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Message: [QUOTE="Gurleyman, post: 4471227, member: 175"] Yeah. That team is my weak spot. I was more mad at Marcus Williams (he was the older player and had his cousin/friend along stealing laptops) and thought we never should have brought him back. AJ wasn’t going to play that season anyway, I don’t think, after having brain surgery - but the suspension took that possibility away (and took his redshirt possibility away). I kind of liked that team without Marcus, although our ceiling was lower - we scrapped and clawed a little bit when we only had Austrie and Rob Garrison … knowing we needed to fight on defense and fight for rebounds. We won in Maui (Denham at the buzzer) and we were still undefeated when Marcus joined, when we immediately became way more talented and better offensively. But from them on we thought we could just outscore teams and went soft, right from day one when we got drubbed by Marquette. Part of it was we couldn’t defend guards (a bigger problem than lacking a secondary ball handler was that we didn’t have a primary defender against ball handlers), but we also didn’t seem to have the same grit. We had a couple good games (a home win over Nova to split with them, and a game we beat Seton Hall by 40), but basically stunk the entire last month of the season. The loss to George Mason didn’t come from out of the blue - we were tied with a 10-20 Louisville team with a minute to go in the regular season finale. Then lost to a Syracuse team that was NIT bound at the time in a 1-8 game in the BET quarters. We learned our lesson so well from that loss that we needed to come back from 12 down to beat Albany in the 1-16 game. Then let a pedestrian 8 seed Kentucky team take us down to the wire. Then we needed a miracle to beat UW, which probably wouldn’t have been possible without Brandon Roy getting his fourth on a double tech. Why did George Mason finally pull it off? We got zero defensive stops in the last 10 minutes (5 of regulation, 5 in OT) - or at least no stops that didn’t involve them missing free throws. With the Final Four on the line, we didn’t have the grit to dig in on defense for a single stop against a mid-major. We almost scored enough to pull it out anyway, but I’ve never considered that a vintage UConn team, despite the record (a healthy AJ likely would have solved that). But it’s water under the bridge now. We have four - and the tradeoff for winning that many comes the occasional shocker as a favorite. Duke vs. Lehigh, Kentucky vs. Saint Peter’s, Kansas vs. VCU, etc. Or, to its largest extreme, Virginia vs. UMBC, followed by a nattie. When George Mason happened, we were only 2 years removed from winning - the 90s losses were harder to take before we got our first. [/QUOTE]

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