I'll play devil's advocate on Ollie

[Deepster]

Poor guy never recovered from your Haiku sentence.

Maybe he's off somewhere babbling to Oklahoma Eric about our lack of a high/low post offense.

 

[GoUconn7961]

The main issue I have with Kevin Ollie is player development. Forget wins and losses, conference, TV exposure, etc....If recruits see that other players aren't getting better than they won't come here. Even when Calhoun had bad years ie 01, 07, 1o. You still saw the players on the team get better over time. I'm just not seeing that from Ollie. Under calhoun you saw massive transformation not only in basketball skill but also in strength and conditioning ie Hilton Armstrong, Caron Butler, Richard Hamilton, Kemba. I'm just not seeing that from Ollie. Larrier seems like the same high volume shooter, one dimensional player he was under Shaka. Same with purvis. How much did Brimah develop in 4 years. Look at Jalen Adams body, he clearly doesn't have a NBA body....why is that??

The off the court work just isn't getting done. Players are not developing and improving their games. And that is the biggest issue for this program. Even if the quality of recruits has gone done, we should still see improvement over time. It is not happening.

Player development is what destroys programs or brings them back to relevancy. Players don't care about wins and losses or conference play if they believe the coach can improve their game and get them ready for the next level. We just don't have that right now.

Exactly - I've been saying this same thing for the past two years.

 

[intlzncster]

The main issue I have with Kevin Ollie is player development. Forget wins and losses, conference, TV exposure, etc....If recruits see that other players aren't getting better than they won't come here. Even when Calhoun had bad years ie 01, 07, 1o. You still saw the players on the team get better over time. I'm just not seeing that from Ollie. Under calhoun you saw massive transformation not only in basketball skill but also in strength and conditioning ie Hilton Armstrong, Caron Butler, Richard Hamilton, Kemba. I'm just not seeing that from Ollie. Larrier seems like the same high volume shooter, one dimensional player he was under Shaka. Same with purvis. How much did Brimah develop in 4 years. Look at Jalen Adams body, he clearly doesn't have a NBA body....why is that??

The off the court work just isn't getting done. Players are not developing and improving their games. And that is the biggest issue for this program. Even if the quality of recruits has gone done, we should still see improvement over time. It is not happening.

Player development is what destroys programs or brings them back to relevancy. Players don't care about wins and losses or conference play if they believe the coach can improve their game and get them ready for the next level. We just don't have that right now.

Bazz, Boat, Giffey and Daniels all got better under Ollie. That said, there's been some definite deficiencies as well. Facey among others comes to mind. Development could be a lot better. But it sure helps having good players. I don't think anybody was making Brimah better. He was what he was. I think Jalen should be further along than he is.

Biggest issue for this team is they can't shoot. And that isn't changing.

 

[intlzncster]

Spot on.

Perfect Pal right there.

 

[auror]

If I could give one piece of advice to people trying to give advice it would be that brevity is your friend.

What he meant to say was ‘hey, let’s see how the next week plays out.’

Unfortunately, to do that you have to have established your authority and gravitas ahead of time.

For the rest of us, there is long-form and charts.

 

[champs99and04]

What a load of nonsense.

You're just the type of fan I was referencing in my post, so it doesn't surprise me that this is your reaction. Extrapolating wildly from hunches, second-hand info, and your most recent data point? You're the every-man of sports fandom.

 

[champs99and04]

If I could give one piece of advice to people trying to give advice it would be that brevity is your friend.

What he meant to say was ‘hey, let’s see how the next week plays out.’

If you could take off your macho glasses for just long enough to actually read the post, you might have seen me compliment you. Instead, it appears you have echoed the sentiments of the echo chamber in a thread that attempts to deal specifically with that phenomenon and by extension undermined yourself.

I know think-pieces on sports fan psychology isn't your genre, but perhaps you can entertain my logic from the perspective of somebody who saw the warning signs from the beginning. Perhaps you can recognize the futility - as I know you are not one of these people - in allowing 60 minutes of basketball to dictate your opinion on the future of the program.

Incidentally, since I see that some of you have made a habit of highlighting the length of my posts, I'll note that this one was six short paragraphs. I understand that not everybody (myself included) likes to read posts of those sort, but either take two minutes to read it or move on with your day. Some of you are like the second grader who announces that the lights are out five seconds after they are turned off.

 

[Walker11]

Four days ago I wrote a post that included the words, to paraphrase, "to say that I'm glad to have Ollie is an understatement" that was liked by 47 people. There were a lot of other words in that post and people probably liked it for different reasons, their pity for my livelihood being among them. But nonetheless, 47 people are not liking a post that includes those words today no matter what they're prefaced with. The euphoria of the victory over Oregon made it very easy to ignore the mounting presence of conflicting evidence.

Now I would not consider myself an "Ollie apologist" (tangentially, if there anything worse than the people who post the 'I told you so' threads after a game like that?), but my angst with him - or at least that which I expressed - dates back about a year. I certainly wasn't the first to lose patience with him and one poster in particular seemed to sense that things were awry long before anyone, but I was also surprised at the resistance I got to the assertion that he did a really bad job with last years team. I've been in a weird place where I've simultaneously been arguing against his performance and for his long term viability, and at a time like this, I'm certainly not looking for credit. I've hedged my bets enough where I won't look like the biggest idiot here but probably won't be making a living as a gambler either.

But as I said in another thread yesterday, it's OK to admit to being really confused. That doesn't mean you're confused about what you saw in the last game or the last season or the last three seasons, it just means that they confuse your ability to predict the future. Trust me I would know, as I was ready to anoint him as the greatest coach to ever live a few years ago. And if we were confused eighteen months ago, when hardly anybody objected to his extension, then what is to prohibit us from being confused again?

The idea that we can't predict the future is obvious. The idea that recency bias might be invading our ability to assess the situation might not be. It's why the anti-Ollie sentiment seemed to grow tamer and tamer as the off-season progressed until it had just about sputtered out by halftime of the Michigan State game. It's why the prevailing narrative following the Michigan State game - and I actually argued post game that people were giving the team too much credit - was that we were heading in the right direction.

My ultimate point, then, is that our opinions on these things don't derive from conviction, they derive from the fear that we are somehow being duped, that all of these games and possessions warrant an omniscient narration that enlightens us, retroactively, to all of the warning signs. Nobody wants to think that these games are merely limited samples of data that progressively and in a very linear way enlighten us to the truth. Otherwise, the totality of an entire career - and the inherent worth of our players - wouldn't have swayed so dramatically with literally one game. That's what happens when a particular subject matters to us. Our conviction is not rooted in the opinion itself, our conviction is rooted in the emotion. On this topic, a topic that matters to all of us, our opinions resonate strongly not from a lack of evidence, but from the presence of competing evidence. That's why one game and seven KenPom slots represent the difference between Kevin Ollie taking this program forward and not - because we are really confused. One game absolutely lends credibility to the (building) idea that he should be out, it just shouldn't be the singular pivot point from which the degree of separation is formed. It only seems that way because we're at the line that at some point has to become binary.

If nothing else, pay attention not to what the narrative is, but to how much it changes, how fast. See how fast a CBI bound team with a sunken coach becomes a tournament team. See how fast a win over Syracuse takes this from "hopeless" to something else. See how the win over Oregon becomes a resume builder again, how Michigan State becomes the best team in the county that beat UNC more thoroughly than us, how those poor kids had to play a consolation game 3,000 miles from home after emptying the tank to beat Oregon and MSU and of course they had nothing less. Nobody will make those excuses faster than us. Nobody. Nobody will reduce this disaster of epic proportions to "three bad halves" faster than us IF WE NEED TO.

We're a team that went from 69 to 65 to 72. We might be at 55 in two weeks or we might be at 94. I have no damn idea.

If you want to talk about the fickle nature of fans, it would be worthwhile pointing towards statements about individual players even more so than views on KO and the trajectory of the team. I don't think anyone I really respect as a poster was changing their mind about KO after the Oregon game. The mood was better but there weren't posts praising KO for figuring it out - actually, there were some in regards to him going so small (even though that was entirely out of necessity) but not much. But it is funny to read comments about individual players and their outlook, especially the freshman big men after games versus mid-majors and an undersized Oregon team, versus comments against a top 3 frontcourt in the country. All of a sudden, guys who were worthy of threads raving over their potential became the subjects of posts railing against our recruiting.

I can appreciate that every fanbase is probably about the same. But being so immersed in one fanbase, I have to admit that I often feel that such a entitled and fickle and fairweather fanbase maybe doesn't deserve nice things. Especially us younger posters who weren't here from the beginning.

 

[champs99and04]

If you want to talk about the fickle nature of fans, it would be worthwhile pointing towards statements about individual players even more so than views on KO and the trajectory of the team. I don't think anyone I really respect as a poster was changing their mind about KO after the Oregon game. The mood was better but there weren't posts praising KO for figuring it out - actually, there were some in regards to him going so small (even though that was entirely out of necessity) but not much. But it is funny to read comments about individual players and their outlook, especially the freshman big men after games versus mid-majors and an undersized Oregon team, versus comments against a top 3 frontcourt in the country. All of a sudden, guys who were worthy of threads raving over their potential became the subjects of posts railing against our recruiting.

I can appreciate that every fanbase is probably about the same. But being so immersed in one fanbase, I have to admit that I often feel that such a entitled and fickle and fairweather fanbase maybe doesn't deserve nice things. Especially us younger posters who weren't here from the beginning.

I agree, but the conviction was much different. That's what I'm trying to get at. Confirmation bias is especially powerful when the thing being confirmed is something you fear. People are worried that Ollie might not be the guy for the job. When you're worried about something but not consistently vocalizing those worries, it means you're conflicted. That's my point. People are, above all, conflicted on how to feel about him. They're still conflicted, but because of recency bias, and because of their emotional investment, that conflict is being represented in a very overt way whereas it was being repressed a few days ago. Or in the case of others, like Big Ern, maybe the Arkansas game was enough to tilt the arrow over the line. Either way, all of these opinions exist on a continuum which means that none of them changed dramatically since the beginning of the season. Put differently, this team has played six games this year. Nobody expressed dissatisfaction with Ollie's performance after any of the first five. Things we could do better, criticism, maybe, but not outright dissatisfaction. But now, after game six, the narrative is so much different? No, it's just a visceral reaction to a performance that lent credence to our fears. We still, to a man, have no damn idea what to think, and to your comment about other fan bases...I've seen fan bases and you've seen fan bases that knew it was time. And they knew because they were apathetic. Nobody on this board is there yet. The coat on the narrative hasn't dried five minutes.

 

[UChusky916]

I'll play devil's advocate with a simpler and shorter question...

If you fire KO, who are you replacing him with that's better?

The answer is no one.

Stick with him

 

[Deadrody]

Bottom line ? No quality UConn team that I can recall lost a game 102-67 to a team like Arkansas, especially on a neutral floor. There's no way around that debacle.

Coming soon to the Boneyard ? A wistful post from me about "Gosh, how great was Jim Calhoun after all ?"

 

[sammydabiz]

I'll play devil's advocate with a simpler and shorter question...

If you fire KO, who are you replacing him with that's better?

The answer is no one.

Stick with him

Wow, if you truly believe that, I have this bridge I'm selling in Brooklyn.... great price, act now, a deal like this won't last for long

All joking aside, please tell me why there is no one better out there than Ollie? Are you satisfied with the current state of this program? Not trying to chastise, I'm really trying to understand your logic here, maybe you can change my mind.

I want to believe, I do, I just don't see it though.

 

[HooperScooper]

I'll play devil's advocate with a simpler and shorter question...

If you fire KO, who are you replacing him with that's better?

The answer is no one.

Stick with him

If things aren't working and you're losing the interest of your fan base shouldn't you try something different? What's the downside? O.K. I guess it could be worse. See Bob Diaco.

I refuse to believe UConn can't attract a great coach. They have plenty of money to offer (Ollie is in the top 10 of highest paid coaches) and it's a pretty prestigious job. It's not Duke, UNC, Kansas, and some others but it's in the top 5% of desirable college basketball coaching positions.

 

[Pudge]

I know what some of you guys do for a living; so, the fiery rants come with little real-world thought. You knew that game's achetype was possible.

WE are a Team with 2 kids that played more meaningful minutes than 10 a game last year. Regardless of what any of you say ... they are quality kids. ADD about 6-9 others you have to play. And you play an Arkansas of seniors, JUCOs, and a good add. WE looked lost from the first moment (and I have only walked away from a UConn TV game a few times). That play was horrific ... but understandable. Like with Diaco, you get to a moment. In this major UConn sport, this guy is COMMITTED to the University ... and not apparently to his own self-agrandizement. He made his thoughtful moves bringin in Chillious and Killings. Scrambled like hell. Did you see that Oregon team? Yeah ... they are Pritchard and about 8 newbies.

This is Ollie's crucial moment and one of the most important seasons in UConn hoop. I think the journey has just begun and there can still be some development and surprises. See you at MSG.

 

[Paesano]

I'll play devil's advocate with a simpler and shorter question...

If you fire KO, who are you replacing him with that's better?

The answer is no one.

Stick with him

Well, if you say it is so then it must be true! I love posts like this.

For me, personally, I like data. Your opinion is not data. What is data? Gonzaga found themselves a better coach. Wichita State found themselves a better coach. When Butler found Brad Stevens, they found a better coach. When UConn found Jim Calhoun, they found a better coach. I could go on and on. Is it a high probability event? Maybe not. Is the probability zero? Definitely not! Is the probability decent given UConn's history and infrastructure? Yeah, I think so.

 

[HooperScooper]

I know what some of you guys do for a living; so, the fiery rants come with little real-world thought. You knew that game's achetype was possible.

WE are a Team with 2 kids that played more meaningful minutes than 10 a game last year. Regardless of what any of you say ... they are quality kids. ADD about 6-9 others you have to play. And you play an Arkansas of seniors, JUCOs, and a good add. WE looked lost from the first moment (and I have only walked away from a UConn TV game a few times). That play was horrific ... but understandable. Like with Diaco, you get to a moment. In this major UConn sport, this guy is COMMITTED to the University ... and not apparently to his own self-agrandizement. He made his thoughtful moves bringin in Chillious and Killings. Scrambled like hell. Did you see that Oregon team? Yeah ... they are Pritchard and about 8 newbies.

This is Ollie's crucial moment and one of the most important seasons in UConn hoop. I think the journey has just begun and there can still be some development and surprises. See you at MSG.

I'm definitely willing to give Ollie the rest of the season to see what he can do. But it's not just this year or last year that has me worried. I haven't been impressed with the way he coaches or runs the program (this is more a concern to me than the in game coaching) the last 3 seasons. Yes, UConn made the NCAA Tournament in 2016 but in my opinion that team under achieved. The talent was there to be better.

At the end of the season you evaluate everything. But when is the point that you make a change? Say you keep him for next season and things don't improve. You can't keep making excuses and hoping the future will be better.

 

[Paesano]

I know what some of you guys do for a living; so, the fiery rants come with little real-world thought. You knew that game's achetype was possible.

WE are a Team with 2 kids that played more meaningful minutes than 10 a game last year. Regardless of what any of you say ... they are quality kids. ADD about 6-9 others you have to play. And you play an Arkansas of seniors, JUCOs, and a good add. WE looked lost from the first moment (and I have only walked away from a UConn TV game a few times). That play was horrific ... but understandable. Like with Diaco, you get to a moment. In this major UConn sport, this guy is COMMITTED to the University ... and not apparently to his own self-agrandizement. He made his thoughtful moves bringin in Chillious and Killings. Scrambled like hell. Did you see that Oregon team? Yeah ... they are Pritchard and about 8 newbies.

This is Ollie's crucial moment and one of the most important seasons in UConn hoop. I think the journey has just begun and there can still be some development and surprises. See you at MSG.

I get what you are saying but how many "do overs" do we give the guy? The first bad season was because his recruiting was hindered by sanctions. I believe that excuse was WAY overplayed. The second bad season was due to injuries. If this plays out to be a third bad season, it will be because he blew up the team and started over. I get that there is some truth to every excuse but there are two opposing forces here. On the one hand, we have a well liked coach that will be expensive to buy out and who also has some excuses in his favor. On the other hand, every season that goes buy with the team playing like this makes us less relevant and makes finding the next coach that much harder. I don't envy the AD right now.

 

[MadDogRevival]

Bazz, Boat, Giffey and Daniels all got better under Ollie.

Yeah, but, they had JC for their initial push and direction, so I'm not buying it.

Exhibit A and Exhibit B for Ollie are Brimah and Purvis, both who appeared to depart substantially the same player as whom they arrived. I will never understand how Brimah played 4 years here and never developed a single go-to post move. Inconceivable (proper use).

 

[UConnJim]

I don't understand how everyone is going crazy right now. When has a college basketball team with almost all new players played well at the start of a season? Last year's team blew up and we are starting from almost scratch this season. I don't know about you, but this season so far has been as I expected, EXCEPT the way we lost to Arkansas as it seemed the team gave up.

That said, Arkansas was a very experienced team with their top 3 Gs being seniors and 5 out of their top 8 players being seniors. Their freshman was 6-11 and the 37th ranked recruiting the class. So, Arkansas had more experience playing together, had more experience at guard, and they had a better big man than UConn had. They will be a top 25 team this year.

Think about this. Arkansas 6-9 forward who played 19 minutes had as many assists in the game, 5, as Dave O, Polley, Larrier, Diarra, Cobb, Carlton, Whaley, and Williams have COMBINED this season. These players played a COMBINED 106 minutes for UConn last season. It is going to take time to come together as a team.

Due to the hard schedule this year and our lack of experience, I am only expecting 20 wins the year.

 

[Stainmaster]

Yeah, but, they had JC for their initial push and direction, so I'm not buying it.

Then why did none of that development occur while JC was running their practices and directing their training?

 

[HooperScooper]

I don't understand how everyone is going crazy right now. When has a college basketball team with almost all new players played well at the start of a season?

2017 Duke. Hey, you asked.

 

[BlueDogs]

If you look at the body of work since the NC, you see a steady decline in execution, consistency and quality of play. Recruiting and player assessment has not panned out. Player development is poor. We need a new direction because the overall trend is in the wrong direction. Sad.

 

[freescooter]

I'll play devil's advocate with a simpler and shorter question...

If you fire KO, who are you replacing him with that's better?

The answer is no one.

Stick with him

So what you are saying is that although Ollie isn’t good, there is no other coach who would do better. None. In the whole country. Nobody in the MAAC, CUSA, A-10, assistant anywhere? Only Kevin Ollie can coach UConn basketball. What a bizzare outlook.

 

[Balker]

Incidentally, since I see that some of you have made a habit of highlighting the length of my posts, I'll note that this one was six short paragraphs. I understand that not everybody (myself included) likes to read posts of those sort, but either take two minutes to read it or move on with your day. Some of you are like the second grader who announces that the lights are out five seconds after they are turned off.

I don't know what people have got against the long posts. Your threads lately are some of the most readable content on this board. I sift through all this nonsense to find these gems of coherent thought hidden between it all.