One of the other threads discusses what are we fans looking for from this team that would indicate progress. Mostly seems to be stats/number of wins-driven, which is fair. What I’m looking for is far more subtle and difficult to measure.
My feeling is that, before the Gophers can make any kind of jump, they first must understand effort and working as a team. Obviously, both take some time and it’s not always an even climb. Most coaches will tell you that freshmen can take up to a year to actually understand how hard you have to play at all times, just to be competative. It’s one of the harder concepts for a freshman to actually be able to incorporate. The old idea that “what you thought was 100% in high school, is about 80% of what we’re asking from you here”. Have had many 2nd-3rd year college players mention how much harder they had to work now, not to mention the stuff they could get away with in HS, that was worthless at college level. Meshing as a team and getting on the same page can also be a challenge when you have a lot of new players.
Although I only got to see the first half, I finally started to see those two things from the Gophers, at least on the defensive side. Much better sustained effort all the way through to the rebound. I felt the defense worked as a unit at a much higher level for a longer time than I’ve seen this season. In my mind, that’s the step the team needed to take before anything else. There are still issues and a very long ways to go. Now, Ben needs to impress on his club that the effort and defensive teamwork that I saw for most of the first half last night is the floor; the minimum of what needs to be done to compete. IMO, nothing can get much better until the team embraces and improves on that level of effort. Obviously, there are a lot of other issues on both sides of the ball that pretty much everybody has already addressed on this thread.
Like I said, it’s an uneven climb and we’re likely to see some big bumps, but at least now Ben can point at that as an example of the effort needed. “Now lets, at the very least, maintain that level of effort and start concentrating on execution.”. Getting back to the first line of this post, that’s the intangible I was and will continue to be looking for from this club.
