I don't care how many times you guys say this, it will never be true and it will never stop being an assinine assertion.
It may be unlikely that we get another great coach but it has happened here before and it happened at Gonzaga and Wichita State and Butler and many other non P5 teams in the past. Guys like Calhoun may be incredibly rare but guys better than Ollie are not quite as rare.
People who tirelessly recycle excuses are forgetting that next year will be his sixth year at UConn. Yes, there have been great coaches who have taken a few years to "hit their stride" and, yes, even great coaches can have a bad year now and then. But next year will he year 6. Not two, not three, not four. While he deserves credit for that miraculous run in 2014, he also deserves criticism for not being abke to dominate a crappy conference even once. Calhouns don't grow on trees but neither do miraculous seasons. The best way to go deep in March is to have a team that looks like they will go deep in March, just about every year. It isn't happening.
That's where i'm at with all this.
What's been most worrisome to me is just the lack of development on this team this year in spite of these kids getting a lot of playing time. I mean I think to anyone with somewhat of a level-headed worldview of this knew that once they stumbled out of the gate and THEN lost Gilbert and Larrier, that the season was objectively over. The flip side of that to me was that this was - at best - a tournament team; but not a major contender and hey - the young kids can play this season and just work on getting better without loads of pressure heaped on top of them. IN that way - seasons like this one can kind of go from being a curse to a blessing and you reap the dividends the next season.
But I don't think anyone outside of Adams really did...
I hate saying that - but outside of Adams, I'm not sold on a single player that they have on the roster for next year. Not one of them. I like that Vital is so scrappy. Jackson is interesting, but he seems like more of a bit player to me, too. Enoch is a little better to the point where he can pick up minutes, but you can't depend on him for long stretches. Durham just doesn't wow me on any real level. Gilbert will be back and that's nice, but he missed his entire freshman year so who knows wtf that is next year. Larrier has played what - 8 games in his college career? Diarra will be nice I guess - but I don't really know what to expect out of that, either. MAL should be a fun addition, but freshman are still freshman....
I mean this team is an entire roster full of question marks *everywhere.* And if Adams is gone - do they have a single player who can shoot or score at will? Who's the dominant post threat or the guy who can protect the rim? If you want a chuckle - think about what this team does on the glass next year... Freshman years are Freshman years, so I don't want to get TOO carried away here - but this wasn't a team that did anything particularly well this year and you could make a case that they got *worse* as the year wore on. Maybe they gassed, i'm sure they were banged up (and I'm sure there were plenty of dings we didn't even hear about), but the development hasn't been there in as safe an environment TO develop as you could ask for.
And that's entirely on Ollie. All of it. Got dealt some bum cards, too; but the cards he had he played incredibly poorly. I just don't know. I don't know how anyone can look at this through rose colored glasses.
