(12-05-2021 01:43 PM)Sitting bull Wrote:  Fwiw, based on current Sagarin ratings, if we were in the Patriot League (NOT advocating at all), we would still have 3 conference teams ranked below us. One of them is American, Lehigh and Holy Cross the other two.

Hopefully this upcoming home stand, three games, will give us some energy, maybe a win or two. Quinn Blair in my view is the ignition and has to take the lead. He did that against Howard and it was our best shot yet at a D1 win, a four point lead at the 5 minute mark.

Also FWIW, in the 6-26 season, Towson went 1-31 (in Skerry's 1st season) and was 2 of the 6 wins. I don't see anyone like that in the conference this year.

(12-05-2021 03:31 PM)Sitting bull Wrote:  We’ve also had one home game and 7 on the road against D1 competition,

Well, that is our own stupidity; such scheduling is especially problematic when we knew going into the season how young we were.

(12-05-2021 04:42 PM)Zorch Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 03:31 PM)Sitting bull Wrote:  We’ve also had one home game and 7 on the road against D1 competition,

Well, that is our own stupidity; such scheduling is especially problematic when we knew going into the season how young we were.

2 home games, American and Mary Baldwin.
2 neutral site games, Ga. State and Howard
4 road games

(12-05-2021 03:50 PM)WMInTheBurg Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 01:43 PM)Sitting bull Wrote:  Fwiw, based on current Sagarin ratings, if we were in the Patriot League (NOT advocating at all), we would still have 3 conference teams ranked below us. One of them is American, Lehigh and Holy Cross the other two.

Hopefully this upcoming home stand, three games, will give us some energy, maybe a win or two. Quinn Blair in my view is the ignition and has to take the lead. He did that against Howard and it was our best shot yet at a D1 win, a four point lead at the 5 minute mark.

Also FWIW, in the 6-26 season, Towson went 1-31 (in Skerry's 1st season) and was 2 of the 6 wins. I don't see anyone like that in the conference this year.

The Tribe was 4-14 in conference in the 2011-12.

Actually, the Tribe only played Towson once that season and won at Towson 66-49.
The Tribe also won league games at home against JMU, Hofstra and Northeastern. There were 12 teams in the league that season.

VCU appeared in the NCAA tournament that year and beat Wichita State in the first round before losing to Indiana in their second game. Drexel represented the CAA in the NIT and beat UCF and Northern Iowa before losing to UMASS by 2 in the 3rd round.

The CAA was much stronger than it is today.

I hope the Tribe wins more than four league games this season, but the team will have to drastically improve to achieve that goal.

(12-05-2021 02:34 PM)wmmii Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 01:55 PM)Prestige Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 01:37 PM)Zorch Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 01:30 PM)Tribe32 Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 01:07 PM)Zorch Wrote:  Presumably there is a list somewhere that identified that we are one of the 20 youngest teams. I wonder what the current record is for the other 19 young teams.

Thn announcers on the game yesterday gave a number. I may be wrong, but I remember them saying 11 or something like that.

Thanks...but what I meant was that I wonder what the won-loss record is for the other 19 young teams. If their records are comparable to ours then okay, the youth excuse might be entirely valid. However, if their records are closer to .500 or better then I think that invalidates the youth excuse... and I don't think our record is worsened by whom we have played since Howard, Radford, Norfolk St., American, etc don't strike fear into anyone's hearts.

The 12 youngest teams this year:
Air Force 7-1
William & Mary 1-8
South Florida 3-4
Mississippi Valley St 0-6
North Florida 2-7
Duquesne 3-6
Tulane 3-5
Marquette 7-2
Arizona 6-0
Temple 5-3
Green Bay 2-6
Dayton (youngest) 6-3

The other teams on this list are a combined 44-43, so it isn't really an excuse for getting blown out every game.

This is a mixed bag. Six of these teams have winning records and six with losing records. The common dominator among the winning teams is that most are from multiple bid NCCA tourney leagues.

Bottom line is most statistics can be manipulated to prove a point anyway you want.

Cheers

True. What’s not a statistic is getting smoked by 3 teams ranked below 250. After kicking our teeth in, American lost by 23 or more points to frickin Longwood (by 40), UMBC (31), Stony Brook (23), and Howard (34). That’s ranked #289 Howard, by the way. None of those teams have any business hanging with us, much less treating us like punks. Our team was not and is not prepared to beat even the dregs of D1 MBB.

I want Fischer to turn this around more than anything. But, a bunch of y’all acted like he was the greatest coach of all time with Shaver’s players but won’t acknowledge that he alone is to blame for our current state. If you’re going to crow, be prepared to eat it, too.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

(12-05-2021 07:35 PM)NC Tribe Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 03:50 PM)WMInTheBurg Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 01:43 PM)Sitting bull Wrote:  Fwiw, based on current Sagarin ratings, if we were in the Patriot League (NOT advocating at all), we would still have 3 conference teams ranked below us. One of them is American, Lehigh and Holy Cross the other two.

Hopefully this upcoming home stand, three games, will give us some energy, maybe a win or two. Quinn Blair in my view is the ignition and has to take the lead. He did that against Howard and it was our best shot yet at a D1 win, a four point lead at the 5 minute mark.

Also FWIW, in the 6-26 season, Towson went 1-31 (in Skerry's 1st season) and was 2 of the 6 wins. I don't see anyone like that in the conference this year.

The Tribe was 4-14 in conference in the 2011-12.

Actually, the Tribe only played Towson once that season and won at Towson 66-49.
The Tribe also won league games at home against JMU, Hofstra and Northeastern. There were 12 teams in the league that season.

VCU appeared in the NCAA tournament that year and beat Wichita State in the first round before losing to Indiana in their second game. Drexel represented the CAA in the NIT and beat UCF and Northern Iowa before losing to UMASS by 2 in the 3rd round.

The CAA was much stronger than it is today.

I hope the Tribe wins more than four league games this season, but the team will have to drastically improve to achieve that goal.

The perils of posting without double checking. I had looked that up before and forgot it in the post. Good catch.

(12-05-2021 07:20 PM)NC Tribe Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 04:42 PM)Zorch Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 03:31 PM)Sitting bull Wrote:  We’ve also had one home game and 7 on the road against D1 competition,

Well, that is our own stupidity; such scheduling is especially problematic when we knew going into the season how young we were.

2 home games, American and Mary Baldwin.
2 neutral site games, Ga. State and Howard
4 road games

I said D1 games, so scratch Mary Baldwin. The games at High Point were still on the road, neutral or not.

So again for D1 games, we have had one of our first 8 games at Kaplan. You missed one road game in there. This has happened before but particularly rough with this tenderfoot team. It’s something we really need to improve.

(12-05-2021 07:36 PM)Tribal Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 02:34 PM)wmmii Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 01:55 PM)Prestige Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 01:37 PM)Zorch Wrote:  

(12-05-2021 01:30 PM)Tribe32 Wrote:  Thn announcers on the game yesterday gave a number. I may be wrong, but I remember them saying 11 or something like that.

Thanks...but what I meant was that I wonder what the won-loss record is for the other 19 young teams. If their records are comparable to ours then okay, the youth excuse might be entirely valid. However, if their records are closer to .500 or better then I think that invalidates the youth excuse... and I don't think our record is worsened by whom we have played since Howard, Radford, Norfolk St., American, etc don't strike fear into anyone's hearts.

The 12 youngest teams this year:
Air Force 7-1
William & Mary 1-8
South Florida 3-4
Mississippi Valley St 0-6
North Florida 2-7
Duquesne 3-6
Tulane 3-5
Marquette 7-2
Arizona 6-0
Temple 5-3
Green Bay 2-6
Dayton (youngest) 6-3

The other teams on this list are a combined 44-43, so it isn't really an excuse for getting blown out every game.

This is a mixed bag. Six of these teams have winning records and six with losing records. The common dominator among the winning teams is that most are from multiple bid NCCA tourney leagues.

Bottom line is most statistics can be manipulated to prove a point anyway you want.

Cheers

True. What’s not a statistic is getting smoked by 3 teams ranked below 250. After kicking our teeth in, American lost by 23 or more points to frickin Longwood (by 40), UMBC (31), Stony Brook (23), and Howard (34). That’s ranked #289 Howard, by the way. None of those teams have any business hanging with us, much less treating us like punks. Our team was not and is not prepared to beat even the dregs of D1 MBB.

I want Fischer to turn this around more than anything. But, a bunch of y’all acted like he was the greatest coach of all time with Shaver’s players but won’t acknowledge that he alone is to blame for our current state. If you’re going to crow, be prepared to eat it, too.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It's almost as if an assistant coach hired from a struggling A-10 program might not have been the most qualified candidate to work what is one of the tougher jobs on the east coast. Does anyone know what happened with those supposed offers Huge extended to Thad Motta and JT3?? LOL.
Not to knock Fischer, because he seems like a great guy and represents the College in a positive light, but there are plenty of nice/good guys in the coaching world who also win games.
It's worth noting that KenPom analytics showed William & Mary the 3rd "luckiest" team in 2020 and 14th "luckiest" team in 2021 in all NCAA. To translate, advanced analytics would have predicted W&M finished ~17-15 in 2020 and ~5-12 in 2021. This season W&M has effectively a neutral "luck" rating, implying that analytics would predict this team be 1-7.
So the million dollar question is whether Coach Fischer and co. had the magic sauce these past two years or not. Because I don't think folks would be giving the staff this much leeway had those been the team's records the first two years. All previous analytic work on the "luck" metric would say that luck normalizes out close to 0 over time (basically the law of averages as a team's record eventually reflects their underlying performance), but, who knows, maybe we have some special sauce in the Crim Dell.

This team is bad and I know it pains all of us. W&M is a tough place to recruit too, with tougher academic requirements yet plenty of other high academic schools around here who play at a higher level. Coming in, many here were banking on the new staff executing the Dave Paulsen playbook - finding under-recruited guys and coaching them up. This worked in the Patriot League, where there isn't as noticeable of a talent (or athleticism) gap between the best teams and bottom. It did not work at all in the A-10. It took Tony years to find a good recruiting pipeline, and that was with basically establishing a system that players loved to play in (high octane offense, shoot a ton, defense "optional"), which allowed us to compete for recruits "out of our league". As much as it pains me to say, right now there is no edge against any of the myriad of solid academic schools right now on the east coast, and it's not like other schools aren't recruiting based on "family" and "Core Values" as well. And the positives to choose W&M only continue to fall away if the team continues to put out a product like this. Obviously W&M has a lot to love, and once guys get here we know they'll more than likely fall in love with the place... but you have to get them here first.

For the record, Thad Matta was never in play for our job; he left Ohio State due to poor health.

We supposedly talked to Nathan Davis at Bucknell, who would have had absolutely zero reason to leave them for us.

And of course, JT3 was supposedly the guy the whole time, being Huge's guy at Georgetown. At the time, no one could figure out how we would make the math work on paying him $3 million-plus over five years while we also paid Shaver's buyout, but we speculated that there must have been some big private donor/other secret money pot because surely, the AD wouldn't fire a B-level coach just to hire a C-level replacement; the A-level big splash must already be in the pocket!

Anyway, the point of saying that we lost many years of uneven-but-demonstrable progress in about a week is not to relitigate the past but to really reset where expectations should have been. Dane was functionally starting with almost nothing (other than the players who really couldn't leave). No reputation to speak of, nothing much to sell to recruits even if you can get them admitted (and it's an enormous if), and very limited resources to help. There are a lot of rose-colored glasses on this board every year, but you all were warned that at least a year, and maybe two, like this was coming. There is much more potential on this roster than actual good basketball right now. Some of it will be reached, but some of it will be prayers, or even expectations, of turning straw into gold and I predict much kvetching over the next couple years when it inevitable doesn't happen. So you can count me in the "I want to see what his fully developed players look like before we try to add a *third* coach onto our payroll" camp.

I think it would be fun to have a "Relitigate the Past" thread -- or maybe one for each major sport, and another for the rest. They'd probably be the busiest ones here. (I would certainly be a regular contributor!)

But for purposes of this thread, for the rest of this season Dane will be playing out the hand that he has before him. Some of the worst cards were dealt to him, no doubt, but others he dealt to himself at least in part -- recruiting decisions (including re: potential incoming transfers vs. freshmen), coaching emphasis, scheduling choices, etc. etc. It's a mix.

What I'm looking for is how well he plays this hand from now until March. Will the team start to come together under his leadership and play as a team, move with a purpose (on offense particularly), and do the best they can with what they've got, even if wins remain scarce? We've seen a few flashes of that. Or will they not develop proficiency and confidence in Dane's system, and basically fall apart? We've seen flashes of that, too.

Someone mentioned earlier that Chuck Swenson was a nice guy and brought in good talent, but "couldn't coach 'em up." Dane is a nice guy, and seems to be bringing in good talent. There's a lot of basketball still to be played. Coach 'em up, Dane!

Finances aside (which, of course, they never really are at W&M), at season's end Mann should be looking at what (if any) progress has been made.

Enough sports clichés strung together from me.

I am also tracking player movement. We've already seen two players bail out (Scott, Stone) for what I assume was related to dedication and playing time. Then we have Loewe who chose to take his talents elsewhere after graduation. Let's hope that we don't see more. Remember that everyone from last year get's an extra year of eligibility whether they stay here or leave.

Loewe had the opportunity to immediately become a starter at a P5 school, and I daresay the large majority of our players in our recent history would leave for that.

Scott was abruptly off the team and appears to have no interest in playing basketball, so I don't think he has anything to do with the ordinary course of business.

Stone was slated to be the 11th man as a junior on a rebuilding team. Truthfully, he hasn't shown much, but I'd rather have the scholarship, and to the extent someone else will play him, it's a mutually beneficial divorce.

I won't be worried unless we lose somebody we really "shouldn't". Lord knows we have minutes available for anyone halfway competent at the D1 level.

I'm actually more concerned about some of our scholarship holders that aren't leaving, but that's not a nice topic to discuss on a public forum.

If we were to pick up a transfer over winter break, would the player be eligible immediately? I mean, all the usual stuff about learning the schemes and getting comfortable on the floor with the rest of the team applies, but is it possible to transfer mid-season right now and play immediately?

(12-06-2021 04:06 PM)WMInTheBurg Wrote:  If we were to pick up a transfer over winter break, would the player be eligible immediately? I mean, all the usual stuff about learning the schemes and getting comfortable on the floor with the rest of the team applies, but is it possible to transfer mid-season right now and play immediately?

If it is their first transfer or if they are a grad transfer, yes.