Utah Utes Basketball: The State of the Union Address

I thought on the day of our final preseason battle with the mighty whatevers of the College of Idaho.  We’d look at where Utah Basketball is.  But then again, that perspective changes wildly depending upon who you talk to.

The Larry Lapdogs will tell you that things are probably better than they were at any time under Majerus.  It was Jim Boylen’s fault we’ve blown double digit leads in the 2nd half this year, twice at home to Big Sky and Big West teams, including that 21 point masterpiece to Cal State Northridge.  Larry is so good at teaching some stuff and it should be obvious to everyone what that stuff is.  In short, buy your final four tickets now, we’re just not saying which year.

Now the Larry Lapdogs think my review is something like this.  That Larry was shat from the loins of the Devil himself, Dr. Chris Hill in a river of firey lava diarrhea sent to destroy the Angel Jim Boylen and Utah Basketball.

Now the question is what is the story.  Clearly the team is better than last year.  But that doesn’t mean anything since Larry didn’t actually keep anyone from last years team.  As for this years team, our guard line has not been good.  Glen Dean is struggling to do what Larry is asking him to do.  The once promising Dallin Bachinsky has fallen away when we stopped playing teams of tiny white midgets.  The one consistent part in all this has been Jordan Loveridge.  Although the 9 and 5 from Jared Washburn off the bench is nice, honestly I wonder if he shouldn’t be getting more of those minutes going to Lenz and Bach.

But the thing that we have to wonder is, these blown leads.  They’re kind of becoming a hallmark of the Larry era. I can think of a couple from last year and three glaring ones from this season.  I think we could all deal with the blown lead at BYU (although this is Rose’s worst team in quite a while).  But the Northridge game, there can be no excuse for that.  And we have to start to wonder about Larry’s abilities on the bench.

And the cynical part of me has to wonder this, the best of what this team is doing is being coached by Tommy Conner.  My question is, if we didn’t have Larry and Andy Hill, moved Conner to head coach brought in an offensive minded assistant and another solid recruiter, would we be at all worse off?

In conclusion, I’m not really sure what the state of this hoops program is.  If we surprise in the Pac-12, wonderful, but if we’re in the 1/3 of the conference again, I don’t know how anyone could say things are going right.