You’re more optimistic than I am. I’m not seeing this nucleus. I see a bunch of freshmen with Derek Simpson-like upside. Lots of players have the potential to put up some good games followed by stinkers but other than Grant, who disappears regularly, I don’t see a single B1G player on this roster. No one knows their roles, and the rotations are no clearer than they were before the season started. The offense is disjointed, the defense stinks, and it’s complete chaos.
Oh again - your misunderstanding. I see nothing right now either. We look dreadful. If we look like we did vs SHU all season we won’t win 12 games. What I’m saying is he has the rest of the season to show substantial improvement with the current group. The reason I assigned a 12 win threshold to that is simply based on how the schedule lines up.
Here’s how I see it. There are really only 4 games in our next 13 that we won’t be heavy underdogs in and all of them are at home. Penn, Del State, NW and Oregon. Go 1-3 in those games and he should probably be fired midseason. 2-2 should indicate trending towards end of season dismissal. 3-1 demonstrates glimmer of hope - let’s see how the final 7 games and the BIG tourney go.
The team’s performance in those final 7 games are (or at least should be) huge factors in how we proceed. Look at that schedule. Pencil in a loss at Mich State, but look at the other games. He gets 4 games against PSU and Maryland, Washington at home and @ Minny. If he went 3-3 in those and found a way to win his opening game in the BIG tourney that, in my opinion, would qualify as showing progress.
It certainly isn’t looking like the team is on track right now to achieve any of this. In fact, losing to Penn appears to be a very real possibility. All I’m saying here - is 12 wins would essentially be the best of what I broke down above. Avoid loss in next two OOC games. Find a way to split Oregon and NW home games. Then play 500 basketball in those last 7 / conf tournament to find 4 more wins (any combo). The outlook in that case would be good enough at that point in time where it wouldn’t be laughable to give him one more shot. Anything worse than that and I just can’t even see a vision of what we might sell to recruits.