Has the conference affiliation finally caught up

[Zonepress]

No doubt the UConn teams the past two years while very good are not at the level of the previous 10 to 12 years. This year’s team and last year’s as well have not played as well as they are capable of primarily due to playing most Of their games against very poor competition
Perhaps past teams had a different make up and were able to not be affected by playing against so many inferior opponents

I for one think the league affiliation has finally caught up with your UConn
and obviously made much worse by the
Cancellations against Miss state Baylor
Louisville
Interested in your take

 

[Plebe]

No.

Not being a very good team is what caught up with us.

 

[Vowelguy]

No.

Not being a very good team is what caught up with us.

And recruiting misses

 

[BostonCanuck]

And a head coach who has lost his edge, especially with respect to the "during games" aspect of the role.

 

[uconnfan68]

No.

Not being a very good team is what caught up with us.

Losing to a red hot top 20 team on their court doesn’t make us bad. Bad match up, combined with some really poor individual games sank us. Add in some questionable coaching decisions and there you go...

 

[Vowelguy]

Losing to a red hot top 20 team on their court doesn’t make us bad.

It’s not the outcome. You can see it in the performances in many games.

 

[Zonepress]

Yes but would we be a better team if we
Played better competition

 

[Vowelguy]

And a head coach who has lost his edge, especially with respect to the "during games" aspect of the role.

Hahahahaha

 

[CTBballfan243]

UConn is plenty good. They lost a game. That happens in the real world. This game will help this team build confidence in themselves. UConn went toe to toe with a team that played probably as good as they possibly could play and lost by only 3 points. I know UConn can play better. I’m fairly confident in saying RKansas can’t play any better than what we saw tonight. UConn will be fine.

 

[Vowelguy]

Yes but would we be a better team if we
Played better competition

Unclear.
Really good mature players don’t need a loss to improve.

 

[BostonBay]

Poor recruiting has caught up with us. Way too many guards/swing forwards & far too little bigs with physical presence. I know Geno likes his fast, passing teams, but the great UConn teams always had presence in the middle. This years teams has almost no balance. Its Paige (& EW) - how they go, the team goes. As Mr. Miyagi said - need balance...all of life balance.

 

[Zonepress]

Agree with you

 

[Plebe]

Yes but would we be a better team if we
Played better competition

UConn has consistently had one of the best overall strengths of schedule, year in and year out, even in the AAC years. Nothing wrong with the competition.

It's a facile rationale, intellectually lazy in the extreme.

 

[slepers]

As a rod would say RELAX

 

[Lucelab113]

Poor recruiting has caught up with us. Way too many guards/swing forwards & far too little bigs with physical presence. I know Geno likes his fast, passing teams, but the great UConn teams always had presence in the middle. This years teams has almost no balance. Its Paige (& EW) - how they go, the team goes. As Mr. Miyagi said - need balance...all of life balance.

Did Arkansas beat us because of their bigs??

 

[SECbbfan24]

UCONN is a good team but games like this are definitely needed sometime as a wake up call to improve on things. They aren't the only top team that has dropped a game or struggled to an inferior team as well, it happens.

NC St, Baylor, Stanford, A&M and many many others all have had their struggles as well and they are good teams. It will be a good learning experience and bring about change that is needed in the long run to be more successful.

 

[JonathanXIV]

No doubt the UConn teams the past two years while very good are not at the level of the previous 10 to 12 years. This year’s team and last year’s as well have not played as well as they are capable of primarily due to playing most Of their games against very poor competition
Perhaps past teams had a different make up and were able to not be affected by playing against so many inferior opponents

I for one think the league affiliation has finally caught up with your UConn
and obviously made much worse by the
Cancellations against Miss state Baylor
Louisville
Interested in your take

This comes up every time UConn loses. Correlation is not causation. No one is going to bring this up next year.

 

[JoePgh]

I'm not exactly sure what the theory being advanced in this thread is. There seem to be two very different possibilities:

(a) playing in weak conferences has caused UConn to miss out on recruits that they would have gotten "in the old days", i.e., when they were in the old Big East through 2013; OR
(b) playing in weak conferences has caused UConn not to experience higher-level competition frequently enough to refine its game during the season.

For my money, (b) above is much more plausible than (a). UConn has never gotten all the recruits that it wanted, but the incoming 2020 and 2021 classes demonstrate that it remains capable of getting top-flight talent despite the conference in which it plays. And the fact that the last two WNBA Rookies of the Year have come from UConn (both recruited while UConn was in the AAC) should be sufficient to impress other recruits that playing at UConn will be advantageous to the pro basketball career that they presumably aspire to.

However, I do think there is some plausibility to (b). This year, the games lost at the beginning of the season were very critical, but we certainly can't blame the coaches for that. Of course Geno would prefer to be in a more competitive conference, and that might marginally improve its game performance, but complaining about that is like complaining about the weather (or about COVID). Everything that can be done in the way of scheduling competitive opponents is being done, as the occurrence of tonight's game illustrates.

 

[Watchdog]

This game exposed how mechanical and slow ONO is when she makes her moves to the basket. More TO's than FG attempts, Points and REB's against an undersized team.

Over and again, while she was being quickly doubled, she caught passes, brought the ball down, pumped to make her move as she turned, and got stripped by smaller players. 2 points, 2 rebounds and 3 turnovers in 19 minutes from a 6'5" center.

Keep the ball high and turn and you make the shot, or get fouled, or find an open shooter. And she's a Junior.

Then there's the team defense..........................

 

[Watchdog]

Did Arkansas beat us because of their bigs??

Well, let's see about OUR bigs:
Of our starters' 70 points, 62 were from the 3 guards and 8 from the forward and center.
The other guard added 8 points and the other 2 forwards added 9, so the game totals were: Guards 70 points, Forwards and Centers 17 points.
We report, you decide.......

 

[NormanDale]

Did Arkansas beat us because of their bigs??

You realize our bigs are allowed to beat somebody else right? We got ABSOLUTELY NOTHING out of our 3rd yr starting post against a team in which she was half a foot taller than, if we get ANYTHING out of her tonight we win the game!

 

[hoophuskee]

Yes but would we be a better team if we
Played better competition

So if UCONN was in the SEC, they wouldn't lose? Or they would be better losing in the SEC to Arkansas if they were a SEC team instead of losing as a Big East Team?

So how is Stanford, Louisville and NC State "undoubtedly better" losing in their conference while UCONN loses outside of theirs? Because you say so?

I think some of you are masters of panic-- by so desperately needing to make a "proclamation."

Here's a proclamation: Maybe for tonight they just lost to a better team on that given night.

Would have loved them to win.

 

[NormanDale]

Sure, our conference affiliations haven't helped, but I think over the past 5 years there has been a seismic shift in the number of competitive teams. 10 years ago, UConn would have beaten a #19 ranked by 40, but look around the NCAA, the Top 5 teams in the country are tested or beaten EVERY night. Over the last few days Stanford lost b2b, Louisville needed a prayer to win, NC State lost tonight, etc. There are simply more good players and more good teams, the women's game is following the same evolution the men's game did post UCLA.

 

[jonson]

I'm not exactly sure what the theory being advanced in this thread is. There seem to be two very different possibilities:

(a) playing in weak conferences has caused UConn to miss out on recruits that they would have gotten "in the old days", i.e., when they were in the old Big East through 2013; OR
(b) playing in weak conferences has caused UConn not to experience higher-level competition frequently enough to refine its game during the season.

For my money, (b) above is much more plausible than (a). UConn has never gotten all the recruits that it wanted, but the incoming 2020 and 2021 classes demonstrate that it remains capable of getting top-flight talent despite the conference in which it plays. And the fact that the last two WNBA Rookies of the Year have come from UConn (both recruited while UConn was in the AAC) should be sufficient to impress other recruits that playing at UConn will be advantageous to the pro basketball career that they presumably aspire to.

However, I do think there is some plausibility to (b). This year, the games lost at the beginning of the season were very critical, but we certainly can't blame the coaches for that. Of course Geno would prefer to be in a more competitive conference, and that might marginally improve its game performance, but complaining about that is like complaining about the weather (or about COVID). Everything that can be done in the way of scheduling competitive opponents is being done, as the occurrence of tonight's game illustrates.

As an outsider, I'd also argue that (b) is plausible-- not for teams (like the Stewie years) that are head and shoulders above everyone else, but for teams, like this one and the past few at UCONN, whose advantages over the best other teams in WBB are less or sometimes not that at all. Yes, Geno does everything he can to schedule a very demanding out-of-conference schedule and that has generally given UCONN what is listed as a very high strength of schedule overall. But playing marquee games, usually spread out over time, against tough opponents out of conference is not the same, in my view, as navigating a conference schedule in which the margin of error for victory, week after week and sometimes game after game, is much less than it has been, and is, for UCONN in both the American Conference and Big East. The physical and mental demands of competition within a relatively tough conference are much greater and, perhaps just as important, the scouting by opponents is much more thorough (and becomes increasingly so). So--if team B learns how to defend what team A has been doing so well up to that point (or discovers a weakness), everyone jumps on board, forcing team A to adjust if it is to continue to be successful. And that of course makes team A all the stronger as the (conference) season progresses. That's why it is often the case that teams with a fine out-of-conference record fall flat once they get a couple of games into the conference part of the season. I think it's difficult to improve as much as one would like without that sort of week-to-week competition. Not impossible, obviously, but considerably more difficult. And that is the challenge that UCONN has faced for several years now.

 

[hoophuskee]

Sure, our conference affiliations haven't helped, but I think over the past 5 years there has been a seismic shift in the number of competitive teams. 10 years ago, UConn would have beaten a #19 ranked by 40, but look around the NCAA, the Top 5 teams in the country are tested or beaten EVERY night. Over the last few days Stanford lost b2b, Louisville needed a prayer to win, NC State lost tonight, etc. There are simply more good players and more good teams, the women's game is following the same evolution the men's game did post UCLA.

This "seismic shift" isn't true at all. You and the OP and some others on here are in complete meltdown looking to make grandiose proclamations because you're upset that your team lost. C'mon. - They got beat by a better team on that given night just the same way any "non-great college team" can get beat. It's as simple as that.

Ten years ago which you claim UCONN would have wiped out a number 19 team-- UCONN beat #17 West Vga 57-51 in January 2011. In late February they beat #17/18 GTOWN 52-42 in which it was a 4 point game with 5:16 left.

You know back then just like now other teams had scholarship players and had some good coaching too. Not every coach was bad.

What's changed since the last 4 years is that UCONN hasn't had Stewart/Jefferson/Tuck. It has nothing to do with a "seismic shift."