CBI bound, possibly NIT.
Out rebounded couldn’t stop penetration vs a bad team.
Year 8, year 8 (although I do want CMA to remain).
I agree. I’m about off the Anderson train.
Don’t worry Navy, this team is so close. Wait until next year. With another year of experience, we will make the Big Dance and maybe just maybe win a game.
Personally, I’d rather cycle through coaches every 5 years with no chance of a sweet 16.
I’m agnostic about it at this point. But the (fill in year) reasoning always puzzles me. Last year was Year 7 and we were pretty good. Same for Year 6.
But now it’s a Year 8 thing. It’s as if we expect every year to be progressively better just by virtue of the passage of time.
I don’t get that. Now, more than ever, non blue bloods ebb and flow and replace and add and subtract.
If anything, this is about what I expected with an almost entirely new roster. The Perry flip killed them. I think them starting well changed expectations and now that they’re experiencing the struggles of a remarkably young team, many of us are frustrated.
The losing in football and basketball in the same year is tiresome.
Yes, we’re a young team but we have played over 20 games and we don’t seemed to be getting any better.
Good post. Bob Huggins and Gregg Marshall are in Year 12 and are 10-14 and 12-11. Billy Kennedy and Jim Larranaga are 10-13 in Year 8. And before anyone says it, yes, I know they all have been to the Sweet 16.
All, like Arkansas, were in the NCAA Tournament last year. All have young teams this year. Good basketball programs are not immune to poor seasons, no matter the coach’s tenure.
Unlike the guys you named, we’ve never made a Sweet 16 and after this year it will be 2 NCAA tournament wins in 8 years.
I’m still pro-CMA, but it’s harder and harder to be a supporter. I want so much for it to work because I like him and all he represents, but I have serious doubts he will get us to the point of being a consistent Top 25 program.
You say we were pretty good last year, and I don’t disagree from a talent standpoint, but from a record standpoint we underachieved. We were 10-8 in the SEC and lost in the 1st round of the NCAA tournament. That was with 6 seniors and a potential 1st round pick at center. It would be one thing to have a rebuilding year every few years if the years that are suppose to big years you actually achieve something of substance. That is the problem, eight years in and we haven’t achieved anything of substance.
That’s not what we thought a week ago. I’m not making excuses. We had to find a way to split. We were curb stomping USCe (who was favored and is 7-3 and 4th in the SEC) and we just missed a chance to beat a banged up Mizzou team that is we were favored over by 1.5 but FPI had winning and is about like us and has a coach whose seat is also heating up).
We didn’t and for all intents and purposes the season is effectively over. Both were tossup games that played out that way, mostly, and we didn’t pull them out.
But, there’s a reason road wins are harder to come by in college hoops than in any other major sport. It hasn’t been that way as much this year but historically in the SEC and around the country life on the road is rough.
We may have slightly underachieved, but, if you’re saying that on the whole it wasn’t a pretty good year, then it seems to me you’re seeing what you want to see.
Yes, we had 6 seniors. Two of them were very good and played to the expected levels, mostly.
Thomas and Cook were horrible. Beard was hit or miss. Trey Thompson was a role player.
And they won 23 games and finished 4th in the SEC ahead of their projected finish.
The disappointment was that they didn’t win a game or 2 in the NCAAT, and in that respect they underachieved.
But, on the whole, they had a solid year by most any objective measure, unless you just want to minimize any positive and accentuate every struggle.
Again, I don’t care what they decide to do at this point. But, saying they underachieved in Y6 and 7 seems to just be you doing what you like to do when it comes to the program and coach—minimizing any positive and hammering the negative.
I think MA hasn’t met anyone’s expectations, but I’ve seen what this can and has looked like and I don’t want to go there.
My hope is that if they fire him they make a good hire. I have no idea if they will or not but I do know they 3 before him (Pel, Heath and Altman were awful/awful fits.
This is just a disappointing season. Plain and simple they don’t play defense and give up wide open 3’s and direct line drives to the basket. They continue to not value the ball. Heck Gabe took a 3 on a break! Pretty stupid decision just like a bunch of stupid decisions in the game. It’s a carbon copy of every game this year.
Youth. If you can’t shoot why are you on the team. If you can’t play why are they on the bench. Dump the dead weight off the bench and put a roster together.
I’m a CMA supporter but I’m tired of the hogs losing to bad horrible teams. I don’t care if the game is on the moon!
That’s the failure of the hogs this year a bench that’s short! Youth that can’t make good decisions. They better have a good year next season. CMA’s seat isn’t hot by no means. Look around the country would you rather have one of the coaches in the crosshairs of the FBI thing? I don’t. We have a good coach and he hasn’t caught a break. Pay to play has ruined recruiting.
The last 8 years have been a 100% improvement over the misery we went through after Nolan left. Thank the folks that made the decision to put CMA out and not allow him to take over! That’s where the mistake was made.
I don’t expect to win the SEC this year and I don’t expect we will it next year. I do expect to be in the top 4 of the SEC. Earning a bid in the dance with this young team was always going to be a challenge this season. And now it not likely at all!
If they can win a couple of more games and make the NIT to where they can play a few games is better than a 1 and done in the dance.
I don’t know what the answer is. At times, they are a good team. However, they throw a bad 5-8 minute stretch in most games. Sometimes, this happens at the opening tip. It can happen at any time. This has cost us at least 5 or 6 games. Sometimes, the funk comes with the first major substitution. Sometimes it comes from the starters. About all you can count on is that it will happen.
To correct this, one needs to figure out why this keeps happening. Is it a talent problem? Is it poor fundamentals? Is it a game plan or lack of one? Is it a poor substitution pattern? Or is a combination of multiple problems? Could it be time to re-evaluate the whole program?
Coach Anderson has always modeled his coaching on Nolan Richardson. The pressing, trapping, fast paced game is what Coach A wants. There are big problems when you don’t have a bench full of long, quick, strong skilled players. When Nolan had his high level teams, they were loaded with very good to great basketball players. He could go big or quick and fast. He had both shooters and scorers. And he had so much talent that he could.substitute all 5 at once. Toward the end of Nolan’s tenure when he did not have his previous level of depth or talent, holes showed in his defense. Mike has not had the talent that made Nolan’s defense so effective. As a result, the defensive breakdowns are glaring and allow our opponents to shoot a lot of uncontested shots. I think that we would be more successful if we used the pressing, trapping defense as a change of pace and used multiple man and zone defenses to fit the game situation.
I respect and totally support Coach Anderson as a good coach and a better man. That being said, I think that our program is mired in mediocrity and we need to explore some different options. If Coach A wants to tweak his program, I certainly think that he deserves that opportunity. I just want our program to be a fixture in the top 20 and be a top 10 squad on a regular basis. WPS
Or it could be basketball problem…
Literally happens to everyone at every single level. Watched Louisville a top 20 team with a great coach have his team blow a 23 point lead to Duke last night. Watched the Boston Celtics drop a 17 point lead to the Lakers the other night. My Memphis grizzlies dropped a double digit lead to San Antonio last night. And the Golden State Warriors have been known over the years to play in poor stretches then just “turn it on” in the 4th quarter and make a comeback.
It’s a game dependent on putting a ball through a hoop. Teams are going to have bad stretches where that ball isn’t going through the hoop every single game. That’s why they say it’s a game of runs, one team gets confidence up, and gets hot other team has to hold it off and hope when their run comes they do more than the other team and they are ahead in score by the end of the game. That’s how the game works, it’s not some deep seeded uncorroborated conspiracy theory like CMA doesn’t teach fundamentals or doesn’t have a game plan. I highly encourage some of you when you have some free time to watch a basketball game outside of Razorbacks.
My question is pretty simple, under Anderson do you think we’ll ever be a Final Four team? In all my Hog loving optimism and admiration for Anderson coming back to my team when he did, I would answer no and I’m very sad it has come down to that thought. No one should be the Razorback coach if we never have a chance to be a Final Four team.
No doubt this has been a disappointing season. For that matter, I’m disappointed in MA’s tenure as coach. We’ve been better than we were under any of the other coaches post-Nolan, but that’s not a very high bar. I’m not ready to replace him because I’m not convinced he can’t get us to the next level, but OTOH, we can’t go another 2-3 years sitting on the outer edges of the NCAA bubble in mid-February. If I were certain we could replace him with someone I knew could get us back to the Sutton-Richardson levels, of course I’d say replace him, but no one knows who that’d be.
I don’t pretend to know the problem. I’m suspicious of Bruce Pearl’s success, but I can’t believe everyone is cheating. I don’t mind the occasional bad year or two as long as there are some really good (Sweet 16 or better) years in there somewhere. We haven’t sniffed that level.
This team is good enough to win 7 more games, but bad enough that it might only win 3 more. It’s not going to win the SECT. Hope I’m wrong, but I still see us in the NIT this year. At least compared to football, that’s a good result.