As you well know, the best team rarely wins the title. And quit acting like we have 25 year old men playing against college players. Our NBA guys are raw as hell. The supposed GOAT hasn't had much success molding a new team every year. I'm taking K. Self always has a perfect balance of talented experience like Graham and mason to go with highly ranked recruits and continually flames out. When Cal has that combination you see years like 2012 and 2015. We're going to be closer to those teams than the teams of pretty much all freshman.
And for the record, we have double the final fours during the Cal era than any other team. By far the most tournament wins, while missing tournament one of those years.
No, you see years like 12 and 15 when he has experience and ridiculous talent.
Self always has the perfect balance of talent and experience? Hilarious. This year and 2008 might be the only rosters you could say that about.
Last year they had zero depth and one good big. Everyone labeled it his worst team til they made a final four run. The year before they had a few good guards but ZERO inside game. Every year some of his best talent is injured or sidelined before the tourney and he rarely has an ideal roster. When was the last time Calipari lost a talent like Embiid?
Self wins a ton of games every year and often overachieves in the regular season, which sometimes leads to disappointment in the tourney. Calipari only succeeds on a high level when he has such an insane amount of talent that he can "platoon" or when he has such a massive talent advantage over every team he faces in the tourney (2012) that he couldn't possibly blow it. And yet if KU hadn't missed a million chip shots, he would have.
See, the thing is that everyone rewrites history throughout the course of the season. They forget the low or modest expectations they had for Self's team and pile on and ridicule him for getting a one seed and losing in the elite 8. Forgetting that their expectation was a 3 seed and Sweet 16.
And it's the opposite with Calipari. Everyone forgets that they printed 40-0 shirts when he reaches the final four after stumbling in as an 8 seed. Or makes excuses about youth after expecting big things before the year. No doubt youth will conveniently be an excuse if they don't meet expectation next year, despite all the preseason noise about having amazing talent combined with experience.
