Which is another part of the Calhoun legacy that is just remarkable. In his 20 plus year run from the Dream Season on, only once did we lose in the first weekend to a clearly inferior team. And that was when our point guard blew out his knee in the game and it took too long for our players to recover emotionally. Normal ranked teams, and normal prominent programs, are used to losing 5-12 or 4-13 games every so often.
I'm not saying that to make excuses for our play Thursday night in the first half, which was not acceptable, or for our inability to make enough good and smart plays in the second half. But normal coaches, not named Jim Calhoun, have to be viewed in terms of reality. The reality is that we had a good year. You can absolutely question whether Hurley could have tweaked a little more out of this team, but the reality is that he brought a team with obvious and visible limitations into the Tourney as the 17th best team in the country. A team that was limited in terms of present quality depth, outside shooting and other than RJ the ability to keep making smart decisions at the end of close games.
We had a good season that was at the top level of expectations. We sucked in one game in the tourney. Those are almost separate things. Everyone is free to value one more than the other, but no one should be not paying attention to both of them.