On-the-floor leadership missing entirely
The talent may be there but the heart isn’t. NIT baby!!
For the last three seasons this team has been one of the most frustrating I have ever watched and I have been a State fan for over 50 years. There is a ton of individual talent. It's not that they aren't being taught how to play good team basketball, because they do it, on both ends of the court, for 20-30 minutes every game. But this group of guys has a run in every game where they look like they have never
seen a basketball game before. Ill-advised, lazy passes; driving into a triple-team with no plan for what to do when he gets there; making switches on defense when picked as if there were no reason in the world to exert yourself at all (like a walk-thru in practice and this killed us over and over yesterday); and then the horrible shot selection, over and over. The duration of these periods of dumb basketball has diminished each season, but they persist. Anybody remember what Richard Williams did to turn one-man-show Dontae Jones into an SEC tourney MVP in one season? State lost some games it might have won with him on the court early in the '96 season, but it paid huge dividends at the end of the season.
Another reason this team is so dysfunctional at times, and a large part of the reason those periods last as long as they do, is that this team has no leader on the court. Nobody on this team seems to have that in his personality.