Let's hope the troll doesn't ruin this thread too.
Won't attack Carmody because of trolls. He had nothing to do with this year's team, win or lose. Recruited 2 of the players who learned how to play at the college level and be successful under our current, better coach.
If anyone's takeaway from the weekend isn't incredible pride in what this team/staff has accomplished, that pretty miserable of them.
The T was a human reaction to a brutally bad human mistake. Refs CHOKE like players do, because they're human like players are. These 3 refs had a terrible game, then CHOKED at the worst possible time. They robbed us of our best chance to come back. To rally against an excellent team from a 22 point deficit, you need everything to go right ... and then to have some that DID go right end up going in reverse, that is a killer. It robbed us of our best chance to rally and allowed Gonzaga to breathe a bit and that was enough. We can place our own final 5 minutes in our head, but nobody really knows if we win if it's 63-60. The part that sucks is not getting that chance to play the game out from where it should have been.
Yes, Collins should have gotten a T for charging the court like that. No, I don't blame him one bit. Big picture -- we became who we became largely because of Collins' personality, his drive, his enthusiasm, his emotion. It was necessary to overturn 80 years of dark clouds. We've adopted our coaches personality, for (99 percent) better and (1 percent) worse and it allowed us to fight back in tough situations. Other GOOD programs talk about how tough we are on both ends of the court. I don't recall that happening under other coaches, at least not for real. This wasn't patronizing little brother stuff when we were 9-19. This was coaches at the highest level of the game when we were competing at the highest level. I don't want Collins to trade any of his emotion at this point, it's the energy for something that's picking up some serious momentum.
Ah well, amazing season. Sucks there are a few trolls out there. Collins IS the Coach of the Year in my mind. Sometimes you need extraordinary passion to accomplish extraordinary things.