GameForAnyFuss

Three possible reasons why you do it now:
1. So players don’t have a visceral reaction and hit the portal before you have a chance to show them the benefits of staying.
2. You want to lock up a good candidate before he’s in greater demand once the firings begin at season’s end.
3. You have someone in mind already but you’re afraid he’ll cool off…[Read more]

I’m pretty ambivalent about this news. Craig just did nothing for me. Didn’t love him, didn’t hate him.

All that matters now is:
1. Who do we get?
2. Will some booster step up and give us some damn NIL?
3. Will any of this make a difference, or will we still remain the same 40th-percentile team we’ve been for the last 6 coaches?

There’s no scenario in my mind where I can even contemplate either Gonzaga or SMC having the ability to outbid Utah.

I guarantee you that Gonzaga is deploying more NIL money in men’s basketball than Utah is. John Stockton’s NIL contribution alone is going to be more money than Utah’s total spend.

If only endowment money went to basketball…

Remember, Deivon would still be at Utah if we just injected average money into the program. What would having Deivon this year make our sorry-ass guard situation look like?

1. They play in a garbage conference.
2. They have more money than you think.

It’s a chicken and egg problem. We can’t get boosters to step up if we don’t have a better coach, but we can’t get a better coach if boosters don’t step up.

The evidence suggests we aren’t going to luck into a great coach who can turn around the program with subpar resources. We’ve had a half dozen chances to do that since Majerus without…[Read more]

It’s folly to think that we’re one coach away from greatness. Modern college basketball is about having financial resources and Utah doesn’t have them. Or more accurately, Utah has them but chooses not to deploy them this way.

Smith isn’t the problem. We’ve gone through a half dozen coaches and each one of them had basically the same level of success. That suggests the problem lies elsewhere.

We’re the Raiders of college basketball. We can go through every coach in the sport and we’re not going to get appreciably different results until we fix the actual root cause of…[Read more]

My point exactly.

Reminds me of some coach K teams picked low and end up middle of PAC12 and all one could say was, “well, I guess they exceeded expectations but still were mediocre.”

Hmmm…almost makes one think there’s something going with the program besides coaching, considering that almost every coach we’ve had since Rick has done basically this exact same thing.

Keller is flat out awful and should be getting zero minutes. I liked Lohner coming off the bench to spell Lovering. He’s not tall enough to guard a true center (like that corn-fed mule Kansas had) but he’s got heft and knows how to throw it around. That’s good enough for a backup. Mass kicks ass, after all.

I’m well known to be a basketball-first fan and I don’t care for football as a sport quite as much. But I would still take the football wins over the hoops natty. I understand that football runs the show, and without that football success, we’d still be in the MWC today.

As a basketball fan, being in the MWC means that our absolute ceiling would…[Read more]

I think today I’m going to avoid my usual criticizing and just enjoy the win. There are obviously areas where we can still improve, but there are no perfectly executing teams in college BB. We just beat the #17 team in the country! And it was a fun game – very entertaining. Kudos to the Kansas fans – they travel well. And they’re really into their…[Read more]

Haha…oops. I meant 13th.

My wife and I celebrate Valentine’s Day on the 14th. Food is cheap and the restaurants are empty.

It’s just a random day, so we created our own random day.

Off campus arenas are not ideal in most cases, but I’m not sure if that’s true in our case. The U is poorly located with respect to how our major roadways are laid out in the valley. Did you ever notice that our belt route is only 3/4 of a circle, and the missing 1/4 is right where the U is? It would be a different story if the belt route actually…[Read more]

This is probably more of a function of having a whole bunch of stiffs on the team as anything else. There’s not a single guy on the team whose play screams “I have to be out there if we’re going to be successful.” That means every minute is up for grabs for any player.

This, of course, goes back to our dismal recruiting. And that, of course, goes…[Read more]

He was mouthing off after a no-call. Too bad – he was playing really well until then. The tech was his 2nd personal so he had to sit the rest of the half. Craig pulled him right away and gave him a long talking-to. Ezra didn’t seem to be in the right headspace the entire rest of the game.

Ezra is a fun but frustrating player to watch. He’ll look…[Read more]

We won with 19 turnovers because we shot well. Utah made a conscious effort to get looks for Gabe (lots of high screens, etc.) and it paid off. He found his shooting touch, especially as the game wore on, and got to the rim and drew fouls. Unlike the rest of the team, Gabe is nails from the line. Plus Keanu and Ezra (until he got into foul…[Read more]