I Pitino has learned a style of play from his dad and Billy Donovan and it's one that works, but only works when you have the right players. He doesn't have that here. He hasn't adjusted and on one hand it's his fault, but on the other he's never known anything else. I'm pretty discouraged right now but I'm not about to run him off either.
I laugh and laugh when you discount ENTIRE seasons based on one game over 6 YEARS. This year's meltdown is quite reminiscent of several seasons we put up with in the last regime, perhaps you should go back and review those seasons to compare to this one. If the NCAA is all you care about, why pay attention to the season at all? Winning consistently in the B1G is much much harder than winning one tournament game against a barely average team with no heart or discipline.
Tubby had his shot, one game wasn't enough to justify what he was getting paid. The product he consistently put on the floor was brutal to watch game after game.
The worst coach in college basketball history took a 9-win team to the Tournament in his 2nd year.
The slowest nights on offense now still beat the Tubby-sponsored, stand around offense.
We actually seem to have a plan on how to attack a zone defense now.
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once again the king of hyperbole (who has said he doesn't use hyperbole) once again uses hyperbole!
I laugh and laugh when I think about how making the Tournament and winning a game there was cast aside as meaningless by this fan base. The worst coach in college basketball history took a 9-win team to the Tournament in his 2nd year. This coach's 2nd year? CBI, here we come! I can't wait!
I laugh and laugh when you discount ENTIRE seasons based on one game over 6 YEARS.
This year's meltdown is quite reminiscent of several seasons we put up with in the last regime, perhaps you should go back and review those seasons to compare to this one.
If the NCAA is all you care about, why pay attention to the season at all?
Winning consistently in the B1G is much much harder than winning one tournament game against a barely average team with no heart or discipline.
Tubby had his shot, one game wasn't enough to justify what he was getting paid.
The product he consistently put on the floor was brutal to watch game after game.
But celebrating failure by Pitino and this season just to say "I told you so" is not something I can get on board with.
This website absolutely sucks right now. It is almost completely devoid of logic and almost entirely consisting of extremism and overreaction (This post likely included in said extremism/overreaction). Those that see the flaws of the current roster and the reason of the dismissal of current coaches predecessor yet hang onto their expectations of "win now or die" frustrate me. Those that claim the current coach is terrible despite some very evident evidence to the contrary are frustrating as well. And what I cannot stand the most is the almost instantaneous 180 some people pull when we win a game we maybe should not have or lose a game we should have won. The opinions of players and personnel changing on the result of a missed layup or open jumper.... Yikes.
Am I upset that we lost last night? Absolutely. Do I have some trepidation about the regression of the current roster? For sure. Has it changed my faith/optimism in Pitino's vision of where he wants to take this program? Not yet. There are very few correlations we should be drawing from the results/efforts of the current team to what we should expect down the road, or at least applying a severe discount to said results due to not enough time and or terrible roster make-up (some organic, some inherited). I've said, with some ridicule, that it's 6 years minimum for a coach to install a program and turn one around. I firmly believe that. In YEAR 4 we will start to see the true form of what he wants in this program. In YEAR 5 he will have his first players that went through the system start to finish and in year 6 he will have his first real recruits hit the floor as seniors.
Tubby's short straw and or the validity of his dismissal are irrelevant in this conversation and those that bring his name up in this conversation are equally frustrating. It's just frustrating that this board cannot have a candid conversation about the things you're seeing today that upset you and not go off on 10 tangents about how big of a disaster (HYPERBOLE TO THE MAX) this season has been.
The answer I'll likely receive is then well go somewhere else. Well I live in Wisconsin and know 0 die hard Gopher fans, so this has been for the last 4 years my location for inside info on recruits and sometime quality conversation about the direction of my favorite squad.
How is continuously dribbling into a turn over or throwing the ball away the coaches fault? Go watch the game, and watch some of the guys actions. You don't win games turning it over the WAY we do...especially when a lot of those actions are performed by our "seasoned veterans".
I can't believe how short sighted some of the "fans" on this forum are.
Ski-U-Mah
I watched Tubby's Texas Tech team against Baylor a couple of nights ago. They're young but they have definitely have some potential. Right now I'd bet that Tubby has a better team than Pitino next year.
With all due respect Bleed, Kansas might not be the best example. Gopher fans on this board seem to have some sort of entitlement and false sense of what our program is or where it was headed 2 years ago. Expectations are not appropriately set and response to failed inflated exactions are erratic and immature at best.Sports brings out emotion and dramatic shifts in said emotion. That is nothing new and certainly not unique to Minnesota. This board is tame compared to most as is our fan base. You should have heard KU fans' opinions of Roy Williams after they lost in the Round of 32 one year. A few years later 16,000 people showed up at his press conference to cheer him on that he was staying at the school they wanted to run him out of a few years prior. Gopher football fans were hanging Murray Warmath in effigy a year before he won the national title. This has been happening for decades. Winning is more fun than losing.
Go Gophers!!
With all due respect Bleed, Kansas might not be the best example. Gopher fans on this board seem to have some sort of entitlement and false sense of what our program is or where it was headed 2 years ago. Expectations are not appropriately set and response to failed inflated exactions are erratic and immature at best.
Being passionate is not what I'm frustrated at, it's the fact that there are numerous people that will say this team is full of senior talent in on post and proclaim NCAA or bust, and in the very next post claim said senior is not a d1 player. Some get mad at our new coach for not having a stid 4 on the roster as if he didn't recruit multiple 4s and had numerous extenuating circumstances limit the ability of getting a 4 on the roster.
It's the irrational extremes that piss me off.
With all due respect Bleed, Kansas might not be the best example. Gopher fans on this board seem to have some sort of entitlement and false sense of what our program is or where it was headed 2 years ago. Expectations are not appropriately set and response to failed inflated exactions are erratic and immature at best.
Being passionate is not what I'm frustrated at, it's that there are numerous crazy extremes that come out after wins and losses. People that will say this team is full of senior talent in on post and proclaim NCAA or bust, and in the very next post claim said senior is not a d1 player. Some get mad at our new coach for not having a stid 4 on the roster as if he didn't recruit multiple 4s and had numerous extenuating circumstances limit the ability of getting a 4 on the roster.
It's the irrational extremes that make it unreadable.
Fair points.
Though we are coming off a bad loss at home to a bad Northwestern team, that we've now lost to two years in a row at home. Obviously that is unacceptable and can't continue to happen. We need better coaching and better players.
As I've stated before, I firmly believe that Richard Pitino is a guy who will take his team to the Final Four, likely multiple Final Four's in his career. My fear all along has been that he'll do it at another school and will look back at this experience as the school that he really took his lumps at and learned from, not the program that he won big with. I hope I'm wrong, but that is my fear.
Go Gophers!!
Fair points.
Though we are coming off a bad loss at home to a bad Northwestern team, that we've now lost to two years in a row at home. Obviously that is unacceptable and can't continue to happen. We need better coaching and better players.
As I've stated before, I firmly believe that Richard Pitino is a guy who will take his team to the Final Four, likely multiple Final Four's in his career. My fear all along has been that he'll do it at another school and will look back at this experience as the school that he really took his lumps at and learned from, not the program that he won big with. I hope I'm wrong, but that is my fear.
Go Gophers!!
Before Pitino can get an opportunity to take another program to a Final Four he is going to need success at Minnesota. More than likely success in the NCAA tourney.
Nah, you're just a critic of both. But for some people thats the most entertaining part. There is something between a koolaid drinker and hopeless negativity.I know an awful lot about the team to just be a football fan; could it be {gasp}, that I'm a fan of both? If you still see hope in this situation you are a kool aid drinker. There is hope of a nice back court with Mason and Dorsey, but JJ is a short combo guard with a questionable shot. Mcbrayer can score, but can you play the 3 in the big ten at 170 lbs? No one else really wanted JN, so I'll just hold out hope he can be a serviceable piece. There is nothing 3 thru 5 on this roster. We will still have to recruit something there if we want any level of productivity. The two Africans will never amount to anything and JN seems to be a solid defensive presence with limited offensive capability.
Before Pitino can get an opportunity to take another program to a Final Four he is going to need success at Minnesota. More than likely success in the NCAA tourney.
Fair points.
Though we are coming off a bad loss at home to a bad Northwestern team, that we've now lost to two years in a row at home. Obviously that is unacceptable and can't continue to happen. We need better coaching and better players.
As I've stated before, I firmly believe that Richard Pitino is a guy who will take his team to the Final Four, likely multiple Final Four's in his career. My fear all along has been that he'll do it at another school and will look back at this experience as the school that he really took his lumps at and learned from, not the program that he won big with. I hope I'm wrong, but that is my fear.
Go Gophers!!
There are some irrational extremes out there. At the same time, we have only seen two Pitino seasons so far. Right now, pending a pretty impressive finish, it is likely that Pitino will have taken this team a step backwards in both of them. When you fire a coach for poor performance, you expect to see improvement and not regression.
I have no fear of Pitino leaving. Somebody else young and hungry would take the job.
I don't think he needs to take MN to the tourney to get a better, though maybe not elite, job. He could leave tomorrow and get a top 15 job because of his name, connections and communication skills. He can blame this season on Tubby and no practice facility.
I have no fear of Pitino leaving. Somebody else young and hungry would take the job.
I don't think he needs to take MN to the tourney to get a better, though maybe not elite, job. He could leave tomorrow and get a top 15 job because of his name, connections and communication skills. He can blame this season on Tubby and no practice facility.
No he couldn't. He could get a job at Auburn or LSU, etc. Just like Tubby could have. But he won't, because those are worse jobs than MN.
And I think that is exactly why we pulled the trigger on Tubby. The decline was coming, instead of waiting for Tubby to fail, (maybe he would have righted the ship, we'll never know) Teague pulled the trigger and hired someone who he thought could change the culture with and sell his facilities agenda with (was Pitino his plan A? Don't know). That takes time, and likely accelerated the decline. Rather than 2-3 years of failure from the predecessor we get it with the new coach. I don't think that's a terrible or rational way to look at where we are today.
If you're setting the bar at NCAA round 2 and anything after that is regression, I guess we're going to disagree simply based on one person is operating on "facts" and the other is making subjective assumptions on the inevitable fall of the program.
Last year I set the bar at NCAA round 2 and anything after that was regression. This year, NIT championship was the bar to assess whether or not we have again regressed, and we shall see how we match up against that standard when the dust settles. I have been wrong so many times about the direction of various Minnesota pro and college teams (both optimistic and pessimistic) that I don't believe in "inevitable falls".