Hey fellow Rambler fans!
I’m posting this after the flohoops off the court disaster and on the court disaster that was today. I’m just looking to hear your thoughts on the expected level of play for the Ramblers program day in/day out...year in / year out?
Is it unreasonable to want a national relevance?
Don’t you think PM wants that too...
Today’s game, with 10 min and zero field goals is tough for me. Don’t get me wrong, this season will be all about the conference, but with Cam drawing double and triple teams, the shooting should be so much better. Don’t you think the open three is becoming more routine? USF47%. I know our kids can make that shot, and wonder why they shoot it so tentatively. One more thought, could we ever have a lineup with two bigs? ESP. Welsh as PF. Even decide to do offensive rebounding for put backs?
That’s it, bad day for Ramblerguy on and off the court... let’s go from here and just get better!
Hey bartender, one more please....

We’re an extremely young team trying to figure out lineups and roles, and that has been complicated by missing pieces just now being slowly worked back into the mix. I expected struggles early, with ups and downs. We’ve had exactly that. While the downs (like the second half today) have been tough to stomach, the ups have looked pretty good. I expect a much better team by conference season, and I fully expect us to compete in the Valley.

Expecting national relevance is still on the table with the regime we have. It cannot be ignored that we lost 2 conference players of the year, and we brought in 7 new guys to start this season.

To be relevant you have to consistently make the tournament. In the league we are in, that is attainable if we are clicking in February. The W’s and L’s themselves right now mean very little.

If you look around our league, despite our starting struggles, there’s still no reason to believe we can’t go out and win this league three years in a row. On top of that, no matter what we do this year, next year is all addition and virtually no subtraction. It doesn’t feel like it right now, but the arrow is actually pointing up. We aren’t regressing - we are building, and as long as the players buy into that mantra we are going to have success.

I’m still excited to see this team grow. We have a shot to go 3 for 3 in the Valley. Everyone needs to keep their chin up, and this team needs to keep grinding.

I love where we are as a program.

As a team this year we clearly have some issues. It's frustrating to see the same things repeat from time to time. We seem to get thrown off our game pretty easily by teams that play us aggressively. Hopefully we grow out of that.

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MBB Scholarship Chart

I expect a stable high floor to this program. Given the money we're spending now and the notoriety we have, I expect to be decent and not embarrassing even in our "down" or rebuilding years. And by "down" I mean a year where we might finish below .500 because we have transfers, key injuries, too much youth, or some kind of catastrophe.

I don't think I would consider this year to be a "down" year, but more of a "breather" year... I expected us to win 70% of our weakish non-con schedule and 50% or more of our league record for something like 18-11 heading into Arch Madness. That's what I expected from this season-- slightly below what I'd expect on average.

And before I'm accused of somehow expecting too much, remember we have the highest paid coach in the league, certainly the best student section in the league, probably the best home court atmosphere (especially from a student-athlete perspective) in the league, a brand new practice facility, the highest men's basketball budget in the league, and three players with significant Final Four playing experience.

What I've seen in several games this year is below what I would consider an acceptable floor of performance under any circumstances, let alone what I'd expect in a slightly below average year. Six games into the regular season we're averaging 30% from three point territory and opponents are shooting 38.6% on threes, both around the worst 10% rankings of any team in Division I. We are averaging 15 turnovers per game, which is unsustainable for a team that plays at our pace and needs to maximize possessions.

The home loss to Coppin State not only caused a lot of local media people to decide until further notice that we were a crazy flash-in-the-pan in 2018 and we're not really a serious men's college basketball program, a lot of OUR OWN FANS made that determination after that game. Did you notice the drop off in attendance? When St. Joes lost to Missouri State by two the other day (after losing to Florida by eight a day earlier), I saw someone say St. Joes was "terrible"-- even though they beat UConn and Bradley-- BECAUSE Loyola had beaten them by 17. That's what one stupid game can mean to a team's reputation for the year. And there's no excuse for losing to Coppin State at home, whether we're having a below average year, or a really bad year or a catastrophic year or a four horsemen of the apocalypse year.

We were picked to finish 5th in the conference...

We got our asses beat 87-53 to Boise State -- a team that didn't make the tournament and lost in the first round of the NIT...

We got our asses beat by UW-Milwaukee 73 to 56.... a team who finished the season with a losing record and 5th place in the Horizon...

We lost 59–64 to Missouri State, who finished was 7-11 IN CONFERENCE (one more win than last place Valpo).....

We lost AT HOME to Indiana State, 57–61 - a team who finished 6th in the conference....


But we still won the conference, won Arch Madness, went to the tournament and reached the Final Four.



Trust the process. Watch Porter work with these guys.... Look for improvement. It's a long season.

This.

I usually agree with Toledo on almost everything, to the point that I'm sometimes embarrassed by how much I agree on each and every particular point. But I don't think comparisons to 2017-18 are valid at all with this team.

For one thing, we lost the person who designed our defensive scheme and offensive responses to opposing defense. He also did scouting reports for upcoming games. He was fantastic at it, and he knew almost all the major opposing players in the league because of his connections. That's a huge loss. Massive.

Second, I really don't sense the culture of resolve that I think this team needs. Aside from Krutwig and Wojcik, I don't see the kind of defensive intensity that I think needs to be a core part of this program. Maybe Lucas Williamson does it, but he is so natural as a defender never seems to be working at it-- probably his defensive focus has hurt his offense. The rest of the defense appears to be opportunistic rather than a designed help defense with extreme pressure.

Third, each year that passes from our last success watches our name and influence dissipate like a radioactive half-life. The competition isn't remaining static-- DePaul is coming on with some big recruiting gets, and Illinois is making improvements. If we appear to be fading, Northwestern could move in on some of the better students we're looking at.

I'm not panicking, but I've seen this kind of slow decay into irrelevance before. And it's been a decay from national relevance to local irrelevance.

I think we need to let the Feelings of the Final Four go. That was a magical season with players that just worked well together. That season had a couple bumps in the road, but that was a roster of players that knew how to play with each other. They didn’t have to think where to go, they just knew where to go. This collection of players may get there this year, more likely next year, but it’s unfair to compare any future Rambler team to the magical run of San Antonio. I will also make a bold prediction. Jalon Pipkins will be a deciding factor of how far we go in March. Dude is just too athletic to not make a difference.

Not in November of ’17 they didn’t. That team at the beginning of the year struggled. We were coming off a disappointing finish to the Milton Doyle years, and didn’t look all that great at the start. It wasn’t until the UIC game, a month into the season, they really showed any sign of what it would end up being. For God sake we were losing in the second half to a bad UMKC team at the beginning of the year, and looked pretty lost at times the entire first month. I’d love to go back and see what some of us were saying that November. Especially halftime of the UMKC game, and a few weeks later at Boise.

Look, nobody is realistically thinking this is a Final Four type team. Or even an at large type team with our youth and schedule. The point is this is a young team, with a lot of talent, learning to play the D1 game. It’s not going to happen overnight, but these kids absolutely have the potential to be right there in March. Absolutely nobody in the MVC has shown themselves to be a team I look at and say “we can’t beat them”. As the great 20th Century philosopher Axl Rose once said, all we need is just a little patience.