Quote Originally Posted by smootness View Post
It you really need me to spell out the difference in the two, then here goes.

First, our women's team, while young, will still be top 10 in the country after a loss. Our men's team, while 'young', is fighting to try to make the NCAA Tournament.

Second, our women's coach has made two national championship games in the last 3 years with this program. Doubting or questioning him seems extremely asinine. The same is not true of our men's coach. He has had success in the past, but it has been a long time, and he hasn't done it here.

Third, as I talked about in my last post, youth in the two sports isn't equivalent. 4 of our top 7 men's players are in their 1st or 2nd year (3 of those in their 2nd). The same is true of 6 of UK's top 8 players; 4 of LSU's top 5 players; 4 of OM's top 6 contributors; and 2 of Bama's top 3, 3 of their top 7. Auburn is a veteran team, but it's not like it's any sort of anomaly among our competition here. In women's basketball, that UK team we just lost to has 1 such player in their top 5 contributors and 2 in their top 8. SC is also a young team, but that's been noted by me numerous times. Our competition there tends to be older on average, yet we are even younger there than our men's team, not to mention that our players there will stick around longer than our men's team.

So our men's team is not as young relative to its competition or relative to how long they'll stick around. And the women's team is much better relative to its competition and with a coach who should be questioned less. How could someone look at these two teams and think they should be viewed similarly? One is worlds better right now and is far more likely to continue improving over the next couple years.
I?ll address these one by one.

First, the girls are good and I?m glad they are good but there is an INCREDIBLE gap in parity between the men?s and women?s game. Any given year for the women there are probably 6 teams that have a legitimate shot at winning the title- some years less than that. This is evident when looking back at women?s NCAA champions over the last 30 years. A 1 or 2 seed wins it. No exceptions. For the men there are probably about 30 teams that can legitimately win if they get hit at the right time. See Auburn last season.

The criticism of Vic was obviously sarcasm. I was just mimicking what people spew on this board about Howland after any men?s loss, and sometimes even wins too.

Lastly your estimate in the men?s game being much younger than the women?s game may be slightly true but you are grossly overestimating that gap. There are 347 division one basketball teams with 13 scholarship players per team. There are 60 NBA draft picks consisting of both college players and international players. So every year the NBA draft depletes around 1% of college talent if all picks are out of American colleges. That?s not nearly as drastic at lowering the age of college as you make it out to be. The teams that have the big age gaps are the elite programs like UK,UNC,Kansas, Duke etc. We will never be these teams. Your argument really doesn?t hold water.