I know I'll end up kicking myself for continuing this but the trainwreck this thread has become is nearly impossible to look away from.
One of our freshman did play significant minutes in Kansas. The take the DH didn't want to give any of the kids a chance is insane.
The one who did play was healthy, is a reasonably capable ball handler for a wing and has physically mature body. None of our other freshmen could check all three of those boxes this past Friday evening.
If you look back at posts of mine from early summer you will see that I have been as high on Ross as anyone here. I believe that he will turn into a tremendous player for us and greatly exceed the expectations of most of our fan base. That said, he didn't belong in the court last Friday. He isn't physically ready to play inside or defend anyone on Kansas and if he was used as a spot up wing, it would have made it easier for Kansas to force the issue with our ball handlers.
Stewart is better physically equipped but he also is not enough of a ball handler to play the three and at the four Kansas would have had a mismatch.
I don't believe the plan was to limit our rotation as severely as we did but it was obvious that we weren't expecting Kansas to blitz the ball handlers (and overplay everyone else) to the level they did and Hurley viewed the shorter rotation as the best path to win the game (by the way, it almost worked).
In retrospect it is easy to say "we would have lost anyway so why not play the other kids" but in the heat of battle, in a game that we were in until literally the final seconds, a head coach can't start trying things just for the sake of seeing what happens.
