| 20 March 2007
On Sunday, I had a mixed set of emotions. I was unusually calm for my team being down double digits most of their 2nd round game of the NCAA Tourney. Friday night, I was pounding on my desk while watching MMOD. I think what it came down to was, I was happiest we didn't lose in the first round. Maybe that we finally beat the NC State style offense. And when I saw that same offense show up in SIU, I half-knew we were done from the start.
I rated this season a B+ in the end (despite others claiming "yeah, i'm definitely in the A range"). The season basically is all about where you look at it from. Beginning of the season, most were hoping just to make it to the Dance. Mid-season, most thought we were gonna be just above .500 with an NIT bid. Mid-conference season, some thought we could maaaybe win the ACC and at the end of the season, we were locks in the 4-6 seed range. To me, the OOC portion was a disappointment. We shouldn't have lost more than maybe 1 game (to SIU who turned out to be a very good team).
The Conf portion was probably not supposed to be better than 8-8, so turning in a 10-6 is better than expected. Yet, after going 7-2 against the ACC teams that made the tournament, we manage to go 0-4 against NIT teams and 3-0 against couchpotato teams. So we lost to the teams that were bad enough to look past but not bad enough to take themselves out of the game. And using the miracle of hindsight, winning just 1 of those 4 games gets us the ACC regular season crown, and the inside track to winning the tournament.
It's that inconsistency that rubbed me the wrong way about this team. It's tough to figure what to put it on. Lack of talent, overuse, mismatch, bad reffing, or bad coaching could all be candidates. Don't get me wrong, I love the seniors from this class and Seth Greenberg is about as good a coach as they come. But there has to be something to blame for why we couldn't put up 1 more basket to beat a bad Marshall.
I guess it was just a mix of all of those issues. Lack of talent as in why did we never run any set plays? I believe I read an article in early fall (I think Greenbergball.com, but don't quote me on that) was saying that some of the players were having difficulty learning the offensive system that Seth wanted them to play. A group of guys, that loved to run, now in a set offense? Square peg meet round hole. And when we had 2 very early losses to teams we SHOULD have beaten, wouldn't that be the alarm going off to say "This ain't working, Coach" and make the whole system disappear?
And once that system was gone, maybe Seth didn't want to see his young players growing too comfortable in that system that he had to use because of the senior talent? Or maybe he didn't trust the younger players in that type of system? Either way, there was a significant dropoff in playing time for the younger players. Why Witcher diappeared and ended up riding the bench all year is beyond me, especially when the rebounding differential was usually embarrasing for VT. And then, big surprise, our star PG who held the team up in so many games, was now completely drained when the most important part of the season came up.
Bad reffing is usually just an excuse (although I have trouble with how one-sided it gets in critical games). And maybe it just was a mismatch against a certain offense. Whatever it was, that little issue that caused us to have frequent slumps is what kept me from going estatic over this season. It was a very good season. A much better season then anyone expected when Greenberg was hired. The program has grown, but we need to keep the trendline going up... Not staying where we are, not falling off, going UP.
- TheVTRocketScientist -
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