Oh No We Suck Again…
Looks like I get to put that order of crow with white cheddar sauce on hold.
Just when things looked liked they might be looking up, Utah goes into Cal and looks like they have for most of the season. That is nothing new. When our free throw defense doesn’t hold up the way it had in the first three games and we don’t get an above average effort from someone Larry actually recruited, well its going to be very very ugly. But maybe Larry deciding to make this team crappy came from something no one considered before. Maybe, Larry wanted to fit into a horrible Pac-12 conference and simply overshot.
Because the Pac-12 is bad.
In today’s Bracketology, Joe Lunardi has 4 MWC teams into the dance, 3 West Coast Conference teams and 2 Pac-12 teams. The top RPI team in the Pac-12 is Cal at 38. Here are western teams ahead of Cal.
Gonzaga RPI 8
UNLV RPI 10 (How much should Utah be kicking itself over Dave Rice)
Colorado St RPI 23
St. Mary’s RPI 24
San Diego St. RPI 34
And that doesn’t count a couple of teams coming in right after Cal, such as BYU at 43, Denver at 48, New Mexico at 51 and Long Beach St. at 56. The only other Pac-12 team in that group is Oregon at 49. It’s just shocking how awful that is. But it looks like there are a lot of changes and help on the way.
(Side Note: Outside of overlooking Dave Rice, other coaches Utah either considered and tried to nickel and dime or passed on include Tim Miles (CSU), Randy Bennett (St. Mary’s), Dan Monson (Long Beach St.))
Ben Howland’s time is almost certainly over at UCLA with all the rumors going on about him. In fact you have to wonder if some other school had taken a run at him last season and been willing to write a check if he wouldn’t have jumped. I think you see where I’m going.
I can’t see how Kevin O’Neill survives this abortion at USC right now.
Unless Craig Robinson rights the ship at Oregon St. in Pac-12 play you have to figure out he’s gone as well.
Things were probably looking bad for Herb Sendek but he cracked the hammer, dismissed his leading scorer and things are looking better. His cause would probably be seriously wounded if he lost to Utah on Saturday.
And although Ken Bone probably survives the year, you have to figure he’s in trouble if it isn’t much better next year.
On the positive side, Arizona has easily the best recruiting class in the country. Dana Altman is doing some very good things at Oregon. (Side Note Two, I wonder how much better things might have been if we’d hired him instead of Giac, we could have if we’d given him a 10 year deal. Of course Utah would have run him the second one season got worse than the previous one no matter how much talent we lost.) Cal and Stanford are also clearly doing very good things and Lorenzo Romar is always willing to buy err, recruit good talent.
This means Arizona, Cal, Stanford, Washington and Oregon will be better than Utah for the foreseeable future. You have to figure UCLA could be back pretty quick. Oregon St. has a lot of talent so you have to figure even if Craig Robinson is fired they can be good with someone new. Can Utah get by some of these teams.
So the question becomes for Utah, does the class we have next year have the talent to make it into the NCAA tourney two years from now? Because Larry has a four year deal and I don’t see how you can extend if he hasn’t made post season play by then. Plus his champion, Chris Hill will almost certainly be at or within a year of retirement.
Utah Basketball lives in interesting times.
(Side Note Three: You have to wonder how a team of Jiggy, Clyburn, J.J. O’Brien, Shawn Glover not to mention a couple of recruits Boylen was working on would have fared against a Pac-12 this down.)