Eye opening question

[RGV Pony]

Okay, so we've said that football will turn around because we improved our model, which will mean that hopefully we wind up with some better players.

As for basketball, we all thought when we recruited Dia, McCoy, Williams, Otis that we'd gotten some decent talent in here. Same for last year when we had the guy from T-Mac's prep school that we ran off (Bennie). We took a guy who averaged what, 20+ ppg at an upper level 5A school and turned him into a gunshy, non-shooting, pointwing (I guess that's what you call it..he gets the ball on the wing and looks to dish...talking about Harp).

Yes, I know these guys are young. But you know what? There are underclassmen playing all over the country and having an impact. Let's assume for a second that the "we're the youngest/one of the youngest teams in the country" theory doesn't fly.

Why do we still suck? Will football continue to suck despite the improvement to the model, as basketball has continued to suck despite better recruits?

[ponyboy]

Could it be because coaching matters?

[LA_Mustang]

I still can not deal with Doherty's substitution pattern.....it is maddening. I wish someone would ask him about it....I would be very interested to hear his response

[jtstang]

Could it be because coaching matters?

Are you saying our coach sucks? Not sure I disagree with that assessment after 3 years of nothing.

[RGV Pony]

As for the coaching matters question, remember we weren't allowed to use that argument in football.

[Sam I Am]

I am so disillusioned by our inabiliy to produce winning teams in BB and FB that I have begun to lose my life long interest in SMU sports since the days of Doak Walker. I don't even check the chat board much any more. I know that if this has happened to me then others in the hard corps must be falling by the way too. I don't want it to end this way, but we may finally have become irrelevant. Even Rice goes to a bowl game these days. My only consolation is that the Dallas Cowboys are worse off because they lack character and SMU only lacks athletes.

[NastyStang]

It's almost a show in itself watching Doh substitute these guys so much. There is no logic - Nyakundi starts the second half and is pulled 45 seconds later at a dead ball. Wasn't a foul issue and if it's a mistake, coach them at practice! The core guys need the minutes to get in a flow as an individual and a team.

I'm also still amazed at the fascination with Harp. Those minutes need to go to Faye and Malone. Towards the end of the 1st half some guy sitting behind me asked if Faye was on my roster. I just laughed...

[George S. Patton]

It's almost a show in itself watching Doh substitute these guys so much. There is no logic - Nyakundi starts the second half and is pulled 45 seconds later at a dead ball. Wasn't a foul issue and if it's a mistake, coach them at practice! The core guys need the minutes to get in a flow as an individual and a team.

I'm also still amazed at the fascination with Harp. Those minutes need to go to Faye and Malone. Towards the end of the 1st half some guy sitting behind me asked if Faye was on my roster. I just laughed...

If your coach cannot determine who can help and who cannot after working with them since mid-October and 10 games. then either one of two things has happened:

1. You recruited poorly
2. You don't understand your personnel and likely won't

Thus, you have ding-dong losses to Arkansas-Pine Bluff and UT-San Antonio. But then again SMU is doing an excellent job of becoming no different than those types of programs.

Maybe we need to start looking at scheduling some guarantee games where teams have us come visit and cut us a big check for the right to kick our [deleted]. That's basically what we are now.

[Pony_Fan]

We were all complaining about this schedule but it's where we are right now. How sad. We should be crushing these teams.

I agree, we might as well go play Uconn, Gtown, Gonzaga, Duke, and top 10 schools to collect our checks.

[DiamondM]

I still can not deal with Doherty's substitution pattern.....it is maddening. I wish someone would ask him about it....I would be very interested to hear his response

I did ask him about it on his radio show a couple of weeks ago. He said (1) he has a pre-set plan to get certain players in the game at the first whistle -- mainly to get them minutes and see what he's got and what combinations work; (2) when he pulls kids out of the game, it is not just for a mistake -- mistakes from hard effort are fine. He gave a specific example from one of the early games in which Otis made a couple of turnovers, but they were as a result of hustle, so he left him in. He said the 2 things that result in getting pulled are laziness and one other thing I can't remember for sure now -- maybe attitude? I'll see if my husband remembers. But I remember that it made sense when he said it.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with all the uproar about substitutions, but I have 2 observations. First, other than McCoy and Williams, we have a bunch of guys with not a whole lot difference in talent/production (or so it would seem) from 3-10, and a number of guys who could play multiple positions. Nonconference is the time to experiment -- see who can come through in real games (apparently, no one at this point), see who works best with whom. I would have expected to win more during this phase, but playing a deep bench in nonconference when there is not much difference between #3 or #4 and #9 or #10 is pretty normal. Second, it's funny to me that everyone says we should only go 7 or 8 deep. I don't think there is anything fundamentally problematic with a 9 or, in certain circumstances, even a 10 man rotation. One of the complaints I repeatedly hear from Duke fans on their message boards is that Coach K has too SHORT of a bench, such that by the end of the year, the 7 or maybe 8 players in the rotation fizzle out at the end of the year as a result of too much playing time. I think if we played Williams and McCoy 35-40 minutes every night for the season, they'd tire towards the end of conference season too. And we all know that at this point, we can't afford that.

[JasonB]

Exactly. Nonconference is tinker time. Pick which players are going to play for you the rest of the year. You will see a more consistant and shorter rotation by the UTEP game.

As for the talent, I would argue that the talent HAS indeed increased. Yes, young players accell all over the country, but teams with all young players don't. The only experience we have is Fall, who doesn't have a ton of bball experience so he isn't useful in that regard.

This is a very, very young team. We should be happy that we now have players who can compete athleticially with other teams; we haven't seen that in a long time. The wins will come, but it won't be until the second half of conference play and then we will be a winning team next year.

We have a couple of shooters (McCoy, Nyakundi), some hieght, and good guards. We ARE going to be able to put this thing together, it just takes a little time for players to mature.

I don't think people around here realize how low the talent level was when Jones and Doh were brought in. Instead of comparing these things to other programs you need to look at Turner GIll at Buffallo and think 2-10, 5-7, 8-5. They were at a god awful talent level just like we were. It takes some time, even with really good coaching.

[FriscoPMG]

Exactly. Nonconference is tinker time. Pick which players are going to play for you the rest of the year. You will see a more consistant and shorter rotation by the UTEP game.

You tinker when you're up by 20 points late in the 2nd half against lowly programs like Ark-PB and UTSA. It's not tinkering -- it's poor coaching and desperation -- when you're just trying to remain competitive and beat these teams. No coach in the history of sports would put "tinkering" as his top priority over beating these supposed weak programs and in the back of his head think, "we'll be fine once my rotation is set because only conference games matter."

It's yet another flimsy excuse since we're SMU and we're not supposed to lose to programs like this. Kind of like the Cowboys had a free ride to the Super Bowl only to find out that having the wrong GM, the wrong coach, misfitting players and the wrong priorities in place is just a bad formula.

[FriscoPMG]

Maybe we need to start looking at scheduling some guarantee games where teams have us come visit and cut us a big check for the right to kick our [deleted]. That's basically what we are now.

If this program was being run properly, then we'd absolutely be getting guarantee games and playing some bigger schools. Then at least this "rebuilding process" would include making some money since obviously we're not making any money from ticket sales at home games. Plus the players might actually get up for these games. Yes, you'd probably lose big in them, but I think these young players grow up a lot faster by losing to legit teams instead of suffering embarrassing loss after loss to bottom feeders.

I wonder if this administration/coaching staff didn't want to get embarrassed by suffering big losses to top 25 programs. Instead we're suffering even worse losses to joke programs.

I know at the end of the Dement era, that staff was forced to schedule a certain amount (monetarily) in guarantee games. And while that final season included a blow out by OK State, it also resulted in a win at Purdue and over Tech (home & home, not guarantee). So as bad as that season turned out once the players quit, we still had wins over Texas Tech and Purdue...oh, how far we've fallen...

[RGV Pony]

I wonder if this administration/coaching staff didn't want to get embarrassed by suffering big losses to top 25 programs. Instead we're suffering even worse losses to joke programs.

hasn't seemed to bother the adminstration on the football side. Of course, that's only Tech.

[SoCal_Pony]

As for the coaching matters question, remember we weren't allowed to use that argument in football.

Coaching doesn't matter when you recruit players whose only other offers are from SFA and Sam Houston.

Coaching matters when your players have offers from OU, Virginia and Kentucky.

As for me...I think the verdict is still out on Orsini.

a) looks like he made a bad hire in the only sport we were relevant in, Men's Soccer.

b) Doh hire not looking as good now, although he does deserve more time.

c) JJ hire was solid, but I personally would have spent JJ-type $$$ on a BB hire over FB, as BB is the one meaningful sport we can truly become perennial Top 25.

And for the record, I would 10* rather see SMU in the NIT or better yet NCAA’s than playing a meaningless game tonight against Western Michigan in front of 15,000 fans, 6,000 of whom will leave at half-time.