Uh Oh...........

[Hoop Fan]

Definition of "average at best compared to what" : In the latest RPI, we are #232 out of 334 teams and we just lost to the #254 school. Further, we have a losing record in the 15th ranked conference in America - our old conference is ranked 10th...................

I guess if you want to look at it that strictly you can. Seems like a narrow way to look at it that does not begin to consider the circumstances of Dements final recruiting classes and where he left this program. By your RPI analysis, I guess you also have to conclude the new Tulsa coach is average at best as well. Which wouldnt be fair to him either given the state of the program he took over when he came from Mich State. Too early to say for either Wojcik or Tubbs. But I do expect Tubbs to turn SMU around to the post season first, I will say that.

Did you really expect this year to be much better than it is? I'm pretty sure you know enough about basketball that you didnt have post season expectations for this team. Not with so much new blood in the lineup in the post especially. We all knew this team was facing an uphill climb. RPI only proves what we already knew. We need more players, more quality and more experience all over the floor. Only 2 of our top 6 players are past the midway point of their sophomore years, plus you have Rack who as the 7th has been hurt his whole career and hardly played much basketball. People might not want not have the patience to deal with reality, but that doesnt change it. BHop is wasted because he has too much inexperience around him, but that is clearly Dements fault right now, not Tubbs.

[KnuckleStang]

Did you really expect this year to be much better than it is? I'm pretty sure you know enough about basketball that you didnt have post season expectations for this team. Not with so much new blood in the lineup in the post especially. We all knew this team was facing an uphill climb. RPI only proves what we already knew. We need more players, more quality and more experience all over the floor. Only 2 of our top 6 players are past the midway point of their sophomore years, plus you have Rack who as the 7th has been hurt his whole career and hardly played much basketball. People might not want not have the patience to deal with reality, but that doesnt change it. BHop is wasted because he has too much inexperience around him, but that is clearly Dements fault right now, not Tubbs.

This is well said. Give Tubbs a break already. With all the experts on this board saying Bamba was a "2 to 3 year project at best" without ever having seen him play, and Tubbs losing 3 starters from last year's team (2 of them 3-year starters), I'm not sure what some of you expected out of this season in basketball. I sure didn't see us at .500.

[Stallion]

Let me repeat-Bamba Fall is a 2-3 year PROJECT

[KnuckleStang]

Thank you for dropping the "at best" part.

[Hoop Fan]

Let me repeat-Bamba Fall is a 2-3 year PROJECT

Yet he is better than anything we have had at center in a long, long time. With tons of potential. Thats what I said about him from the beginning. He is certainly a project in terms of becoming dominant and/or an NBA prospect, but he is not a project in terms of upgrading this program. I guess if you were expecting a slew of 4 and 5 stars to beat down the door of that beauty known as Moody, then yea, I guess i can see why you are so down on the guy.

[SoCal_Pony]

Did you really expect this year to be much better than it is? I'm pretty sure you know enough about basketball that you didnt have post season expectations for this team. Not with so much new blood in the lineup in the post especially. We all knew this team was facing an uphill climb. RPI only proves what we already knew. We need more players, more quality and more experience all over the floor. Only 2 of our top 6 players are past the midway point of their sophomore years, plus you have Rack who as the 7th has been hurt his whole career and hardly played much basketball. People might not want not have the patience to deal with reality, but that doesnt change it.

I agree with what you are saying HFan, but I also see the other side of the argument.

2 years from now, Fall and Morris will be Juniors, while Roberts and Dez will be Seniors. Factoring in some development by each of them, I still say unless we make substantial improvement in the quality of player we sign in the future, this core group of Fall/Morris/Roberts/Dez will not win championships nor will they take us to post-season play.

That is not Tubbs-bashing…I wish him all the best.

[Hoop Fan]

I understand your concern sitting here today. Its hard to know how much guys will improve. But big guys like Morris and Fall should improve alot. Post players who play as freshman improve much more than the guards usually. Think of the HUGE differences between Poerner or Castro between their freshman and senior years. Just due to maturity, Morris and Fall should improve in a big way. Now Roberts is a concern to me, he cant seem to coax the ball into the basket again this year. Last year, I thought it was due to his wrist injury and being a freshman. Roberts has great tools if he can put it together. I agree we now need two shooters/scorers/slashers. If we dont find them, we wont win any championships. But I still think we will be better than you think two years from now.

[Vitale]

Let me repeat-Bamba Fall is a 2-3 year PROJECT

Oh my god, you know even less about basketball than you do about football. Bamba Fall already is the best center we've had in 20 years, if not more, and might well be the most promising freshman we've had at any position in that time. He's really just beginning his basketball career (he sat the bench a lot at Oak Hill and on Team Texas), but if you can't see his improvement from one game to the next, then you're not getting to Moody very often. People talk about his blocks, and rightly so, but just as big as the number of shots he alters/changes. And while he's still extremely raw on the offensive end, he's developing every time out. He has mobility and skills that are genuinely rare for a guy of his size, and once he develops some low-post moves, he'll be even more impressive. Based on his defense and rebounding alone, he's already a force. With a developed offensive game, he'll be outrageous. No, he's not there yet. But to call him a project is foolish, at best.

Nobody's saying he's Olajuwon or Ewing or any of the other recent great college centers. If anyone who's not first-team Freshman All-America is a "project," then you're right. Other than that, you couldn't be farther from the truth. He's not an All-America, but he's a damn good player who's only going to get better.

[The XtC]

[quote="Vitale"][quote="Stallion"]Let me repeat-Bamba Fall is a 2-3 year PROJECT[/quote]Oh my god, you know even less about basketball than you do about football. Bamba Fall already is the best center we've had in 20 years, if not more, .[/quote]

Going back 20 years, you narrowly miss Jon Koncak, but that would include Glenn Puddy and Jay Poerner, both of whom were more complete players than Bamba is at this point. Bamba could well surpass them all, including Koncak, before he is done here. That is down the road, though, if it happens.

Frankly, I think Bamba is probably more than a 2-3 year project. It could take him as long as 5 years before he really reaches his potential. He needs to put on at least 30 pounds, and 50 would be better. He doesnt gain weight easily, asking for more than 10-12 pounds per year is probably not going to happen. He is making steady progress on the technical aspects of his game, but there is still a long way to go, particularly on offense. He needs to catch the ball better, which comes with improved strength. I can see him gaining more confidence in his low post moves, but he needs to finish them off more consistenly, particularly when someone is leaning on him. Bamba has all the raw material to become a special player, but right now he is still developing.

Bamba is pretty much what I thought he would be at this point. He's an asset on defense, but still learning to be more than just a screen setter and rebounder on offense. He's on a learning curve. When I say he is a project, that doesnt mean he isnt already helping the team, it means that he is still a few years away from reaching the potential that he is capable of. He's a work in progress.

If you want to see an example of what I'm talking about, look at Akeem Olajuwon. No one would argue that Akeem wasnt an outstanding player in college, but he didnt reach his full potential until several years into his NBA career. Akeem didnt even play as a true freshman at UH, he was redshirted. His sophomore year he really didnt score that much, but he was a fierce shotblocker and strong rebounder, and people could see that this guy could be something special. His junior year he averaged about 14 points a game, nothing really impressive, but he was also grabbing 11 rebounds and blocking 5 shots per game. Offensively, Olajuwon wouldnt reach his peak until his 10th year in the NBA, when the Rockets won the NBA title behind his 27 points per game, more than double his college scoring average.

If anyone is wondering about the timeline here, Akeem arrived at UH in 1980. Some people refer to 1981 as his freshman season, but it was actually his 2nd year at the school. He still had a year of eligibility left when he entered the NBA draft.

I'm not saying that Bamba will mimic Olajuwon, and I'm not saying that he isnt helping our team now, but the player that he is capable of becoming is at least a few years away.

[LA_Mustang]

X, you really expected this much out of Bamba this quick? I certainly didn’t. He is having more of an impact than any SMU freshman since Sas.

Work ethic is never an issue with kids from his background, and he seems to be way ahead of the curve. I can only image where he would be with a full year of high school ball, which he didn’t get. His timing and instinct are what separates him. Let’s be honest, he is the first SMU athlete, basketball or football, to show pro potential this early. He is 7’1” with every quality NBA scouts look for......hard worker, talent, size, and timing. I see him as a Dang type player. He's not as talented at this point, but has more potential. We need to hitch our wagon to Fall and get some people around him......if we do, we might have something.

[PonyFan]

Of course he's 5 years away from reaching his full potential, XtC -- he's probably MORE than 5 years away from reaching his full potential. If he stays a full four years at SMU, he'll be in his second year in the NBA in 5 years, and there's not a player in history who reached his full potential by his second pro season.

As for your other comparisons, perhaps that's why the comparison was made for a 20-year window, although that's just me guessing on that. I'm not sure Poerner qualifies, since he clearly was a 4 playing the 5 spot (although I agree that he was a terrific player). As far as overall ability, I'd say Fall blows away Puddy. Puddy was more productive by the time he was a senior, of course, but Fall has far more raw ability, athleticism and potential. The key there, of course, is the use of the word "raw" -- at the moment, we're seeing flashes of that ability. If he can develop and maximize that ability, he might well be better than Koncak, too.

[EastStang]

A center like Fall will take some time to grow into his potential. Tubbs recruited him. But he is a player that you can build around. With Morris as a banger power forward and Fall at center, you need to add the usual mix of a solid shooting 3 position player who can drain a 7-15 footer with consistency, a point guard, and a shooting guard. I was worried when we hired Tubbs that he would be a Dallas only recruiter and he proved me wrong by sigining Fall and Morris when no top Dallas recruits were available. I was worried that is coaching during games might not be there, but he tends to make good adjustments as the games go on, they just seem to start the games badly which could be indicative of youth. Going back to the "secret one-on-one meeting" between undisclosed persons that started this thread, unless you have names it is really just total BS and this thread should have been deleted as too vague.

[FriscoPMG]

Can I please request some consistency on this board regarding the recruiting process? When BHop, Devon and Derrick Roberts play well, we are reminded that Tubbs recruited those guys as an assistant under Dement and Dement could've never landed them without Tubbs. When these guys play awful (which has been a lot recently), we are reminded that these guys are leftovers from the Dement era.

Now everyone is crediting Tubbs with landing Bamba because he has certainly exceeded everyone's expectations. If you go back and read the DMN article about Bamba, it clearly states that Lineburg recruited him. For numerous years Lineburg has been the coach doing the international recruiting (including prep schools).

So while I don't think it matters a whole lot who gets the credit or blame, I think there should be some consistency when discussing recruits and the role of the head coach vs. the assistants.

As for the original point of this thread, don't rule those meetings out as BS just yet. I certainly don't have the full details, but in talking to some of the players when they got back from Houston, it sounds like this program is about as close to rock bottom as it has been in a long, long time.

[abezontar]

worse than in Dement's last year where we got blown out regularly by the likes of Boise State, and Rice?

[EastStang]

Which players, where's the meeting, who's meeting with whom? This kind of vague stuff when there are potential recruits out there who might read this crud really bothers me. Either be specific, or SHUT UP!!! Otherwise, I and others on this board will assume that you go to TCU and want to stir the pot. Yes, this is utter BS. Given that we have been making second half comebacks in virtually every game, this team hasn't quit on the coach and he hasn't quit on them. Tubbs' job is safe, and no one is calling for his head who matters. And you don't matter.