NavyHog: [quote]
I stake my reputation as a guy who has watched college BB for 40 years that next year is a NCAA Top 6 seed or better year.
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DudleyD:
[quote]Having actually seen these guys play, I will concur with Navy.
Barford is likely going to be the best player on the team next season and that includes Moses.
Never seen a star, an NBA guy being so undervalued as him. I guess it is simply because he is junior college kid.
Macon will likely match Bell’s numbers or at least be close.
Cook - absolutely he will be better than what they have at PF this season. I mean that bar is absolutely low.
Thomas - like the little what I have seen in practice.
Adrio Bailey - having a fantastic high school season - at 6-8, 205 and athletic, he will fit well
And I expect them to sign 2 more - a big and a Wing type
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I’m sure you mean this as a Gotcha post, but were Navy or DD far off?
We are probably gonna be a 7 or 8 seed.
Barford has turned into a force down the stretch and Macon has been most of the year.
In conference games only both are in the top 20 in the SEC in scoring, Barford is 7th in FG % (salty for a guard) and Macon is 6th in FT% and 3rd in 3pt %.
They’ve both ended up being very impactful, talented players who overcame growing pains expected of JUCO guys to be very important parts of a team that has a very good chance of winning 25 games.
I think they have, on the whole, met reasonable expectations.
Which is what I was going for. I was stunned to see so many post that they felt that this team OVERachieved. I remembered from a year ago that people had very high expectations for this team.
It was a successful regular season. We are nationally relevant and the future appears to be bright, however IMO, in SEC play, we slightly underachieved to met expectations. It seems that most felt we overachieved. I was just trying to gauge where that was coming from.
Not meant to be a GOTCHA post, but I do think a level of accountability is a good thing. Many people post a lot of things as a matter of fact. Perhaps even making proclamations that they are “done with the board” after a loss, only to come back a few weeks later. Calling folks out on it is a good thing. Own it. I have certainly posted things that turn out to be completely inaccurate. I was wrong.
DudleyD:
[quote]Having actually seen these guys play, I will concur with Navy.
Barford is likely going to be the best player on the team next season and that includes Moses.
Never seen a star, an NBA guy being so undervalued as him. I guess it is simply because he is junior college kid.
Macon will likely match Bell’s numbers or at least be close.
Cook - absolutely he will be better than what they have at PF this season. I mean that bar is absolutely low.
Thomas - like the little what I have seen in practice.
Adrio Bailey - having a fantastic high school season - at 6-8, 205 and athletic, he will fit well
And I expect them to sign 2 more - a big and a Wing type
[/quote]
portarthurhog:
[quote]We are going to be a top ten team next year !!
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I can live with that, I’m generally way to optimistic :lol: :lol:
A few things that I didn’t anticipate -
I didn’t think we would miss Durham, but we do. I think he would have been an asset in slowing down quick guards. He was also good at penetrating and dishing.
I thought Thomas and Cook would be major upgrades from Keaton Miles at the 4. It’s true we are better there, but not as a dramatic upgrade as I forecast.
I thought we would be a better pressing/half-court man team with more depth. For whatever reason (lack of quickness perhaps?) we have struggled. Barford and Macon show effort and should improve over the off-season.
On the flip side the FT shooting and overall offensive efficiency has been fun to watch. There is no one guy who gets the lion share of the assists, but this team moves, cuts and shares the ball offensively. We carved up UGA yesterday.
Comments: I’m not sure you’ve provided anything to change others perceptions of this team performance at this point of this season, as you have labeled as being underachievers. The old comments you’ve dugged up only suggest an expectation we should be a better team with the new additions seven players compared to last season’s team that ran out of gas late. Our juco’s credentials were impressive 1, 2 and 5 in the junior college ranks. Based upon their numbers we knew they could score, it is the other part of the game defense, where we’ve struggled there at times. It appears JUCOs don’t push defense only offense putting the ball in the hold, and the same can be said about some high schools as well. Listen at the end of the day how do you say they underachieved when their season isn’t over, and they finished third although beginning the pre- conference season they were selected somewhere between 6-8 in teams ranking.
I’ve owned plenty. I was wrong about several things about Bielema (OL development being one) and I “owned it”.
There’s nothing for me to own about leaving the board for a few weeks. At the time, I left the board after 2 awful losses and I said it was probably a good time to do so. It was just toxic. I didn’t bail on the team or trash them.
I said that unnecessarily smart ass posters like you were doing nothing but making it a miserable place to be and I had no desire to argue for the sake of arguing. So, I stopped posting. There’s nothing to own about that.
Throughout the season, I almost always supported the team and ripped them on the few occasions they didn’t play hard and lost to teams like MO and MSU because they didn’t give effort and and that’s the one thing I find unacceptable. I stated that as a matter of fact. It was.
Throughout the year–and you can check your copy and pastes–I’ve said we would win 23-25, make the Ncaat without being on the bubble and that most people like you wouldn’t enjoy much of it. I stated it as a matter of fact. It was.
There’s plenty I’m wrong about and I own it. I try to be objective.
One thing I’m not wrong about is that for absolutely no reason, you often call people out just to be an Internet tough guy.
The program is on the uptick and you want to call other people out for missing by one seed or for players they predicted being very good taking awhile to reach that level (but they eventually did soi).
I pointed that out and now somehow owe you an apology or an admission that I am being a hypocrite or not being realistic? I left to get away from the exact same type of Gotcha, tough guy stuff from a guy like you who spent 4 pages crying about our poor defense while we were in the midst of a 5-game, season-changing winning streak or a completely random reset about how wrong others were when they were largely right (just after we essentially clinched a Ncaat bid).
I haven’t posted much since I stepped away and I certainly haven’t been on here with a bunch of “I told you so” posts since my season prediction was exactly right, down to nailing the win total.
But, now you want to make a run at me for merely pointing out that the preseason predictions from others that you are oddly mocking (considering how things are going) were pretty solid.
It makes you look like a sniveling, millennial twerp that still lives with your parents. Maybe you should own that.
I’ve begun to think we’re using “overachieve” differently. I’m not sure what you mean by it, but if you mean their record exceeds their talent level, I do not believe they overachieved. If you mean they exceeded last year’s expectations, apparently they did not overachieve in the minds of many–they did about what was expected. My personal belief is they underachieved & overachieved at various points in the season. They obviously underachieved by losing at home to MSU & MU. They underachieved by getting blown out at home by Vandy. They overachieved (in my opinion) by winning so many games at the end of the season. They are probably more talented than all those teams except Fla (& maybe SC), but still they won all those games. Even when a team is slightly more talented than each of its opponents, it beats expectations to win every game against them. That’s what they did over the past 3-4 weeks.
I don’t think any of expect to make the sweet 16 this year although we all probably think it’s possible. If they get there, we’ll probably all agree they overachieved–or at least exceed expectations. Win one NCAA game & we’ll all think they did about what we thought or hoped before the season started. Lose in the opening round & we’ll all be disappointed & go into the off-season with the same “blah” attitude we went into the football off-season with.
There were people preseason that was calling FF or bust. If we lose in the Sweet 16 or before, they’ll be back. They exceeded my expectations, I said 22 wins and the NIT, obviously they got 23 and the dance. I also like our draw in the SECT (I think we got a very good shot at making the Finals). I think most assumed 20-24 wins. I don’t think they overachieved or underachieved. I think they did what most thought. I do agree with you that we lost a few games we should have won, but they won most of the games they should have, as CMA said yesterday. They did what they were supposed to.
I think we closed strong and that saved the season. It’s that simple after Mizzery and Vandy losses. This is the first good talent we have had since Portis & Qualls, but it didn’t mesh well early plus the issues with our trapping man defense. Speaking of the new talent on this year’s team, the talent is trending towards 3 great signing classes in a row which may be the first time it has happened since the 90’s. This might be the start of a great mutli-year run of Hawgball that is relevant and pushes hard against the Kentucky and Florida hold on the conference.
I predicted 23-8, 12-6 before the year… but I also said they’d go undefeated at home haha.
Picked them 4th in the SEC in what I actually turned in for the preseason poll but came back and said I wish I’d have put them 3rd when I did a predictions piece a few weeks later. … I also wrote that I wished I’d have picked SC higher than 8th, but I only said 7th. Whoops. Missed that one.
I’ll admit I wasn’t feeling good about having picked them to go to the tourney after the Vanderbilt home loss, but they definitely turned it around.
Oh I agree there will be some who will be upset with anything short of a national championship, but most of us will be very happy with just an appearance in the Sweet 16 and not terribly disappointed with only 1 win. I don’t want to get too far ahead, but our first game won’t be a gimme. At best we’ll be playing against a 10 seed. We’re quite likely to be playing against a 7-9 seed. That means we’ll either be a slight underdog or maybe in a toss-up. No doubt we’ll be the underdog if we get to a second game.
All projections before anybody sees the roster on the court against another DI opponent are shots in the dark, no matter how insightful the observer is. If that were easy, you wouldn’t see so many first-round busts in the NBA by organizations that devote a king’s ransom of resources to evaluating players. If everybody decided that Macon was heir to Michael Jordan, it wouldn’t have meant that he or his coach underachieved once the games started. The projections by Dudley and others were remarkably accurate but erred slightly to the positive. Nonetheless, the season should be used to judge the projections, not to judge how the roster should have performed.
The computer models that look at all the metrics and experience of the roster had us generally around #50 to begin the season. We’re finishing in the top 40. So, there’s that. I don’t see a lot of evidence that we massively over or under achieved. It’s mainly in the eyes of the beholder.
Navy and DD (and you Notorious) were a lot closer than I was. I thought NIT or worse. We still could be anywhere from a 10 to a 6, but a LOT better than I thought we would be!
Wondering - why could anybody read that Scout thread that was linked above? Are you still paying for access to that board? When I hit that link, it asks me to subscribe.