This is Why He's Not Coaching

[BroadwayVa]

Agreed. But for God's sake SEC folks, open your minds and embrace modern basketball theory and reality! Being Neanderthals in basketball is not a good look. The "shine" of football excellence does not hide your lack of it.

Is this your time to offend everyone in the south?? Being a known NeanderAll ---and played with the basketball rocks---it is interesting all the comments you have gotten on this article. One says Defense is hard to learn and other say Defense is easy to learn---one says defense wins games --another says offense wins games. Then we get into the Big wide Tall players vs quick post vs smaller athletic

The only real truth posted so far is----We have Nat and they don't. Before the Tournament is completed that my be the most heard cheer
I suspect there shall be some along the way for: Napheesa, Gabby, Saniya, Kia, Danger, Samuelson and hopefully for Geno--if that happens the 12 shall be upon us.

 

[Huskee11]

Some interesting stats, in my opinion. Against UConn, Kalani Brown was 3-4 from the floor; Brionna Jones 6-7; and Coates 4-6.

Very high percentage makes, but combined shot attempts of 17. I can live with that. We should be fine if we don't foul unnecessarily. The other teams have no answer for the quickness of Napheesa and Gabby. And by the fourth quarter, their bigs will have stopped trying to keep up.

 

[dualskeptic]

....what Geno does better than anyone is to recruit student-athletes who are intelligent enough to anticipate action, athletic enough to implement action, committed enough to execute action and communicate well enough to choreograph action....

One of the most rhetorically beautiful sentences I've read on the Boneyard.

 

[SCGamecock]

I think he's right. I have been mystified for a long time at South Carolina's either inability or disinterest in pushing the ball into the post. USC's post players take only a small percentage of total shots, when they should be taking the majority. Will they succeed against UConn in getting the ball down low? Not sure. UConn has a genius of a coach who has prevented other teams' taking advantage of his small front line for 32 games.

But I think he's right in his observations.

I'm honestly confused by this statement. According to some posters here, all SC does is dump it down into the post players, and in their eyes we have an antiquated offense because of this style of play. But you're saying SC is disinterested in pushing the ball to the post. Which is it?

In all honesty, our post players get touches and demand the ball often. Even when they're not shooting they are getting the ball inside and kicking the ball back out (something we've gotten A LOT better at, Coates and Wilson used to be black holes).. it's important to keep teams honest, and teams know that SC's bread and butter is getting the ball to our 6'4 low post center and 6'5 high post power forward, so our offense is designed to get post touches and ball reversals to the inside, even if it doesn't result in a post score. Every team in America knows this and they prepare for us by scheming to take our bread and butter away.. some teams are more successful at it than others.

UConn is one of those teams that's usually really good at taking away your first option, and second, and sometimes third.... so if you're only watching SC when we play UConn and making the assumption that SC never gets the ball inside because we struggle to do it during that particular game then you'd be incorrect in making said assumption.

 

[magic]

Tulane?

Without getting into technical details regarding that particular game, unfortunately for you, I don't believe they will be playing next week !

 

[cockhrnleghrn]

I think it started by trying to emulate Pat's formula for success, she was beating up on everyone and they all tried to copy what she was doing getting a stable of tall players, play hard man to man defense and rebound like crazy. TN generally was not a great shooting or passing team but they beat people up on the offensive boards and scored lots of put backs. That became the SEC style and not a lot of variety crept in until KY started their 40 minutes of dread. Pat succeeded because with few exceptions she out-recruited everybody else in the SEC and so had better talent.
Even now all these years later, it is still mostly a traditional post league with even the new coaches like Dawn basically running traditional offensives. Not sure what White will do at Vanderbilt yet, and LSU is a little different, but KY still stands out as an outsider in terms of style.

How many SEC Championships has Kentucky won in the last ten years?

 

[UcMiami]

How many SEC Championships has Kentucky won in the last ten years?

None of course, but they have been ranked and second or third in the SEC and successful in the NCAAs for most of the last decade. Not sure how good a coach Mitchell really is, but he has developed a style of play to suit his general lack of quality big players that has been very successful against the rest of the SEC.

And I would posit that playing against KY has been a benefit to the other SEC teams because they present different challenges than most of the rest of the league. One of the things that Geno used to talk about with the Big East was that because it was cobbled together from different leagues and kept pulling in new teams, playing the conference schedule exposed UConn to a wide variety of playing styles that prepared them for the NCAA better than had they all been clones of one another. I think that though has real validity - the more established P5 conferences all had a 'style' and when they played in the NCAAs they were suddenly faced with very different styles that they hadn't been exposed to and often struggled to adapt to. It is another reason that having a descent OOC can really help teams, and scheduling weak OOC can hurt.

 

[cockhrnleghrn]

None of course, but they have been ranked and second or third in the SEC and successful in the NCAAs for most of the last decade. Not sure how good a coach Mitchell really is, but he has developed a style of play to suit his general lack of quality big players that has been very successful against the rest of the SEC.

And I would posit that playing against KY has been a benefit to the other SEC teams because they present different challenges than most of the rest of the league. One of the things that Geno used to talk about with the Big East was that because it was cobbled together from different leagues and kept pulling in new teams, playing the conference schedule exposed UConn to a wide variety of playing styles that prepared them for the NCAA better than had they all been clones of one another. I think that though has real validity - the more established P5 conferences all had a 'style' and when they played in the NCAAs they were suddenly faced with very different styles that they hadn't been exposed to and often struggled to adapt to. It is another reason that having a descent OOC can really help teams, and scheduling weak OOC can hurt.

Playing a lot of different styles is helpful when you get to the NCAAT. It hurt us against Syracuse last season.