ASU Thoughts and Future Schedule Speculation…
I have to confess something to my loyal readers. I actually enjoyed nearly four minutes of Utah basketball last night. Now the first 36 minutes were horrid, but the Utes found a little fight and made a game of it. Of course, ASU is every bit as awful as we are and Herb Sendek should be embarrassed and simply leave and walk the earth righting what once we wrong for penance for what he’s done. But as a Utah fan, beggars can’t be choosers for where the enjoyment comes from.
I like Kareem Storey, too bad he won’t be at Utah next year if Larry gets his way.
But what we have most at Utah is looking to what future teams will look like. And the next part of that is to guess at the schedule.
Now anyone who has read me knows I’ve taken a pretty cynical position in all of this. I think Larry engineered most of this awfulness so that he could create the illusion that this team was getting better, instead of, well you know, trying to put a winning team on the court.
If I’m right, what you’re going to see from Utah is a schedule straight out of the Stew Morrill school of scheduling.
Now the one thing all the Ute fans who hate Jim Boylen cannot bitch about (although I’m sure many have tried) are the schedules. Here are the schedules that Boylen was responsible for (Boylen’s people were mostly responsible for this schedule as well).
Record RPI SOS
’07-’08 17-14 96 78
’08-’09 24-8 9 23
’09-’10 14-17
157 87
’10-’11 12-18 118 26
’11-’12 4-18 264 65
Those are five solid SOS’s including two in the 20’s. In fact, when you consider last season we played the #26 schedule, had a ton of injuries and had 5 games with losses by 8 or less, last year doesn’t look so bad, but I digress.
If what I suspect will happen next years schedule will look very different. Here is what we know about next year. First, we travel to BYU and we will host Fresno and Boise. Those games were determined before Larry came. Now if we’re going to go with the Stu Morrill style look for the following things to happen.
1. More than one team below division one.
2. Maybe only the trip to BYU or at most one other road game.
3. At least two and maybe more games against teams we are not giving return games.
4. And if they are really going to go over the top (and I would hope they aren’t going to sink this low) hosting their own tournament against a few dogs.
Why is our own tournament a bad idea? First the teams who come are always terrible. For example, here is Utah State’s Athletes in Action Tournament sponsored by Gossner Foods. The Teams
Utah State
Kent State
University of Texas at Arlington
St. Peters
Now to make it extra special, it isn’t just a two night tourney but a round robin, so you get three nights of bad basketball.
Now I don’t have any sources on this. But if what is happening in our basketball program continues, expect an SOS in the high 100’s to 200’s for next years schedule and a bunch of wins over bad teams that Larry can point too and say, “see we’re getting better.”
If not, well maybe Larry is trying to do more than use smoke and mirrors.
The other story line to follow is to watch what happens with the Utah State and Weber State games. The reason for dumping them was pretty simple, with fewer games we couldn’t give all those home and homes plus look for a decent team to play as well. If we’re just going to play dogs, the reasons not to play Utah State and Weber disappear. The only reason you’d have would be not getting your ass kicked by in-state teams.
It will be interesting to watch and see what happens.