Ben Johnson is a Disaster

You keep saying this. Who are these posters that don't think the conference is down?
I don’t think the BTN is “down”. There is more parity, and by that thinking, NCAA basketball is "down". There are so many teams that are better now and every conf, along with smaller schools have good teams. No team is dominant this year, as witnessed by the fluctuations in nat’l polls. No team can be taken for granted. BTN will likely get 6 bids and will possibly do better than prev underperformances. BTN has done terribly even when it was considered "up". You never know.
 

I don’t think the BTN is “down”. There is more parity, and by that thinking, NCAA basketball is "down". There are so many teams that are better now and every conf, along with smaller schools have good teams. No team is dominant this year, as witnessed by the fluctuations in nat’l polls. No team can be taken for granted. BTN will likely get 6 bids and will possibly do better than prev underperformances. BTN has done terribly even when it was considered "up". You never know.

The Big Ten Network is getting teams in the tournament? I knew Hummel had an 8th season in him
 

We won’t know if the BIG is down until the tourney is over. Maybe it is and maybe not.Some here say the Gophers have an easy BIG schedule as the reason for their improved record. That is a cop out. BJ has zero control over the BIG slate and has the boys lace them up for each opponent, It could be that the bottom half of the BIG is stronger than in the past. I have no idea if that holds any water but…..

How some here can question that the Gophers have improved is nothing short of denial of the obvious. And if the core stays intact we will see a competitive team next season.
 

I think you have hit on the primary issue for me as it relates to this year. We have exceeded expectations in large part because they had been lowered so far in the previous two years.

But take Ben Johnson out of my comments and speaking more generally.....

At Minnesota many posters have conditioned themselves to believe a rebuild must take four years or beyond before we can reasonably expect to ever be in the conversation for an NCAA berth. We need the first class to be juniors/seniors and only then if they stay healthy, etc. etc.

In the meantime we see similar programs like Iowa State in line for a top four seed in the same amount of time. Maybe that's an outlier. What about Penn State? They are now on their second coach because the first coach was poached and now the second guy in year one has the same number of conference wins as we do at Minnesota in year three. These aren't basketball powerhouses.

Changing coaches all the time is not the answer. But at some point it does get frustrating always kicking the can down the street and watching other programs with similar resumes/histories have better results.
There's no question as to the formula for winning a coach of the year award: absolutely suck one year and then be average or slightly above the following year. That's how Molitor got his.
 









Tonight was …a disaster. Penn state was almost a disaster. 3 of the last 4 have been, disasters… not a way to finish the season. Barely out of weakling Wednesday in year 3…just saying
Hey now. Bruce Weber just declared that Ben is still a candidate for B1G coach of the year. Sure thing, Bruce. Coaches often win COY for finishing 10th.
 

5 pages back or so...there was talk about a team's energy. Like it wasn't a real thing.
If you coach 30 some high school basketball games in a season...I promise you'll have more than one night where you want to cry as a coach....wondering how in the world your team could play like that. Just lay an egg...come out flat...play with no energy...after you laid out all the trap doors they could fall into....they just think they can win without listening. Especially if you beat the team the first time. There's no logic to it.
But just like shooting...it's contagious...just like the flu...it's contagious...your team comes out flat and some nights something happens to change the mood and you recover....other nights it's painfully obvious they ain't gonna wake up. It's real and it's unexplainable.
Happens to every coach every where.
 

5 pages back or so...there was talk about a team's energy. Like it wasn't a real thing.
If you coach 30 some high school basketball games in a season...I promise you'll have more than one night where you want to cry as a coach....wondering how in the world your team could play like that. Just lay an egg...come out flat...play with no energy...after you laid out all the trap doors they could fall into....they just think they can win without listening. Especially if you beat the team the first time. There's no logic to it.
But just like shooting...it's contagious...just like the flu...it's contagious...your team comes out flat and some nights something happens to change the mood and you recover....other nights it's painfully obvious they ain't gonna wake up. It's real and it's unexplainable.
Happens to every coach every where.
Well said. Hawkins, Garcia and Christie played like hot garbage for most of the game and this team needs those 3 to play well in order to be successful most nights. Really disappointing way to close out the home season.
 







In my head, as an irrational fan, every year we don't make the tournament is a down year.

That said, if you plotted the season out on a graph with all the seasons of the last three coaches, this is probably better than over 1/2 of them.

So I kind of think you're both right.
This is what accepting mediocrity looks like.

Expect more. Expect better.
 






5 pages back or so...there was talk about a team's energy. Like it wasn't a real thing.
If you coach 30 some high school basketball games in a season...I promise you'll have more than one night where you want to cry as a coach....wondering how in the world your team could play like that. Just lay an egg...come out flat...play with no energy...after you laid out all the trap doors they could fall into....they just think they can win without listening. Especially if you beat the team the first time. There's no logic to it.
But just like shooting...it's contagious...just like the flu...it's contagious...your team comes out flat and some nights something happens to change the mood and you recover....other nights it's painfully obvious they ain't gonna wake up. It's real and it's unexplainable.
Happens to every coach every where.
This! There is no explains it, and as a rule no fixing it. Plus, no offense game plan survives missing 15 consecutive 3’s. Shooting is like golf, or hitting a baseball. It comes and goes for no specific reason. It just does. Not sure how many 3”’s Mitchell took, but I think 3 of them were in and out. Then the one he made was in and in. And on the loss of Payne in the second half didn’t help. I doubt he was healthy all night, he wasn’t as explosive on the jump and at times appeared passive. This team is not the same without him at full bore.
 



CBJ seems unable to motivate his players when they're missing shots and don't have the crowd feeding them energy. Not sure he can change his personality to fix this.
At this point there's really no reason to think this isn't all going right along with CBJ's plan and when it's all said and done he'll be the most successful coach in Gopher history. I doubt he'll ever have another losing season.
:unsure:
 




Just a terrible way to end the season from a decision making perspective.
 




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