Happy Tuesday Morning to you Cougar fans!
LucasCoug here, fully relaxed after a nice, long, three day weekend. In the olden days (2006-2008), I would currently be recovering from an epic three day bender with my post-college roommates in the six man house we shared in Fremont. My how times have changed. This weekend, I went bowling, did a Meet the Fockers style dinner with DaniBuff’s family as her mom met the family ages ago but her dad just met my parents, played 18 with my buddy Lipper, and then I went fishing yesterday.
Read on to see how I long for the olden days of Cougar basketball though.
Where do I begin with the mess this season has become?
WARNING: If you do not like frustrated rants, the next few paragraphs are not for you. Although, I believe this to be a fair and educated rant.
Just like last season, this team is failing mightily down the stretch. After another 10-2 out-of-conference start this team looks completely lost with four or so games remaining.
I will defend a coach and team to hell and back when the talent is not quite where it should be to compete in the Pac 10. The only point of the Paul Wulff era in which I was calling for the staff’s head was when I witnessed in-person the debacle this season in Tempe. But after that loss, the Cougars played well down the stretch when they could have and should have collapsed and cost Wulff his job. That to me clearly shows where a coach has the respect of his players.
Ken Bone did not inherit a bare cupboard when he took over for Tony Bennett in 2009. He had all-conference players in Klay Thompson and DeAngelo Casto. Bone went out and out-recruited Memphis and UCLA for the services of PG Reggie Moore. This off-season he added sharp-shooter Faisal Aden, in attempts to take some of the scoring load off Klay. This is a nucleus that many coaches would absolutely kill to have. If Herb Sendak, Mike Montgomery or Ben Howland had this kind of talent, I guarantee we would not be 7-8 right now.
Pessimists will tell you that Dick Bennett’s program took three tough seasons to implement before we saw results in the Win Column. To me, that is just BS. Every kid on our team comes from a high school or AAU program that ran an up-tempo offense, because quite frankly, who runs Dick Bennett’s system at that level? When kids came to play for Dick/Tony, they had to learn Bennett Ball because their entire lives up to that point was spent running the same offense Coach Bone has implemented.
While I am not a basketball nerd like some of you, I do know “good basketball” when I see it. It doesn’t take fancy statistics to know clanking Free Throws and not handling the rock will cost you the victory on any given night. Some things, such as talent and off-the-court issues, are beyond a coach’s control. Coach Bone, if he isn’t already, needs to take a page out of the Bennett’s book, and preach the fundamentals of the game. Until he does, the losses will continue to pile up.
After knocking off the Huskies at the end of January, Klay and Reggie talked of running the table in the second half of the conference slate. The worst part is, we as loyal Cougar fans all believed Klay and Reggie when they said that. This team’s wins over Gonzaga, Baylor, and UW allowed us to believe they have it in them. Teams that have our kind of talent should never fall behind by 17+ points in a game to Oregon, Stanford, Butler, Arizona or Arizona State.
In a season, where the Pac 10 is viewed as poorly as it is, the excuses are running out. While I am not calling for Coach Bone’s head, there is a clear malfunction within this team. Two words sum up a season that began with such high hopes, “inconsistent” and “underachievement.”
This team reminds me of the shiny sports car Peter Griffin buys in an episode of Family Guy, only to lift the hood and to find a picture of the car’s engine where the real engine should be. Is this team truly just a shiny looking exterior with no engine? Just like Peter Griffin felt like an idiot for being duped by the car salesmen, we have a disgusting feeling in the pits of our stomach for believing what we saw/heard from this team!
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