ESPN Chasing Ghosts Series

[Zlinedavid]

On 5/22/2019 at 5:50 AM, IUCrazy2 said:

All of these comparisons to Crean, where arguably Crean comes off looking better, are not doing anything to help the idea that we upgraded.

I look at next year's roster and am just not seeing the optimism that some of you have about how well we can do.  There are question marks all over the floor. 

A) I'm sure I could pull a dozen more coaches that moved from a mid-major/smaller major to a premier job, and the first part of their resumes would look similar.  That's kind of the reason that they got the premier job. 

B) Book by its cover/read between the lines.  When looking critically, the end results don't always tell the whole story.  Like I said above, it's the contrast between the offense and defense ratings that stand out to me.  If you took the names off of those resumes and gave you no other information, which coach would you pick as being able to produce the more consistent and repeatable results?  I'd pick Archie.  While it's true that you can't win without scoring, if a high octane offense runs into a solid defense, it's like hitting a wall if they can't play a lick of defense themselves.  Good defensive teams tend to do better in grind-it-out situations.  Just a general assumption, I'm sure there are tons of examples to the contrary. 

C) There are always question marks.  But, we've also got a ton of potential answers for those question marks.  What will Hunter be like? How much can a freshman TJD contribute? What will a healthy DeRon be like? Can Green and Smith be more consistent? What will Race and Damezi look like with a full year under their belts? These are not bad questions.  They're not a guarantee of anything, but there are a lot of worse questions we could be asking.