Mau, excellent OP. Boog2004, strong follow up, except that you and a couple of others on here continue to point to an "inconsistent" regular season in 2013-2014. Really? Go back and look at that year and that team again. They were by far our weakest Final 4/Championship team. With the talent on hand in the front court, there were two games we should not have lost - Stanford at home and Houston on the road. But otherwise... Really? Inconsistent the whole regular season? They went 24-7 and 12-6 in conference play. And DeAndre did not really start to play at a consistently high level until February. Sorry, but to me history shows that KO got that team to play at or near their optimal level in at least 90% of their regular season games. That is about the most you can expect from college kids, and significantly better than your "inconsistent" label.
As for the tournament - on one hand, we did get some luck to prevail against St. Joe's in the first game of the tournament, because they did outplay us for significant stretches of that game. You could even say the Brimah 3-point play was very lucky. By the way, that St. Joe's team was underseeded. A hard-nosed, veteran group who frankly could have easily made it to the Sweet 16 and maybe farther in a different bracket. And from then on KO did as good a coaching job over 5 games as we have ever seen. Period. That is a fact. And the "KO sucks" crowd on here who "assume" Calhoun would have had the same run are just as crazy. And this is coming from someone who loved Coach C; and he did do the greatest building of a program in the history of men's college basketball.
Ollie's first two years here were so far beyond anything any of us could have hoped for with the handicaps (largely created by Calhoun, Jeff Hathaway and our great friends at the NCAA Infractions Committee) he started with. The revisionist history buffs with the "they were Calhoun's players" can blow me. As I recall quite vividly, Alex Oriakhi, Roscoe Smith and Michael Bradley were all "Calhoun players" as well. They all defected from what most every one (including every one of us at the time) thought was a dumpster fire then, with the stain of scandal and frankly a scary immediate future ahead.
But a number of you revisionists like Paesano never, ever bring that up when you bash Ollie at every turn and want to somehow give Calhoun all the credit for the 2014 national title. Seriously? How about if you were completely honest, admitting to the fact that in addition to all the other defections, DeAndre Daniels may well have been part of the transferring group after residing in Calhoun's Chez Bow Wow for the last half of his freshman year. Kevin Ollie had to re-recruit him and practically everyone else (including Shabazz) to get them to stay. Oh yeah, you conveniently never mention those little tidbits of historical fact either. The real truth is, that without the coaching change, the 2014 National Championship most likely never happens.
You say the people on here who try to look for the positives heading toward next year are "Pollyannas"? No. In fact I have not seen one poster on here who has said "everything is great... ALL IS WELL! (ala Kevin Bacon near the end of Animal House)" Not Mau, not Stairmaster, and not pj; not even AntG168 or any of the others who are hopeful of an Ollie-led turnaround. You members who post negative on everything related to Ollie just say that to justify your attempt to ruin practically every recent recruiting thread on here over the last 2 months in which the majority of us would like to have useful information propagated to share and discuss.
Yes, Ollie has made mistakes over the last 3 years. A few of them, obviously. He absolutely needs to recapture the best of what he was those first two years, and then take what he has learned from his mistakes the past 3 years years and be better for it. Pretty much everyone agrees, including every so-called "Pollyanna" on here. But anyone on here who feels he should already be fired without deserving a chance to turn it around after what he did his first two years here (he won a NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP with by far not the best talent in that tournament, YOU UNGRATEFUL IDIOTS!) is a sorry excuse for a fan.