Mostly agree with this analysis and I agree on Michigan. They are better than us and probably beat us 7 out of 10 times on a neutral, probably 6 out of 10 times at SFC, but our effort was poor. LaTulip said he thought we played timid and I agree. I actually think we had a similar level of timidity vs Purdue, at least in the first half, we just had a nuclear Keaton to save us that game.
Concerning that our two worst efforts have come in 2 of our last 3 games but as I said in the Oregon post game thread, I’m chalking a lot of it up to physical and mental fatigue due to being in the dog days of a long season + we had to play short handed for an extended period of time.
Poor shooting, defensive mistakes, lapses in intensity all can be attributed to fatigue. And as I also said in the post game, we aren’t the only ones going through it. Lots of teams are playing down to their competition and/or losing games they shouldn’t including several last night. And on some level those two losses are at least excusable/explainable in that one was the back end of a long road trip which literally no one has swept against a tourney team who has only lost once at home and presents some individual matchup problems for us, and the other against an absolute wagon/one seed. Not like we got blitzed at home by Cincinnati or even lost on the road to Ohio State.
That’s why I’m optimistic we can regain our form. We will only have one game in the next 9 or 10 days depending on if we earn a triple bye (which we likely will). Think we can get our legs back and solidify what we want to do defensively for the post season.
Now if we come out with another tier 3 type effort in our first BTT game like last year when we got smoked by Maryland, I will be concerned that we peaked too early and won’t bring our best ball to the big dance.