Utah Basketball: It’s Not Me… It’s You

I honestly think I have a pretty good handle about what is happening with Utah Basketball.

It’s just that I read twitter and it’s nowhere close to what a great many Utah fans think.  But leave it to a Zoob reporter to summarize how Utah fans view this.

"Short of Auburn when it picked up Cam Newton, few teams have improved as fast as Utah. -Jason Franchuk"

And I suppose that would be true if Larry had kept last years team and was doing this with them.  But instead he changed the entire roster.  So he doesn’t get a cookie for simply being better than last year.  Last year was a joke caused by Larry’s bungling of the transition and should have no basis in any measure of growth of Utah basketball.

In my mind last year does not exist.

The measure of any growth has to be Jim Boylen’s final year.  We won 13 games that year, 13 games against a much tougher schedule.  To even equal that team that every Ute fan hates, this edition of Larry ball should win at least 16, especially because the Pac-12 just isn’t all that improved.

So what does that mean about last night?

Well there are some very good things and some very bad things.  The good is, that the defense and rebounding are improved.  And the box and one on Haws was a great call.

The bad is that we had no answer for the BYU zone, and worse is that it didn’t look like we sought one.  Also once it was clear BYU was going to go to Carlino, at some point you have to make an adjustment, and we did not.

And there is one more glaring issue out there that we need to mention.  This is probably Dave Rose’s worst team.

I would love to celebrate this Utah team more, but it’s hard with the wild exaggerations we face from you people who feel the need to pump up this team.  Until you folks can be honest about the good and the bad…

I’ll remain the one sane man in a world full of crazy people.