Weak OOC Schedule partially to blame?

[ConnHuskBask]

Does anyone else think that going nearly two months into the season without playing a quality opponent has hurt the team? Up until Seton Hall we hadn't played a legitimate NCAA contender or played a legitimate road game.

The guys were able to coast through all those easy OOC games and I think bad habits were developed - such as getting a lead, losing their edge and letting the other lesser team get back into the game.

I'm not even that surprised that with who they had faced, the first time they play a real Top 25ish (spare me Harvard and FSU) team in Seton Hall, on the road, they got beaten.

Coach will turn it around, because he always does, but we may go through some growing pains early in BE competition.

 

[traitor71]

I've seen this post over the years and in this case the answer is no. They didn't exactly "coast" through the early season as the same problems were there.

 

[EricLA]

IMHO the answer is an emphatic no. FSU and Harvard were both legit teams. aside from the Holy Cross game, there wasn't a legit blowout from start to finish. this team needs a lot of work and seems like it has some chemistry issues. very possible to turn it around, but i doubt playing Wisconsin and Baylor instead of Wagner and Maine would have prepared us any better. we'd just have more losses.

 

[huskyharry]

Ney. The scheduling was perfect. Opponents were actually fairly good by RPI and the team would have been undefeated if they had avoided a meltdown against UCF.
Tougher schedule would have meant more losses and a harder chance to make the NCAAs. JC knew what he was doing.

 

[Vuce]

Nope - no correlation. This has been brought up since JC arrived at Uconn. It's BS.

 

[dogpause]

Yes, partially.

 

[ConnHuskBask]

Nope - no correlation. This has been brought up since JC arrived at Uconn. It's BS.

So, beating Michigan State and Kentucky at the beginning of last year, that didn't have a positive effect on the team?

 

[UCHuskies08]

So, beating Michigan State and Kentucky at the beginning of last year, that didn't have a positive effect on the team?

Kemba was ready after a summer of beasting to carry those teams in November. We wouldn't have won the Maui Invitational this year.

 

[huskiesNhoos]

So, beating Michigan State and Kentucky at the beginning of last year, that didn't have a positive effect on the team?

Those games absolutely had a positive effect last year. However, this years team clearly wouldn't have been ready for games against those caliber teams, and getting beat earlier/more often certainly wouldn't have prepared us better.

JC clearly saw that this team needed time to put everything together, and that's a lot easier against a cupcake who you can afford to make mistakes against rather than a MSU, KU that would punish you for those same mistakes

 

[ConnHuskBask]

Kemba was ready after a summer of beasting to carry those teams in November. We wouldn't have won the Maui Invitational this year.

I'm not saying we would've won a premiere pre-season tournament, but I think it would have prepared us better for the Big East season - even if we had a couple losses along the way.

The two supposed "legitimate" OOC teams we played so far are a 9-6 Florida State and a Harvard team that just lost to Fordham.

Playing cupcakes for two months, then going on the road in the Big East is going to cause some growing pains. That's all I'm trying to say here.

 

[Gurleyman]

It definitely had a positive effect, long-term, but it didn't show up the whole way through the year. In our first two conference road games, we lost pretty big at Pitt and were down big at Notre Dame before coming back and making it close at the end. In between (or somewhere in there) we needed OT to beat South Florida at home. Granted, '11 Pitt and '11 Notre Dame were better than Seton Hall and Rutgers.

There are almost always peaks and valleys in the season unless you have a really special, veteran team ('09, '99, '96) that just takes care of business. This current valley is concerning, largely because there's not really a sense yet that this team has a Maui-type peak in it.

 

[freescooter]

Does anyone else think that going nearly two months into the season without playing a quality opponent has hurt the team? Up until Seton Hall we hadn't played a legitimate NCAA contender or played a legitimate road game.

The guys were able to coast through all those easy OOC games and I think bad habits were developed - such as getting a lead, losing their edge and letting the other lesser team get back into the game.

I'm not even that surprised that with who they had faced, the first time they play a real Top 25ish (spare me Harvard and FSU) team in Seton Hall, on the road, they got beaten.

Coach will turn it around, because he always does, but we may go through some growing pains early in BE competition.

I don't think playing the weak schedule we played, especially as poorly as we played it, was all that helpful. Playing a couple of tough teams either on the road or at least away from hartford/Storrs was absolutely beneficial to last years team. Forced them to play tough. The difference was not that we were involved in close games this year. it was that we were involved in close games we still won despite playing poorly. UCONN didn't have to play well to win those games. There was no real pressure...put together a little spurt, or play a couple of minutes of defense and beat a crappy team by 10...As far as your final comment goes, it just ain't so, or did you just become a fan in 2011 and forget about 2010? (Which by the way was a very forgettable season...), Or 2007? Which in some ways this season seems a bit remincent? While he has built some incredible teams in his time at UCONN, "Coach" most assuredly does not always get it turned around. this team needed a test or two along the way...a game that even if they lost would have pushed them to play hard for 40 minutes. Instead they got a bunch of wins and a loss against a weak slate. It almost seems that Calhoun might have figured 2011-12 would be a huge letdown and he needed as many early season wins as he could get in order to take the next step.

 

[Gurleyman]

I dunno - 2007 wasn't like any other team in our history. That team had no experience at all other than a sophomore Adrien, who came off the bench the year before (plus Austrie, to a degree). And the 2007 freshmen were second-tier targets who were very raw - Thabeet fell over when the wind blew, Stanley's skillset included jumping and not much else, and AJ Price had been out of basketball for two years, had molasses for legs and looked like a DIII guard.

This year's team is young (especially with our lone junior not playing like one), but has four starters and a key sixth-man back, as well as three impact recruits on paper. Drummond is raw, but looks like Alcindor compared to how Thabeet came in.