RANK THE BONNIES!

What a gut-punch. All the early season hype and momentum created in Charleston went out the window. I think they'll have to go 3-0 and then pull off what will now be considered an upset win over Uconn to re-earn the trust of the voters.
 
Fuck it. To the cbb well educated voter, a neutral court loss to Iona is at best just as bad as a home loss to the full healthy UNI squad. However one merits 6 spot drops, and one merits 11 spots, in the eyes of the voters.

This goes to show, even with pre-season accolades, the perception for us is always going to be heavily laced with a "Prove it" undertone. I know all the press conferences and news clippings of coach and the guys say they dont pay attention to rankings, but you know they do. If Saturday's loss doesn't piss them off and motivate them on its own, hopefully this will.
 
Fuck it. To the cbb well educated voter, a neutral court loss to Iona is at best just as bad as a home loss to the full healthy UNI squad. However one merits 6 spot drops, and one merits 11 spots, in the eyes of the voters.

This goes to show, even with pre-season accolades, the perception for us is always going to be heavily laced with a "Prove it" undertone. I know all the press conferences and news clippings of coach and the guys say they dont pay attention to rankings, but you know they do. If Saturday's loss doesn't piss them off and motivate them on its own, hopefully this will.
It's always gonna be "prove it." I'm not even mad (at the voters, at least). The team had one game this week and it was an absolute stinker. I don't care how the voters treated the other schools. If ya stink, ya ain't ranked.

Now it's time to do what this team has always done well: prove 'em wrong and go 2-0 this week with a 100 point total margin of victory.
 
I fully agree with them being dropped to NR. You cannot lose that game. There just simply are no excuses. A T25 team does not lose that game on their own court on a week of rest. A 5 man team this age of CBB cannot be a T25 team. They are going to have to get contributions from the bench or you are going to see a lot more losses that shouldn't be.

Rant over. That's harsh. But I think that's the truth.
 
I agree, for the record, my bringing up Alabama isn't to say it's unfair to us that we dropped all the way out. Only to highlight that we shouldn't be expecting to receive any benefit of the doubt when we fuck up. Most out there are expecting and waiting for the fuck up.

I also agree on the bench. Part of our limited bench contributions has to do with never playing them in the second half because we're always coming from behind, but then again, it's troubling that the staff apparently believes a quick substitution will hinder our ability to come back. I'm a little worried for now, but that'll be panicked if it doesnt show signs of improvement soon.
 
Kenpom, which is based on normalized data, dropped us 4 notches and 34 vs. 27 is close enough to be styled as a difference of opinion. I take the Bill Russell position that rankings are for retards anyway. We will have plenty of opportunity to prove whether Northern Iowa was a one-off. My hope is to be no worse than a consensus 4-seed by Selection Sunday, but we clearly have work to do to get there.
 
If we are being realistic, this team will likely lose two more OOC and maybe three if we don't catch any breaks. This is a solid team, but with a stronger SOS and harder draws in A10 play, I think we will lose more games than people expect.

The loss to UNI doesn't really bother me as with Schmidt's style of defense can lead to some teams burning us from three on occasion. The only thing that really bothers me is the bench. At best (right now) we have six guys. Brown and Adams have shown us nothing to get excited about to date. While I believe Brown will likely shoot better, I feel like his ceiling is 6-7 PPG right now.

If any of our guys get in foul trouble, there's a considerable drop in talent from our starters to the bench. We've been lucky so far this season, but there will be a few games that it'll cost us.

9-3 OOC and 13-5 in conference. I think we'll get two in DC with a loss in the title. 24-9 with a seed of 7.
 
I dont know, man. I'm having a hard time slicing that record up in a way which wouldn't leave us with either too few quality wins, or too many bad losses to go with the good wins to even sniff a 7. It's too early for nitty gritty quadrant talk- so much about the quality of our opponents is subject to change, and we won't have true NET for another month. But where it all falls today, if what you say does come to fruition (and it's definitely plausible), I'm sweating bullets between 2 and 6 pm after the A10 title game, let alone thinking 7 seed.

My head is swirling with more thoughts that I could fill many more posts with, but I'll let it rest and hope that the next week proves some of them to just be reactions in the moment.

Shit, I need to find more/new hobbies or something.
 
Let’s just chilllllllllllll. Flush the toilet on that UNI game. The seniors will bounce back quickly.

Schmidt does need to work to a legitimate eight-man rotation, though. Our guys were totally gassed after the big run to tie the game. How can’t he see that?

Rankings, remember, are for retards. Just Winn.
 
Last edited:
You're right, Bill. Sometimes writing things out and dumping them into a post on here is the best way to clear my head, so consider my last post as that.

I know I said I'll let it rest- but one more thing I gotta get off my chest is Anthony Roberts. We hardly had him, so I wont go as far to say we could use him this year. He'd rather be the guy to drop 30 in a double digit loss to the mighty Fairfield Stags, instead of a valued 6th man on nationally relevant team, and that really fucking pisses me off about him. I just had to say it, and I'll never bring him up again.

That's it. WINN.
 
I dont know, man. I'm having a hard time slicing that record up in a way which wouldn't leave us with either too few quality wins, or too many bad losses to go with the good wins to even sniff a 7. It's too early for nitty gritty quadrant talk- so much about the quality of our opponents is subject to change, and we won't have true NET for another month. But where it all falls today, if what you say does come to fruition (and it's definitely plausible), I'm sweating bullets between 2 and 6 pm after the A10 title game, let alone thinking 7 seed.

My head is swirling with more thoughts that I could fill many more posts with, but I'll let it rest and hope that the next week proves some of them to just be reactions in the moment.

Shit, I need to find more/new hobbies or something.

I think we will enjoy having two Q1 wins in Charleston plus a Q2 with Boise. If we spilt UConn/VT, that would be our third Q1 win.

Until we beat Dayton, I'll pencil them in as an L...Q2
Loss to Mason - Q2
Loss to Davidson - Q3
Loss to Richmond -Q2
Loss to SLU - Q2

Assuming we beat URI, VCU, SLU, Richmond that would give us at least one Q1 plus 2 Q2s.

No Q4 losses and one Q3 gets you in safely. Not to mention 4 Q1s and 3 Q2s.

Not dumping or overreacting to the loss to UNI, but this schedule is hard both in OOC and A10 play.

Our schedule with @UD, SLU, VCU, Davidson, @Richmond, @SLU, URI, @VCU and Richmond) could yield six Q2 games and three Q1 contests
 
..Our guys were totally gassed after the big run to tie the game. How can’t he see that?
BR, I'm not so sure that they were gassed as they just took a big sigh and decided to play the final 9+ minutes like it was 0-0. The energy during that run was incredible, I don't think it just goes away in one possession. Prototypical Schmidt comeback, do everything right and overwhelm the opponent until X points are erased, and then reset. The whole reason it's tied now is because you played with purpose and not "0-0 let's see what happens" play that got you down 19 to begin with! That's maddening. And yeah, I know you can't keep it up for another 9+, but maybe see if you can just stretch a lead. Shit, get a lead maybe.

But it does go hand in hand with lack of bench because at some point they were or would be gassed and needed subs. This whole ironman 5 thing is very overrated and frankly stupid and shortsighted both this year and for the program going forward.
 
BR, I'm not so sure that they were gassed as they just took a big sigh and decided to play the final 9+ minutes like it was 0-0. The energy during that run was incredible, I don't think it just goes away in one possession. Prototypical Schmidt comeback, do everything right and overwhelm the opponent until X points are erased, and then reset. The whole reason it's tied now is because you played with purpose and not "0-0 let's see what happens" play that got you down 19 to begin with! That's maddening. And yeah, I know you can't keep it up for another 9+, but maybe see if you can just stretch a lead. Shit, get a lead maybe.

But it does go hand in hand with lack of bench because at some point they were or would be gassed and needed subs. This whole ironman 5 thing is very overrated and frankly stupid and shortsighted both this year and for the program going forward.
I dunno bi, I agree with bill. The team was gassed after that run. It took alot out of them. The reason you cant play like that for 40 min is because its not sustainable. Shoon cant play 20 min straight. Cool is not a huge drop off, have to get him in there. I think bill summed it up well. Let's chill a little. This is a veteran group and look what it took, a guy going off for 35 points. Stay the course. Uconn just barely beat umes tonight at home. Shit happens over the course of a season.
 
I dunno bi, I agree with bill. The team was gassed after that run. It took alot out of them. The reason you cant play like that for 40 min is because its not sustainable. Shoon cant play 20 min straight. Cool is not a huge drop off, have to get him in there. I think bill summed it up well. Let's chill a little. This is a veteran group and look what it took, a guy going off for 35 points. Stay the course. Uconn just barely beat umes tonight at home. Shit happens over the course of a season.

UNI was not a bad loss. They could end up being Q3, but will still likely be a top 150 team at absolute worst. More likely to be 60-100.

Nonetheless, the reason for some worry is that the guys we brought in don't seem ready to contribute this year.

AKC is a strong 6th man. He can fill in for a game or 10 minutes and we won't miss much.

Q. Adams might be able to spell for 5-10 minutes a night, but doesn't seem to give much offense to offset having any of our starters on the bench for extended minutes.

Linton Brown will hopefully be able to provide a spark when he plays. I think he is a slightly better version than AJ Vasquez during his freshman year.

There's just not much room for error when you only have seven maybe eight capable players.
 
UNI was not a bad loss. They could end up being Q3, but will still likely be a top 150 team at absolute worst. More likely to be 60-100.

Nonetheless, the reason for some worry is that the guys we brought in don't seem ready to contribute this year.

AKC is a strong 6th man. He can fill in for a game or 10 minutes and we won't miss much.

Q. Adams might be able to spell for 5-10 minutes a night, but doesn't seem to give much offense to offset having any of our starters on the bench for extended minutes.

Linton Brown will hopefully be able to provide a spark when he plays. I think he is a slightly better version than AJ Vasquez during his freshman year.

There's just not much room for error when you only have seven maybe eight capable players.
How do we know they’re capable or incapable, though, when they never see action with the lights on? Game situations are totally different from the monotony of daily practice. Some guys really turn it up a few notches on game day.

For the sake of this team and the larger program, we need to strategically rotate 3-4 bench players into games. It isn’t like you sit your stars for huge stretches. Subbing guys going into and out of media timeouts is a great way to steal real minutes of rest while missing, potentially, only seconds of game time.
 
Beat me to it, Bill. We cant even speak on the bench outside of Coul, because they're not getting any run. Brown and Adams havent even played in the second half of a game, excluding garbage time vs Marquette, since Siena. There's no reason for that.

Duro did fine in 2 minutes against Canisius. Save for one blown defensive assignment- which everyone has- JNT was fine against Siena. There's no reason some of these guys cant me mixed in for a couple of minutes at a time, individually, One guy mixed with 4 starters isnt going to be detrimental.

I mean, in 2018- if you put Chef, Brock, Ayeni, Amadi and Kaputo on floor at the same time, yeah that's a disaster. But each of them when brought in individually to mix with others on the floor brought value. There's just no way that the entire bench outside of Coul is so bad, that the same can't be true of them.
 
Beat me to it, Bill. We cant even speak on the bench outside of Coul, because they're not getting any run. Brown and Adams havent even played in the second half of a game, excluding garbage time vs Marquette, since Siena. There's no reason for that.

Duro did fine in 2 minutes against Canisius. Save for one blown defensive assignment- which everyone has- JNT was fine against Siena. There's no reason some of these guys cant me mixed in for a couple of minutes at a time, individually, One guy mixed with 4 starters isnt going to be detrimental.

I mean, in 2018- if you put Chef, Brock, Ayeni, Amadi and Kaputo on floor at the same time, yeah that's a disaster. But each of them when brought in individually to mix with others on the floor brought value. There's just no way that the entire bench outside of Coul is so bad, that the same can't be true of them.
Can't argue with that. We've played a lot of close games, and it is still early in the season.

Maybe I am forgetting, but it seems like Schmidt tightens the bench as the season progresses and earlier on is when we usually see what the guys can do. We have played a lot of close games, but that will probably be the case for next eight games or so save two or three games.

Other teams play their bench in close games, but we haven't so far. CC played eight games 10+ mins, UNI played nine guys 10+ mins, Siena played seven 10+ mins, Boise had eight go 10 + mins.

We do have new guys to the program, so perhaps I should let it pass.

Hopefully we will see more guys in the mix tonight!
 
Back
Top