Ive been thinking this for a while, and now that we are in conference it is kind of academic, but something pumpkin head Gillen said made me think it again.
Im wondering if we are actually screwing ourselves by scheduling out of conference so tough with such young, new teams every year.
The original premise behind scheduling a murderers row early every year when we first joined the AAC was the assumption that we were projected to be top of the heap in conference every year and that we would need the non conference RPI bump for tourney seeding. Talk about putting the cart before the horse. That obviously never worked out and has been nothing but a detriment to us because we simply arent good enough early to take anything but a confidence beating out of these games.
Jim Boeheim (and you won't hear me quote this idiot much, but I think it is something I agree with him on, and I think Calhoun did too) has a saying when people criticize Syracuses easy early schedules:
" You don't learn anything by losing except how to lose"
I think back to Calhoun teams especially in the 90's. We feasted on Cupcakes until the conference schedule. We might get one high profile game before conference and then maybe one or two non conference snuck into conference . Dont believe me? go back and look at the schedules. Calhoun very much 'protected' his teams early in season. When Calhoun projected that he would have a team with experience that could benefit from tough early season he would schedule tougher to see where we were at. When he had a young team with new pieces, he preferred cupcakes early. I think that helps a young team. I dont think we gained anything from Michigan St, Arizona, Auburn, Arkansas etc. Villanova is going to wax us, but Im OK with a late January high profile matchup. We used to do late HJan. early Feb matchups all the time under Calhoun. That is an appropriate time to test yourself and always a good break from conference grind. We've had time to gel. We havent gelled, but if we were going to we should've by now. Its being in a hole on December 5th that I find to be a detriment to team development.
Let the kids make mistakes in games we can still win despite mistakes and I think they are a better team in January. I think winning can breed winning. Now here is a major difference between JC and where KO needs to get right or get gone. If we make a mistake in a cupcake game we win, KO needs to be fierce about correcting mistakes. If KO is just content for wins over cupcakes without instilling a system and culture, then it is all for naught. I'v seen KO be content with cupcake wins this year. Not good.
No matter who the coach is next year, Im of the opinion that we should very much lighten our load early season to start rebuilding this team from the ground up. Until we can reach the cycle of sustained success and returning veteran players who have already shown success.
Patrick Ewing was right to clear Georgetown out of PK80 and to start slow with Georgetown this year. While Georgetown is not a good team this year, theyve maximized what they have and have won a couple they shouldnt have and played some decent teams a lot closer than we have and I think that is a direct result of getting some wins under their belt against some bad teams early.
