I agree we’re going to struggle against more athletic teams, but let’s be real, half of that Memphis team should be working a 9 to 5 right now. We’re not gonna see another team that long, athletic, and old until March.
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He gave up about 8 points to Jones in about three minutes tonight, unfortunately.
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Tony seemed fairly philosophical about the beatdown. He sees what everyone sees and he was not sure how the team will respond from here. Thankfully there is some runway to make some changes.
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You wound up being fairly close on the Houston comp
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Sadly! Yeah, it just looked like a physical mismatch and I thought Memphis would just do what NE did defensively.
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The good news is Tony has another full week of practice to figure this shit out before we play our final nonconference game, which fingers crossed shouldn’t be a challenge. Hopefully that gives us ample opportunity to experiment a bit more and find out how to mask some of these issues we’re having.
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We have two guys who can get to the rim, one of whom with some aptitude (Elijah still getting there). We have two very good shooters. We have 2-3 very good useful athletes. And we have at least one decent connector. But we can’t seem to get it to add up to much against any good team so far (Florida was good, but doubt we are repeating Blake getting 16 FTs anytime soon)
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What i saw … 3 freshmen playing against 5th year grown ass men
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Succinct and to the point…our boys need to hit them weights some more…
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So umm…yeah…
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https://x.com/zach_carey_/status/1737306845373440006?s=46&t=Y9ZJTUudJiFOC0Ajwlmckw
https://x.com/benwieland/status/1737301932060950767?s=46&t=Y9ZJTUudJiFOC0Ajwlmckw
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Thinking on this, I think Tony has two kryptonites. 1. Small, quick teams who happen to shoot lights out in a given game (see UMBC). 2. Long, athletic teams who pressure the ball, are able to speed UVA up, and are simply more athletic (see good FSU teams under Hamilton, the Zion Duke team, this Memphis team). I won’t pretend to know how to fix that as I’m no Xs and Os expert. It seemed like Tony was able to solve the athleticism and fast pace of UNC under Roy for the most part but hasn’t for the examples I cited.
An honest question, if you were told preseason we would go 3-2 against the four P6 teams and Memphis on the OOC schedule, would you have said that would be a good outcome? I think I would say that would be a good outcome especially with all of these new faces. And yes, blowout losses in the two but no “bad” losses (knock on wood with Morgan State - have only beat UMBC and three D3 schools; and the ACC bottom dwellers when we get into conference play)
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3-2 isn’t great, but it’s solid. That plus no cupcake losses means we are solidly a tourney team, barring a disappointing ACC season.
The two blowout losses are troubling to me. But plenty o’ time
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The one thing i can’t get over is seeing a UVA player give up on a play and this happened more than once tonight. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything that obvious before and it pissed me off. That has to be straightened out now . Shit or get off the pot
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- What are we doing to instill confidence in our guys? Tony repeatedly mentioned how they were “rattled”, which is fair for a young team on the road, but how do you create a culture where guys don’t go into a shell during adversity?
- “Valuable learning experience, we’ll see what we do with it. No idea how we’ll respond.” Is this Tony challenging the guys, or even losing confidence/doubting them?
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The resume is still strong (all we could have hoped for really). The concern is that the team doesn’t look like it’s actually as good as that resume indicates. Check the alternate universes and I doubt we see 9-2 in many of them. So… kudos to the team for squeezing out every win they could possibly get so far, because we may need them.
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Man prior to COVID like 2/3s of the Memphis and Wisconsin rosters would have not even been eligble/expired out of college. fml. BYU grown men with family vibes
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At this stage, I see no reason to increase that percentage. I am hoping like heck I’m wrong, but I’d be dishonest if I said that’s too low right now. If we can figure out how to get the points we need out of IMac and Rohdes, and we find a way to firm up the middle, then I’d reconsider.
I feel like even 11-9 or so in the ACC would put us squarely on the bubble (so 50-50ish), so saying we have a 35% chance at the tourney is like saying your prediction is something like 9-11 or so, or 8-11 from here on out. Or losing to Morgan State.
Neither of those seem too likely to me, which is why I roughly agree with Torvik’s 88% or so more than your 35%. I’d probably go something like 75%. Or 1 in 4 chance that we lay an egg in the ACC.
#math
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