After being exposed at this level, Underwood scrapped his base defensive and offensive schemes and has been experimenting with ways to improve ever since. I suspect he’ll continue to do so. Up until last season it was a revolving door of new bodies coming in and the staff trying to find a way to mold them into some form of competitive team.
In three seasons we went from complete dog shit to a whisker from a B1G title. The biggest part of that was bringing in better talent. I think players are improving.
Frazier is a more complete player, just isn’t taking volume shots like he used to. And we don’t want or need him to. He’s limited by his size in all aspects of the game.
DMW is vastly improved.
Ayo has improved year over year by leaps and bounds.
They brought Kofi in who was overweight and not even a primary option on his high school team and turned him into a chiseled specimen that was the B1G freshman of the year.
Alan Griffin was lost as an Easter egg most of his freshman year and evolved into a key cog in year 2.
Kipper was Kipper. One night he’d look like Jimmy Butler Lite then spend 4 or 5 games in la la land.
I’m not at practice so I can’t say how much is the staff and how much is natural year over year development of the players as they mature. But to say there isn’t improvement seems odd because it’s easily proven with statistics.
I don’t understand how we can give credit to the staff for how much DMW improved his shot but then ask why they aren’t doing the same for Ayo. Even if we assume they only coached DMW and not Ayo to shoot better, you could make the argument that DMW had nowhere to go but up while they didn’t want to break Ayo down and try to rebuild his entire form because frankly he is pretty damned effective as-is. Not every guy is going to figure out how to shoot 40% from three.
I just hope the team keeps improving and Miller figures it out and Underwood keeps adjusting.
We both agree that we want the team to improve and for Underwood to try to keep adjusting and hopefully figuring out what will work.
I will give credit that he did a decent job in second half last year in managing personnel after we were reeling after the MSU beat down.
You have more faith in the idea that he has clear roadmap and working a plan this year. I don't see such a good one this year so far and he arguably has more talent. We certainly have not overachieved or outperformed expectations.
I would hope to think that there is normal development from playing and training 12 months a year in a P5 program for most guys from year to year.
I guess we will just disagree about the level of staff ability to really teach and develop players beyond an average staff.
Sure they have an impact, I just think it is not a strength of his program.
I also think his in game coaching is pretty average.
UW is an average coach. Not terrible, not great.
I am just not a big fan, but want the team to do well and would love for them to get to S16. We should be a 2/3/4/ seed.
Anything short of a S16 will feel like underachieving. After that you need some luck and breaks.
We have a relatively favorable stretch coming up in next 7 games. We should be favored in all of them. We could be 13-3 and ranked probably in Top 10 heading into a gauntlet of tough games.
We should go 6-1 or 7-0 if we are really making progress and they are figuring out how to put these pieces together.
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