in the sec tourney), but we underperformed on the season. Last year we should have been a solid 7-10 seed without needing to win any games in the SEC tournament. He had more talent on last year's team, than any other team he has had here.
Howland's refusal to play a zone defense is more egregious to me than his offensive street ball scheme. Just hopping into a zone from time to time would limit some of the damage we have seen from teams.
Having said all of this, I still support him. We are outperforming expectations this year, and we are a couple of made FTs away from only having 3 losses on the season. I hope he retires next year on top, assuming Molinar and Stewart are both back. We should be primed for another high seed in the NCAA tournament. If he misses the tournament next year, I think he is "asked" to retire.
A lot of that could be holdover from the Final 4, both attendance and recruiting ability. Then along came Sidney. Even that might have been OK if he'd been eligible the first year. Regardless, it was a lot of fun going to games with a packed Hump. We lost a lot of fans because of Stansbury loyalists, a very poor coaching hire, and all that went with those things. Howland's done a good job considering what he inherited.
Plus the administration kicking a lot of longtime basketball supporters out of their seats because of the new donation demands to keep them from the reseating. Hard to understand why folks are willing to fork out big bucks to get seats they will almost never use.
I enjoyed Stans' time here and don't intend to downplay what he achieved, but another factor in his success was an incredibly weak divisional schedule during his run. I think as talk mounted about doing away with divisions, and the SEC as whole started getting a little better, he gambled on bringing in proportionately more volatile talent to stay ahead of the curve, which obviously did not pay off. I also think not having a glue guy like Shane Power to help him keep the locker room straight those last few years hastened things.
We are right back where we were under Stands- winning 20 per and borderline NCAA-worthy.
I think Howland served his purpose for us and now things have gone as far as they are going to go.
I'm grateful that he pulled us out of the dark ages, but that will probably end up being his greatest accomplishment. Otherwise his legacy is a bunch of forgettable teams that somehow won games a respectable amount of games without accomplishing a whole lot, and the most memorable games of the Howland era are all momentum killing losses (Liberty, multiple Ole Miss losses, the Xavian Stapleton game at Vandy, etc.) All of his teams either underachieve or accomplish the absolute bare minimum of passable results, so he has gotten by to this point without his seat ever really getting warm. I feel that we are on the verge of that changing though, I get the sense that Tuesday's night's showing has soured a lot of people who had been defending Howland to this point.
Like I said, of course it's nice to not be as bad as we were in the Rick Ray years, but that's about where the praise starts and stops for me. If you go back to the fall of 2015 when we had Malik Newman and Q Weatherspoon on campus and were about to sign a highly ranked recruiting class filled with Top 100 players, everyone would have been very underwhelmed if I told you that Howland would have one sure-fire tournament team in six years.
I think we underestimate how difficult it is to turn around a program and make the NCAA. Bruce Pearl (absolutely great coach), Frank Martin, and Ben howland were all proven HCs when they took over bad sec programs. It took Pearl and howland 4 years to make the NCAA, and it took Martin 5 years to make it. Now Martin and Pearl did make it to the final 4 in year 5, so that's certainly better than anything howland has done here. Martin hasn't been back to the tourney again though 3 years. Pearl is looking like he'll miss it this year. Tourney year-in, year-out at untraditional sec programs is really tough