The Best Thoughts Ever on Ute Hoops… By Colo Ute

Editors Note: This was a post by a guy nicknamed Colo Ute on another board.  He gave me permission to post it here.  Cause he knows I’m cool and the other board sucks.

Well, kids, in the immortal words of Barenaked Ladies:

"Well here we are again, and we’re lookin’ at each other as if each other is to blameYou think you’re so smart, but I’ve seen you naked…"

…or something like that.

So, we’re now full swing into hoops season. 1/6th of the way through our self-imposed death penalty, and 2 questions pop into my head:

1) How many games will we actually have more turnovers than points?

2) Since we’re imploding our program like this now, can we commit some massive recruiting violations in the next couple of years and point to this season as our penance? We’ll call this a “Self-Imposed Post-Season Ban” but on credit.

Now I’m totally looking forward to coming on the board for the remainder of this season and playing the “Blame, Blame, who’s got the Blame” game. (Spoiler Alert: it’s more than 1 person) But with this being the first year of a new coach, all I want for Christmas is the opportunity to thoroughly judge him….but circumstances keep telling me, “No, you’ll shoot your eye out.”

Seriously, putting a spin on anything this season is going to be tough, but that doesn’t mean people won’t bend over backward trying.

We’re going to have the Pollyanna crowd jumping in with “I know the scoreboard shows a 30 point loss at home to a Big Sky Team, but we really are getting better.”

We’re going to have the Boylen Haters, “Yeah, we’re only going to win 1 game, but hot damn, at least Boylen’s not the coach, he would have won negative 3 games.”

Of course, the covetous will be chanting, “Did you see Corbin Greene has a 1.15 Assist to TO ratio. Damn, that would have helped us.”

We’re going to have the Krystko Haters jumping in with, “We could have kept it within 20 if K simply could have refrained from putting Bengay in JJ O’Brien’s mom’s bra and spitting Tabasco in her eyes ”

And to top it all off, the Hoopocalypse will be complete when Mullet is heard walking out of the Hunty muttering “Damn, I wish we had Luka Drca back.”

It’s somewhat unfortunate, but there really aren’t many ways in which we’ll be able to really know what kind of coach Krystko is this year. We just don’t have good players. We don’t have guys who can put the ball in the hoop. It’s partly his fault, partly not, but it is what it is. We’re going to lose lots and lots of games this year simply because no matter how well conceived the game-plan may be, if guys can’t hit shots, they can’t hit shots. Can’t really judge quality of coaching on that.

I guess, if my some miracle he pulls 10 or more games out, we’ll know he can coach his ass off. But I also guess if I end up winning the lottery, that means I can manage the hell out of my money.

At any rate, I’ve kind of come up with a few things that I’m going to look at to judge the relative success of this season and determine whether I should look forward to the future with guarded optimism or the bleakest of despair. They all revolve around a similar theme – Is anything from this year salvageable?

1. Did the freshmen get better? These are the guys that Krystko basically got Tabula Rasa. From what I’ve seen, there are occasional flashes of talent, and lots and lots of adjustment to having to play against other good players….you know, places other than practice. There’s lots of room to grow here. How much potential will be realized by season’s end? Can Storey have more of those 7 assist to 2 TO games, or will he be more of a 1 and 3 guy? Can Odunsi hover around double-digits in scoring and shoot better than 40% from 3, or is his name never called except when he commits a foul? Can Matthews earn ANY meaningful minutes? To me, this will be the biggest indication of Krystko’s coaching ability.

2. Can we be in the upper half of the conference in anything? What I’d like to see here is whether we can make up for some of our shortcomings….like scoring….with things where lack of talent can be mitigated by good coaching and execution. Can we be in the upper half of the league in FG% Defense, FT %, Turnover margin, etc. Now, we’re not off to a good start here at all….AT ALL….hoo-whee! But again, if Krystko can focus on things like these and make bad players mediocre, it’ll give me hope he can made decent players good, and good players great.

3. Does anyone really care anymore? It’s one thing to have fans and boosters be mad, it’s much much worse to have them indifferent. The issue facing Krystko right now is that he’s playing home games in a morgue where you can hear a guy cough from across the stadium. If a team feeds off of crowd energy, our team would be Mary Kate Olsen. He can’t bring recruits in for visits to watch a game because of the stench of grim death in the arena. Utah basketball won’t be back – or even on the way back – until people are talking about Utah basketball again, attending games, and creating an actual lively and fun atmosphere again.

And right now, we’re way WAY beyond the point of simply saying winning will fix everything. It’ll help, but when we’re at less than 50 students are willing to come to home games – for FREE, when my kids can play tag in our section without disturbing other patrons, when we lose by 20 on a neutral floor to a Big South team and it doesn’t even draw a mention beyond a snarky comment in passing on a local newscast, your program is beyond irrelevant.

And while it’s not entirely Krystko’s responsibility to fix it, if I were him, I’d be nagging the hell out of some folks to do something. It’s going to impact how successful he can be if something drastic isn’t done soon.

So I’m done with my long-winded rant. I hope stuff turns around sooner rather than later, but I’m not seeing the trajectory turning yet. I’m really hoping that by the end of the year we can say, I think the influx of talent next year could really get us over a hump, but I’m not even close to being there yet.

That said, if the answers to the questions turn out to be: “Yes, quite a bit”, “A couple of things”, and “You bet” (or even “You bet, and they’re pissed” would be OK.) then I’ll have some hope actually to be excited for Selection Sunday in the next few years.

But if the answers are “Not a lick”, “Not even close”, and “Care about what?”….well, for all the good this year will do for us, we’d be better off just giving Krystko the year off to recruit while we let Clyde, the orangutan from Every Which Way But Loose coach the team.

At least he’d be entertaining when he flips off the refs and grabs a BYU cheerleader’s ass. And then, when we go 1-29, at least we can say, “Well, what’re ya gonna do, the Coach is a #$@%ing orangutan.” At least that’s something.