Danny ChaiIs it possible to really understand someone who doesn’t really understand themself? Or is self-understanding a prerequisite for other people being able to understand them?
I’m just getting over Stanford’s loss. I was pissed for a good day, and I’m still sad. Anyway, I honestly think we just weren’t a good team. I hate to say that, but we have to face facts. It’s clear the Pac-10 just utterly sucked this year. We beat Gonzaga, but they were overrated. The only good team we played all year was Kansas. We started the season ranked in the low teens, and that’s I think about where we belonged. Our gaudy record against terrible opponents just masked that.
We were still a better team than Alabama, though. We gave that game away. That’s gonna take a while to get over. I’m against Scott, I don’t think the problem is that we’re not physical enough. At least, that definitely wasn’t the problem with the ‘Bama game, if you watched it. The refs (not the head ref, the backup ref, according to the radio broadcast) simply would not let Stanford play physical. Tons of ticky-tack fouls. It was ridiculous. Don’t even get me started on the last two “fouls” called on Childress. But still, we didn’t make our shots, so we deserved to lose.
The problem in the past hasn’t been that we’re not tall and physical enough, it’s that we couldn’t keep up with quick athletic guards. Except last year when Okafor schooled us. But this year, the main problem was that we’re just a good not great team, masked by a gaudy record against bad opponents.
The other thing is, I love Montgomery, but he’s a bit stubborn. He still runs the same offense he ran at Montana. Which is fine. But like, up to a few years ago, dunno if you remember this, but he was super stubborn against ever running a zone. So we would regularly get schooled by quick athletic schools like UCLA, where our guards couldn’t keep up with their man. Still, for the longest time, he refused to run a zone. It’s only in recent years he’s added zones to the mix.
The other thing he was stubborn about was not calling a momentum breaking time out. Most coaches, when the other team starts getting on a run, the coach calls a time out, try to break the momentum, settle the players, get a good play going. Montgomery was against that, he’d never call the time out, just wait for the TV time out or whatever. I couldn’t tell if he was doing that the ‘Bama game. But I dunno, there are times our players could have used a little settling down. It was ugly out there.
We were overrated this year. It hurts to say that, but it’s true I think. And I think we’d do better without the added pressure of an artificially high ranking.