Basketball fandom or mental illness?: A thread
- Thread starter VCU Heel
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To some extent that makes sense but as primarily a hoops school can you replicate 8 NCAA bids in 10 years in a watered down PAC 10 ? Oregon will bounce back. Zona is always good. Utah is having a pretty good year. ASU started hot but is slumping now. Last year the MWC got 4 teams in the Dance. This year will be 4 or 5. Right now the Pac 10 would get probably 4 bids but thats with USC & UCLA each going. Last year they got 3 again with both USC & UCLA going. Why leave a 4 bid league for a 2 or 3 bid league when your chances of getting in with the MWC are definitely better than with the Pac 10 ?
To my knowledge no.
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I think this off season will answer that question one way or another - i think we have 3 guys that will be in demand from others if they enter portal and may require Vcu to facilitate some serious NIL deals to fend off other suitors. IMHO
especially if we miss NCAA tourney
RamLover
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I said P5, not P6. Even so, like I said, it comes down to how the teams do in noncon for about 2-4 games each. We all bomb them, and it doesn’t much matter what happens after that unless a team wins out in conference. The same isn’t true for P5 schools as they have more opportunity in conference to elevate their bad play from the beginning of the season. Playing schools like Memphis and Temple and some of the others you mentioned outside of the P5 is great, but that’s still limited opportunity, so when you drop a game to a team like Temple, it’s not really good or bad. Doesn’t really do anything for us. Memphis would have been a great win and may have had the same effect as a P5 win, but again, we dropped it, and when Dayton and SLU drop similar games, and then all lose to clunker teams in our conference, there’s just no shot. All goes back to my point that we don’t get at-larges sometimes because of how the other teams in our conference do, which is out of our hands. We can afford a bad noncon performance if SLU and Dayton are good and we beat them. Because of our conference, our at-large chances are a bit more determined by other teams more than a P5 school, as they are more likely to be stronger as a whole.
It’s also just scary what A10 schedules would look like without those holiday tournaments. It’s not those schools scheduling those games with us.
Anyway, we had a three-game stretch that totally hurt us. Our most important games in noncon were the two tournament games and Memphis. Ace was out for all three. That Pitt game was an impressive win without him.
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RamLover
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That’s awesome, and I hope it happens. But it’s sad that coaches like him don’t want it every season. We shouldn’t be excited about one opportunity like that every few years. It needs to be a consistent thing. If he likes the rivalry, it should be at least every other season, minimum. We played them last in 2018, right? They’re a little over an hour away. Hard to believe they can’t make that work in 4 years.
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I will say, I am not going to put too much stock into the poor 3pt shooting. That happens every once in awhile. The problem was getting beat in crunch time from a coaching standpoint, a lack of focus at the free throw line, and worst of all in my opinion was the fact that down the stretch, it appeared as if Ace trusted NOBODY out there. He was holding onto the ball and forcing shots to will the victory. He has taken more of a game manager role over this streak and he regressed back to a more ball centric mentality at the end of the game. When we came back to beat Dayton, it was a team effort to come back and win, it wasn't Ace holding onto the ball forcing up desperate shots. That is on coaching. You can't allow that. Everyone has bad shooting nights, but the things you can control, you should. The free throw shooting is a joke and is a direct link to a lack of focus and we were far out executed by an inferior team. All that being said, we still had a chance to tie and win really, and if there are any positives to take from that game, that would be it.
Also, we all give JJ are hard time for the number of techs he gets (rightfully so), but Ace needs to chill too. Say what you want about the refs, but they could've t'd up Ace quite a few times during this game and they didn't. I don't recall this many situations in the past where our players were so arrogant and mouthy to officials. That is a big problem right now and that is on the coaches.
It may be a blip from a technical standpoint, but that's a blip that we cannot afford with our current NET ranking and tournament resume, that's the issue. That "blip" the other night very possibly could have lost us an at large opportunity. It's unfortunate, but that's what happens when you lose games you shouldn't and have hardly any quality wins to offset it. Our margin of error is so thin, it's transparent. You can't lose a game like that, let alone at home, with our credentials, and think it won't hurt us moving forward. We put ourselves in this position. We need(ed) to dig out of it, and we were, but unfortunately, we are in no position to be having "blips".
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No one cares what any other coach or school does. Stop worrying about them and stop comparing us to them. We are an outlier, we have higher standards thus, higher expectations. We have earned that based on our results. I posted about this a little bit ago, but that's such a weak excuse to default back to "oh we're only a mid-major, no one else does this as a mid-major". Yeah, no one else does this, but WE do. We are different and that's a good thing. I absolutely hate this excuse and so many people just default back to this when we start losing.
To sit there and say that at the start of EVERY season, you, and everyone else on here isn't expecting VCU to have their name called on selection Sunday would be totally disingenuous and a lie. No one is looking at the schedule when it comes out and showing up to the first game saying, "I'd really be happy for an NIT appearance this year". I can't stand this terrible excuse. We've earned the expectation; we can do it every year. That's OUR standard. I don't give a poope about any other school, mid-major or not.
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We got better OOC games when we were full havoc tbh. So that argument about our style doesn’t really stick.
Outside of 2011, our record against P5 programs is abysmal. Yes, the P5 are unlikely to engage us in a H/H series. But it is for reasons other than fear or trepidation regarding our style of play.
VCU85
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I don’t think VCU had an at large opportunity. They’d have had to run the table, and even then it is very doubtful they’d score one in my opinion.
RamFan44
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right- why be great when you can be average...
We got in better early season tournaments back then which led to better schedules. The quality of home and home matchups that we had were roughly the same.
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If you had asked me if I would be happy with 2 losses for VCU at the halfway point of A10 play I would have said yes after watching OOC play. I would not have expected those losses to be to Duquesne (although on the road) or Bona at home. If VCU can do the same in the second half 4 losses would be better than I would have guessed. Here is the thing though. Since Rhoades took over VCU has responded with stacked losses after a bad game like they had against Bona. Hope that it does not happen this year but tonight's game will give me the answer. All this being said, I do like Rhoades. I am not a hater. I do wonder what is gonna happen this offseason if they sh*t the bed.