Some good points, OK4. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that Tuesday's loss wasn't discouraging, but at the same time, it wasn't completely unexpected. As I've said countless times on this board, fans direct a disproportionate amount of their energy on the W or the L, and not the quality of the performance. This team has demonstrated many, many times over the last couple of years that the quality of their performance is very much contingent on the quality of their opponent. If you had told me Tuesday afternoon we were going to lose to Houston, I wouldn't have been shocked. We've had our hands full with bad teams on several occasions the last two years - people forget the Quinnipiac and South Florida games from a year ago because we won. And if Michigan State and Syracuse would have hit a few more shots, people would have forgotten about those great performances, too. The only difference between the Quinnipiac and Houston games was that Houston played a little bit better, got a couple more bounces, and made a couple more shots. So I ask: how big of a sample size do we need before we just accept that this team is what it is? It's not going to distance itself from bad teams, because it has an abundance of mid-major/raw talent in the post and its highly dependent on the three ball. That's not to say they didn't play like the other night, because they did. The difference being, when Kentucky and Syracuse play like , they win, because they're able to generate enough easy baskets to simply out-talent their opponents on nights where their shot isn't falling. This team doesn't have that luxury, so agonizing, nail-biting type games against the Houston's and Boston College's of the world become the norm.
But we all know things aren't nearly as bleak as they looked Tuesday. This afternoon, I was looking at ESPN's most recent edition of "bracketology", and I was saying to myself, "Why the hell can't we make the final four with that draw?" We'd play Boise State or Tennessee in the round of 64, a similarly composed Villanova team in the round of 32, and then Michigan State and Syracuse - who we beat last season - in our own barn at MSG to get to the final four.
That's just college basketball. There are about ten teams that are really good, and then there are a ton of other teams who can beat anybody but also struggle to distinguish themselves against bad teams. What makes college basketball great is also what makes it frustrating.
Of course, there's a possibility that Boatright, Calhoun, and Daniels all mange to put it together by the end of the season and begin performing at a high level on a consistent basis. But that seems unlikely. Right now, this team is what they are - a solid defensive team with one of the best players in the country and a hit-or-miss supporting cast. If that supporting cast hits, we could be dancing all the way to the final weekend. If it misses, things could go really badly. The sooner people on this board come to grips with this reality, the sooner we can stop questioning our players character after every loss and questioning Kevin Ollie.
