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Message: [QUOTE="diggerfoot, post: 3424426, member: 1673"] Let me start with "bad news first." BAD: We do not have the ideal roster. An ideal roster would have a point who was at least 5'10" (to see over the defense and have less to close out on the perimeter), have excellent court vision and anticipation and is a commanding leader. The ideal post would be at least 6'4" (I was going to use 6'3", the heights of Stokes and J. Moore, but what the heck, let's go with Lobo, Charles and Stewart instead). The other three players would be versatile wings that could play anywhere from shooting guard to power forward. We would have an extra point, post and wing for the ideal 8-player rotation. Even if we had extensive experience and great cohesion, which we do not, we fall short of the ideal. Let me offer a token criticism as a "keyboard coach:" the Walker recruiting class was a major fail. This was different from the Sherwood/Wright/Robinson fail during our previous extended absence from a championship, though of course there is a parallel. You have an entire class of three transfer and you have problems. Same with three out of four transferring. The difference being that the Walker class were all too similar in positions and having that all in the same class was asking for trouble. If Auriemma did not recruit all four we would be complaining about the short roster and how doomed we were in recruiting, but that's where we ended up anyways because of three out of four with similar heights and skill sets transferring. GOOD: Before the season started I would have said a championship is unlikely, the Final Four would be desirable, the Elite Eight would be satisfactory and only less than the Elite Eight would be unsatisfactory. I still think we are in the Elite Eight category, which to me is good news. That would mean our current four year downturn will end up with three Final Fours and an Elite Eight, whereas our previous four year downturn had only one FF and (gasp) a Sweet Sixteen. Oh, by the way, that downturn always had rosters with legitimate WNBA bigs, either J. Moore or Charles, along with complementary bigs (Sherwood, Kerns, McClaren). So here we have had shorter rosters during a time when some folks are saying we have more parity, more recruiting deficiencies and more coaching deficiencies, yet we outperformed our previous downturn. A little perspective is in order. We have a tremendous recruiting class coming in. Unlike the Walker class they are more distinctive from each other in their projected roles. There is automatically going to be better cohesion built into this class and I think we will see most of them for all four years. We also will have at least three bigs in each of the four years. At least one year we will have four. This is probably why most posters have been fairly positive, obvious hope lies on the horizon. Yet there always are a few, which leads to the: UGLY: I see nothing wrong with criticism per se, not even during perfect seasons. Problem solving can be fun and satisfying, plus no person nor program is perfect. The ugliness in the criticism comes in the lack of humility some posters have. Since none of us are directly involved in the day-to-day, we cannot truly know what are better alternatives. We can guess, we can offer our guesses with something along the lines of "I think," but the snark and certainty of some criticisms is much more of an indictment of posters who, no matter how brilliant or accurate they fancy they are, just do not have all the facts available. Thus when I see the word "blame" tossed out, I cringe a little. Well, yes, different people are culpable for different mistakes, but for what are they being blamed? Blaming anyone for not being perfect is absurd, so one would think blame is warranted only if being less than perfect leads to worse results than can be expected. I posted elsewhere that the goals, in order, are: developing good players and people, having a squad play a certain way, win championships and win games. No program during their "high" period has accomplished those goals better than what UConn has done during this recent downturn. Tossing out the word "blame" when no alternative for what works better can be presented as an example is just plain ugly. [/QUOTE]

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