ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
I mean the reasons can be what ever the reasons need to be, but the team we have seen thus far is not remotely up to the challenge of the schedule that's coming.Come on now?? The Gritty Hyperbole Machine is cranked up again! Lol. (feel free to TM)
We have certainly "imploded" in a game this year.....but to assert that the injuries and lack of consistent line up so far this year is a full on team implosion is ridiculous hyperbole.
This is what I mean by under-reacting to the short term and over-reacting to the long term.
I see both "oh it's just because we haven't been able to practice together, this is still a Final Four contender" and "Underwood doesn't make adjustments, this system just doesn't work" in the same threads. Those are both wrong! (There are also weird notes of underrating how phenomenal we were last year just because we soiled the bed against Loyola).
I believe in the recipe now more than ever (<---- pull quote that statement rather than taking the most pessimistic phrases out of context please), but we've got a weird batch baking here and it is going to be very, very difficult going forward.
Marquette, Cincinnati, Kansas State, and UTRGV are what we thought they were. We aren't.
That's no reason to give up. But this whole season in our fanbase's mind has been premised on the fact that we destroyed Michigan at Michigan without Ayo last year. That set the expectation that we're going to be that same kind of force in the same way with the same personnel going forward into this year. That was just flat-out mistaken, the book is closed there.
That's what I mean by "implosion". We were ranked #11 and our fans and certain number-crunching methods regarded that as an insult. This was going to roll on as a continuation of last year's juggernaut. Welp, hard reboot from that expectation level. The question is how can we remix these ingredients in a way that can be effective? We've got an All-American unguardable beast in the middle, just start building out from there.
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