Ok!
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maybe this will be a wakeup call for the second half of conference play, like when UCLA got drubbed by Utah a few weeks ago
Too many silly errors like stepping on the ob line.
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NCAA tournament… that’s funny. If a bunch of upper-class players need a wake-up call, well, that says a lot about those players. If you are going to lose, at least make the other team pay by playing rough defense.
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Shooting fadeaway 3 with no one guarding you?
Who teaches that?
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Where’s the accountability for the Red Sea defense?
Gotta send some messages, coach.
Play the walkons!
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Agree. Step down and get run into if you have to, but don’t be a spectator. That’s unacceptable.
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Charmin is going to be filing a patent infringement lawsuit because our defense is softer than their TP.
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It feels like UW is shooting 600% and on the rare occasions they miss they get the offensive rebound.
This game is no longer about tonight, obviously.
Charter a bus and let the players think about things for 13 hours. Seriously.
Cancel practice until the team decides to show up.
Who will call the players only meeting? Have to find the fire, guys.
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These players seem snakebit on the road. How does a coach fix that? Have a sports psychologist work with them?
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It’s really sad to see a fine article like this in the DNews the morning after a game, with not a single word of coverage in the Tribune.
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I might be stretching here a bit.
We saw what was possible with a fully bought in, disciplined, tough team under Big Rick. (Not ignoring the idiosyncrasies.) A less imposing physical team could compete at the highest levels with an air-tight scheme, maximum effort, high levels of discipline, etc.
Examples: Larry Cain became honorable mention All-MWC(!), the expected NCAA bid yearly, some deep runs, and 1998.
In the age of the portal and NIL, Majerus probably would have struggled. He’d run off a fair number of players, anyway. His level of hard coaching was only for a small minority of basketball players, to begin with.
LK was starting to see similar success with hard coaching, but the level of detail and discipline wasn’t what it was under Majerus. Larry started to struggle a little, did some off-season team building, “boot camps”, focused on “culture”. And then LK had his own struggles, lost some high level recruiting battles and he trailed off.
Craig Smith is a great guy, I think players genuinely like him. When the team is playing well, it’s a blast, the guys like each other. It’s grand. But when the team runs into obstacles like last night… where’s the toughness, where’s the Xs and Os expertise to counter what UW threw at us… where’s the execution?
We looked like a team the Utes used to systematically dismember, you knew what the result would be before tipoff.
In many organizations you have a CEO who is the positive, rah-rah guy, but the #2 guy is the disciplinarian. It’s always a mix of personalities and skills among the coaches. Some years, Dana Altman was the hammer and some of the assistant coaches were the pyscologists to keep the team from dissolving.
Whitt has shown how you really need to recruit players who are ready to sacrifice to get to a higher level of fulfilled potential. Culture is a big deal. It really has to be player-led, by later in the season.
It’s a younger generation + the Portal + NIL that makes it harder to cultivate that culture and attract players who want to achieve, but I think there’s potential to do that, without the weird baggage RM brought. In FB we get guys like Cole Bishop, who was overlooked in the talent rich South, but he could see how his own potential could be maximized and displayed at Utah.
Right now with these teams being awesome at home and dismal on the road, mens college BB is like a club sport. “Great game, guys, that was fun!” Or, “Bummer of a game, but have a good weekend guys and see you on Monday”.
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Deviation from hoops here, but I think it applies.
In the big world, a lot of research has been done understanding what it takes to get great performance out of teams. This is primarily in a military context, but also applies in other organizations, in business, in sports.
The long time assumption has been you need to start with getting the team socially cohesive, ie, cultivate “togetherness”, which should lead to high team performance. However, researchers have found that social cohesion was not a strong determinant of team performance. Some of the highest performing teams have not been particularly socially cohesive. Not prone to fighting, but also not prone to have BBQs together every weekend, either.
Instead, when you have individuals who hold themselves accountable to a higher standard, and you surround them with like-minded teammates, in the beginning there may be some social friction, but it’s the success of the team that forges the lasting bonds.
Think of any number of Super Bowl anniversary teams. “I really didn’t like Steve when that season started, and I let him know about it. But when we were in battle, I knew I could count on him to hold up his end of the bargain on the field, which led me to make sure I didn’t let anyone else down. And we won the damn Super Bowl. We were and forever will be remembered as champions.”
Unit_Cohesion_and_Military_Performance_Ch5_MacCoun_Hix.pdf (berkeley.edu)
Cohesion exists in a unit when the day-to-day goals of the individual soldier, of
the small group with which he identifies, and of unit leaders, are congruent—
with each giving his primary loyalty to the group so that it trains and fights as
a unit with all members willing to risk death and achieve a common objective.
The essence of strong primary group cohesion, which I believe to be generally
agreed on, is trust among group members (e.g., to watch each other’s back) together
with the capacity for teamwork (e.g., pulling together to get the task or job done).
[p. 288] . . . Combat group members try to develop strong bonding as a collective
good, at least in part, because it is in their own self-interest for survival to do so.
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I don’t know if Tommy Connor was offered a job on Smith’s staff, but he was a great coach. He would be a big help if he was still the #1 assistant on the bench.
The B12 teams are a lot more physical than PAC teams. If something doesn’t change in how tough the Utes play, we are going to get pushed around a lot next year. We get pushed around a lot in the PAC and the PAC isn’t very physical.
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The Tommy worship is odd to me.
He was smacked for the Utes recruiting violations, including a suspension and removal of his “head coach in waiting” status.
And, as far as I can tell, has had zero coaching jobs since leaving the U.
I’ve heard many negative things about him as a coach, and personally had a very negative interaction with him.
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This season is feeling a little modern playground to me. It really doesn’t matter which team is out there playing (our or the opponent). Whoever loses doesn’t seem to care about the result. There is no throwing stuff, no anger, no real hard emotion. They just saunter off the court like what happened didn’t matter. The only player last night that seemed to care at all was Smith. Even at that, after the blown call he got hit with the reaction wasn’t anything near what it should’ve been. Coach Smith was rolling like he didn’t care, too. No Utes team should ever get rolled like it did in the last two games - ever. We all point to Big Rick, but Jerry Pimm and Archibald would’ve totally melted down on the sideline over such a soft performance. Hell, even they might’ve drew a T for losing it on their own team.
This team isn’t going anywhere this season or next season with play like that.
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I’ve known him casually for 30ish years and have always had exactly the opposite sort of interaction.
I’m not, however, surprised he was not offered a position with the Smith coaching staff. It’s much more common for an AD to disallow such a thing in favor of a thorough house cleaning.
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I hadn’t heard about the recruiting violations. I do think Connor was a great X’s & O’s & #1 assistant coach.
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I’m sure Tommy knows his Xs and Os. The devil in the details is getting that transferred to the players and getting their buy in, and being adaptive to how best to get all that translated into plays on the court.
After the Oregon win (I think) Smith was basking in the aftermath on the radio show and talked about the coaches installing more plays, and there being difficulty in having guys remember and execute the plays, so the coaches backed off a little, opting to keep it simple.
A few years ago after Oregon won the PAC tournament and was heading to the NCAA, Dana Altman confessed that earlier in the season he wondered if the team might win another game, but between assistants coaching individual players and Altman exercising some patience, the team got better.
I remember one of Delon’s NBA head coaches gushing about how he could be shown a play on paper in practice and then could run that play in the next game without a walk through. That’s a rare level, it’s why Delon’s still playing in the NBA.
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