Fire Whalen!

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So who would do better given the same circumstances?
 

SpaceJunkie said:
Any coach given a Top-25 team should be able to at least randomly win one or two games against decent teams a year; only terrible head coaches can take Top-25 teams and not even make the NCAA Tournament. Whalen also has going winless against Illinois (responsible for half of their Big Ten wins in the past two years), zero NCAA Tournament appearances, zero WNIT championships, and the biggest blowout loss in program history on her resume.
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> ... only terrible head coaches can take Top-25 teams and not even make the NCAA Tournament

OK, @SpaceJunkie, I totally refuted your claim that Whalen inherited at Top-25 Team in a post in the thread B1G Game 18: Gophers Host Maryland (3-1-20) - see ...


The current team has (and had) some pretty good talents, including pre-season nominees for the 2020 player-of-the-year at PF (Taiye Bello) and at SG (Destiny Pitts), and two freshmen who were each named Freshman Player of the Week twice. But your continual assertion that Whalen has a team that is inherently a Top-25 team, is about as ridiculous as asserting that Pitino has a Top-25 men's team, so why the heck are they in 12th place in the Big Ten?

Anyway, let's put that aside, and look at your other claims, some of which may have merit.

> ... Whalen also has going winless against Illinois (on her resume) ...

The loss to Illinois in her first season was some kind of fluke. We should have won that, and nobody has any good explanation why we lost. But no evidence that Whalen directly caused the loss. On the other hand, I can cite at least a couple instances of a Stollings game in which a horribly bad Stollings decision directly converted an otherwise Win into a Loss.

The loss (by 3 points) to Illinois this year was directly attributable to the Pitts fiasco. The Bellos did not travel with the team - in protest to what they felt was excessive and unfair punishment administered to Destiny Pitts by the Athletic Department. This was a very brave (and I believe very moral) decision by the Bellos (so please don't blame the loss on them). Emotions ran high on the team, and we credit the full team for regrouping and going forward with the season.

If you want to credit Whalen for her share in that fiasco, that's your prerogative. Lot's of people have lots of different opinions on that one. My own opinion is that Destiny served as the spark, Lindsay served as the fuse, but the Athletic Department's horrific disciplinary procedures served as the keg of dynamite, and the Bellos were collateral damage. But if you want to assign Whalen full responsibility for the Illinois loss, then you'd better be ready to assign her 100% of the responsibility for the Pitts fiasco - and I don't think there's justification for that line of thinking.

> ... zero NCAA Tournament appearances (on her resume) ...

Whalen had two NCAA opportunities thus far. Last year we deserved to go to the Big Dance, however what kept us at home is fully attributable to Marlene Stollings, namely that she left Whalen with a (too-late-to-change) horrible non-conf schedule of cream-puff teams that sabotaged our SoS and thus also sabotaged our RPI. RPI is mostly a measure of Strength of Schedule, and only minimally a measure of Won/Loss record, since 3/4 of the emphasis of the RPI formula is on an SoS factor of some sort (and thus RPI is really pretty useless as a measure of quality of a basketball team). The committee, being way too RPI-centric left, us out. That's the committee's bad, combined with Stollings' bad. By any just standard, we should have been in. We got screwed out of our rightful appearance at the NCAA Tournament last year. I suppose one might possibly come up with a line of thinking that puts Whalen to blame for missing out last year, but I feel strongly that we should have been in with the record we had.

This year, we know what the story is. We didn't have a healthy true Center that could complement Taiye's impressive Power Forward performance, and you can no longer compete in the Big Ten without double posts. We lost several guards (including Pitts), and although we might have been able to survive without Pitts' shooting per se, we couldn't survive without the bench depth that would have been provided by Mercedes Staples and Destiny Pitts. We were operating with 3/4 of a team, and every team in the Big Ten could exploit our lack of bench depth. Our team has played tired all season, and it often shows up in poor performance in the 4th quarter, when it really counts. As result, we had 4 losses by 3 or less points, and another 3 losses by between 4 and 10 points. If we had just a little more bench depth such that we weren't simply exhausted, we could have easily won enough of those close losses to put us in the NCAA Tournament. It is lack of sufficient player count/quality on this supposedly Top-25 team that kept us from the NCAA Tournament this year. (Or, I should say, will likely keep us from the NCAAs. If we can miraculously get by Maryland and others and win the B1G Tournament, then we're in.)

> ... zero WNIT championships (on her resume) ...

Exactly how many WNIT championships should a coach, still in her second season, have on her resume?

Only one opportunity, and last year's WNIT was won by Northwestern I believe, who you might notice is a ranked (and number 2 in the Big Ten) team this year. Perhaps they were building starting last year toward this year's successful season?

> ... and the biggest blowout loss in program history on her resume.

Hey, Whalen's playing days are over. She's not a player/coach who could sub herself in, and go save the day against the Maryand juggernaut. What you saw was just a really tired team that just wanted it to be over so they could go to the locker room and/or get their Senior recognition.

Whalen could give recommendations as to what to do, but the players were just not capable of implementing any of it on that day. Maryland exhausted them with the full-court press, and then the half-court trap. The guards largely couldn't shoot from deep over their defenders, because as a team, Maryland is almost 3 inches taller than the Gophers. The Gophers were just spent. True, the Gophers are eventually going to need a more active offense and a more robust defense, if they want to compete with a perennial league leader like Maryland. But that sounds like a training project for next year.

Besides that, Maryland has gotten better over the season, and just beat legitimate contender (and 3rd place in the B1G) Iowa by 34 points recently (and BTW, Iowa *is* a Top-25 Team), and beat bubble team Purdue by 43 points. We only lost by 12 points more than Purdue did, and Purdue plays a full team, not the stripped-down/short-bench 3/4 of a team that Whalen is limited to currently. Purdue should be more embarrassed than us.
 
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The Gophers were a Top-25 caliber team by the end of Stollings' last year, and the pollsters had the Gophers ranked in the top 25 before this season and much of the beginning of last season.

The Gophers probably would've made the NCAA Tournamnet last year if they knew how to inbound the ball, so they wouldn't blow a 7 point lead with less than a minute left in a game. Though they didn't prove they belonged in the NCAA Tournamnet by flaming out to never-better-than-mediocre Cincinnati in the WNIT.
 
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