More Jerry
- Thread starter Halldan
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Danny does more PR for us than our own staff. Great question by Jerry.
Yes, and again what drives me batty about some of these Carino articles is what he does not state. Yes, we "did our job" in the OOC in that we avoided bad losses. We also only had one good win versus a "first 4 NCAA team". Jerry omits that scheduling a stronger OOC may have helped us this year, in retrospect. That isn't "doing the job" in the OOC.
Strongly disagree with that thinking for this past year.
Absolutely no one had any idea how much this team was going to overachieve. It's easy in retrospect to criticize our schedule, but in this one case it was necessary.
Regarding the schedule, the Maui Tournament was finalized 3 years ago.
We were to play Michigan but they backed out to instead take on Nova. And no one could have foreseen that Kansas State, a road game no less would have meant so little after we beat them.
Now, if next season we do not bulk up the OOC schedule criticism will abound and be deserved. But not this past season.
Absolutely no one had any idea how much this team was going to overachieve. It's easy in retrospect to criticize our schedule, but in this one case it was necessary.
Regarding the schedule, the Maui Tournament was finalized 3 years ago.
We were to play Michigan but they backed out to instead take on Nova. And no one could have foreseen that Kansas State, a road game no less would have meant so little after we beat them.
Now, if next season we do not bulk up the OOC schedule criticism will abound and be deserved. But not this past season.
I hear you and I think that is a "fair" take. I'm certainly not close enough to the scheduling mechanics to know what is available and what is not available. To me, the schedule reeked of a coach who just presided over a disaster and wanted to do anything possible to go into the BE regular season with a really strong, positive record. I get we couldn't control the Maui field, not seeing Texas who I thought was either 1(a) or 1(b) in that field, not being able to control the game with KSU (and they were picked 9th preseason in the Big 12, which is the profile of at least a potential bubble team). Could we have subsequently replaced one or two cupcakes with legitimate competition? I don't know.
You are correct in your points. But both items could be true. In the end, our OOC schedule was weak for all the reasons you pointed out above, but in the end our weak OOC schedule probably hurt us in the end. But once the season starts, not much you can do, you can only play the games scheduled and we did pretty good job in the OOC.
This is a common sense issue. Why schedule legitimate competition if you don't think you'll be able to beat them. That had to be the mindset coming into this year & I don't blame them. If we don't retain any talent from this year's team, I'd do the same thing next year.
Because you learn stuff about your team by playing real competition in the OOC and help prepare your team for the conference schedule. Whereas you get nothing from pounding on the cupcakes. Even a bad loss to a top OOC team is not going to kill you long term. Our OOC record was great for the fan base and Sha after last year, but IMO it didn't make us better for the Big East, and certainly didn't help us from a "bubble" perspective.
This is a great example of what Nova did this year.
Challenged themselves (N) BYU and (A) Michigan, so those losses didn’t hurt their NET.
They did play 4 - Q4 games but only two were horrible NET teams whereas 5 of ours were 239+ and some into the 300s.
OOC SOS;
Nova: 95
SHU: 301
The argument could be made that you don’t need 5-6 really soft cupcake games to figure out where your team is at. Maybe 2 or 3 and then moderately ramp up some of those other games.
The offset to that, if you are as bad as SHU was last year, you lose to Hofstra, Fordham, and Monmouth, things go off the rails and everyone wants to burn the program to the ground. We saw how that plays out first hand.
This year’s schedule was not built with the intention to make the NCAAT. It was created so that 7-25 was hopefully not going to happen again. And before the NCAAT or bust posters comment. Trust me, I get it, you don’t want anything less to be the bar. But the reality going into this season, was that we needed to mend a lot more before that became a topic for discussion.
Some here say the same thing.
And get shouted down. By SHU fans.
Way to go Dan. And Mr Pitino too!
Imo, it is clear. Our OOC as scheduled was way more aggressive than a brand new roster, coming off a 7 win season should face. And even after the UM game poached, it was plenty good enough. We lost the bid in conference
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Say what you want about Hurley, he never misses an opportunity to pump SHU up publicly. I respect that.
I think SHU’s record looks way different if they beat Depaul twice and don’t drop a game to Butler. Would that have gotten them in? Very weak bubble but its hard to say.
Not going to kill the OOC scheduling, big thing is to have respectable NIL so they feel comfortable scheduling good teams OOC. Maybe it would have helped this team to get thrown around by Michigan. Sometimes it helps.
And sometimes you win! Who can forget our MSG win over UK in OT.
I think SHU’s record looks way different if they beat Depaul twice and don’t drop a game to Butler. Would that have gotten them in? Very weak bubble but its hard to say.
Not going to kill the OOC scheduling, big thing is to have respectable NIL so they feel comfortable scheduling good teams OOC. Maybe it would have helped this team to get thrown around by Michigan. Sometimes it helps.
And sometimes you win! Who can forget our MSG win over UK in OT.
I actually think even just splitting DePaul and getting one retaking one win done from either butler or Creighton could’ve potentially got us in with how weak the bubble was.
to be fair with our weak schedule, we probably needed to beat St. John’s in that semifinal, but beating who we were supposed to be would’ve helped us compared to where we were two weeks ago.
remember we were ranked 25th with our schedule.
If we just beat we were supposed to beat we could’ve gotten the treatment Nova got.
compared to 2924 we really killed ours which is frustrating part about this season.
I'm fine with the OOC schedule for this year (given last year) but it did us no favors.
Maui went about as well as could be expected. We got three D-I games, went 2-1 and it gave us our best win of the season. KSU and RU were down to the point those wins were fairly meaningless -- bad break for us.
Regardless, we still needed to do more in Big East play. No wins against any team that finished .500 in league play is not getting you into the tournament. Especially in a Big East where seven of 11 teams finished .500 or worse overall.
Maui went about as well as could be expected. We got three D-I games, went 2-1 and it gave us our best win of the season. KSU and RU were down to the point those wins were fairly meaningless -- bad break for us.
Regardless, we still needed to do more in Big East play. No wins against any team that finished .500 in league play is not getting you into the tournament. Especially in a Big East where seven of 11 teams finished .500 or worse overall.
That's why I don't even think a few more Ws against the sub. 500 Big East teams gets us in the door.
Nova had Wisconsin, us twice, and zero bad losses to basically anyone else except for Creighton (plus Gtown in the Big East tournament, but I'm not sure conference tourneys play that big a role unless it is a truly a "play in" type game).
If we finished 12-8 in the league with a couple more Ws against teams 5-11, I still don't think we would have gotten a birth because a Committee looking at that resume is going to say they have a whopping 1 good win against a "last four NCAA team" (NC State), and are 0-6 in the regular season against the BE teams that are dancing.
This is so spot on.
Maybe 1 win from the aforementioned Butler/ DePaul group. But they also needed that marquee road win against SJU or UCONN.
I’m honestly glad we didn’t get to a soft 23-9 (12-8) record only to get snubbed again.
the board would have gone apocalyptic.
Jerry’s words of wisdom provides good context. I’ll take his view any day over the Sha bashers here:
“Seton Hall finished in fourth place, won 21 games and didn't make the field because the Big East's metrics were so poor. Meanwhile, the ACC got eight bids and seven of those teams bowed out during the first weekend, including an N.C. State squad that Seton Hall paddled in November.”
“Seton Hall finished in fourth place, won 21 games and didn't make the field because the Big East's metrics were so poor. Meanwhile, the ACC got eight bids and seven of those teams bowed out during the first weekend, including an N.C. State squad that Seton Hall paddled in November.”
I always thought we needed to win 1 v UConn or St John's down the stretch. but franky not sure that would have been enough with this Committee.
Two more wins vs. others or one win vs. St. John’s or UConn might have been enough.
No one is disputing what you cut and pasted from his article. In fact, it's the exact opposite. Everyone has been acknowledging that, so I don't understand what point you are trying to address. If you think questioning the level of our OOC or calling it soft qualifies as "Sha bashing", well I don't get that at all.
Jerry does provide good context and give good info at times. He also soft-pedals any potential critique of Sha.
Sure. You must be glossing over all the positive things I said about the season generally, the job Sha did, or my player grades, none of which were harsh and many of which were glowing. When it comes to the Carino pieces, I'm often complimentary of them or his podcast in various respects and appreciate that he is the one person who gives us coverage. But as someone with his access, I wish he wouldn't shake the pom-poms 24/7 and be a journalist. Great that he got on the BOR and President about the NIL stuff. Is afraid of his shadow when it comes to critiquing anything our coach does and is often that way with the players too unless (it seems) he's been given the proverbial "green light" to do so.
This might be the dumbest quote I ever read. The ACC has 18 teams in it. 5 of those teams finished .500 or worse on the season overall. The big east has 11 teams, 7 in our conference finished .500 or worse on the season overall. Gosh darn it I wonder why they got 8 teams in and we got 3. That damn committee must hate the big east. Maybe you can make the argument SMU shouldn’t have been in, but that wasn’t getting another big east team in.
Given the team our money was able to buy his OOC made complete sense. To those who suggest otherwise you should never have the reins of a college team in this era. What I can’t fathom is this sense that he didn’t do as good as a job as he should have. Due tell what other impact players Sha could buy with his allowance? For $6 million he hobbled a decent group. And it wouldn’t shock me if he didn’t spend all of the purported $6 million and If that is the case it would be because he was asked not to. Color me disappointed with the result but not blaming the roster assembled, the OOC nor his coaching. It’s all about $$$ and the fact we didn’t have enough. Goodnight from the real world of CCB.
I’m with you. Just based on what some of the top guys reportedly got, this roster feels like it was in the low $5m range, if you scaled the other players compensation down based on prior track record.
The team he was able to buy turned out to be somewhat close to the "bubble" for the dance. Had we had a better OOC, our odds of getting on the other side of the bubble would have potentially increased. You might have though preseason they would be awful, but it seems Sha & Co. thought they would be at worst middle of the pack, and a middle of the pack Big East team is allowed to have a strong OOC. If you tell me that Sha needed to schedule this way to go into league play as a confident bunch with a really good record, because he was wanted to pull a Jimmy B., I can buy that. I don't agree with your premise that because we were going to small time on paper, we shouldn't schedule strong opponents to try and get better.
There is almost no benefit to scheduling the way we did. Five games against teams ranked 250 or below on Kenpom. Three against teams in the 300s. Paid to play in the Maui when other schools were getting NIL money for their tournaments. Terrible.
Budd, the Maui tournament was booked three years ago. Not fair to criticize SHU for playing in that non NIL event. This year they are looking to play in an NIL tournament but nothing is concrete at this point.
Coming off a butal year and replacing just about the entire team Holloway had no idea how much improvement would be made this season. So early on he scheduled soft as I would have done.
Kansas State on the road was expected to be an excellent game. No one had a clue how bad they would be this season.
And we did everything possible to play Michigan at their place and agreed on the date until they changed their schedule dumping us for Nova.
I strongly believe given the circumstances Holloway did an excellent job with the schedule which only now in hindsight could have been a little better.
Coming off a butal year and replacing just about the entire team Holloway had no idea how much improvement would be made this season. So early on he scheduled soft as I would have done.
Kansas State on the road was expected to be an excellent game. No one had a clue how bad they would be this season.
And we did everything possible to play Michigan at their place and agreed on the date until they changed their schedule dumping us for Nova.
I strongly believe given the circumstances Holloway did an excellent job with the schedule which only now in hindsight could have been a little better.
A school like Seton Hall that will always have to fight to get an NCAA bid, even in good years. We can not be playing more than 2 games against the Wagner, Monmouth, St Peters types. We played 6 of them this season. Just a waste of time.
We have to start scheduling true mid majors in the OOC and hope the P4 teams we play are quad 2 or better.
The one thing I’ll say about the OOC is that no one expected K Stste to be a complete disaster when the home and home was scheduled. They were not expected to be great and it was a road game at a P5 school. They turned out to be awful. Unfortunately.
oops, sorry, didn’t see Dan’s post.
Yes firing their coach mid season was not anticipated.
I think Sha has shown an ability to get a team to develop quicker than many this past season. Try to frontnload the schedule with high majors in November and early December to take advantage.
It's crap luck. Some years chemistry will come together quick, other years it won't. In his 4 years here, this was the only year we looked good at the start of the season. Is this the start of a new trend I hope so, but the 1st 3 years weren't so hot. Year 1 he started 4-4, year 2 he started 5-4, year 3 let's just not even talk about. I don't think you can blame any coach when it doesn't come together so quick, nor is it a masterful job when they do. Players are going to jive right away or they aren't and if they don't you have to find ways to win.
Just not sure if "this past season" is a reason to front load the schedule with high majors. We definitely need to upgrade the schedule but not sure we should schedule something based on seeing a good start 1 out of 4 years on that criteria.
Curious if you believe that if we played a stronger OOC and we ended up with 18 wins would we have been better off? Serious question. Not snark.
Like 75 said, we lost our bid by not beating Butler/Depaul at home & not beating SJ/Uconn at least once. Playing an aggressive OOC schedule with all new players & coming off the season we had last year would have been a mistake. Keep in mind that our entire roster was comprised of former mid major players & a few roll players from power conference schools, as well as a reclassified freshman.