is that those who defend Howland tend to treat accomplishing the bare minimum as some great success, and then our frequent moments of underachieving get blamed on unreasonable fan expectations because "at least it's better than Rick Ray."
There is a notion that we shouldn't hold the coaching staff accountable, it's just the fans' fault for expecting too much of them. We're told to stop complaining about the Liberty loss because we should just be glad that our veteran team with three NBA players on it even made the tournament to begin with. We're told to stop complaining about last year's team being on the bubble because we should just be happy to finish 4th in the league and ignore all the bad losses that team had that kept them from being a tournament lock. We're told to stop having any kind of expectations for this team because they were picked to finish 12th in the league and are a young team, even though the reason we are a young team is because many of the players we recruited to be upperclassmen on this team were non-factors who transferred out and Howland's recruiting misses don't ever get talked about, and we've also shown enough potential to suggest we can be good but keep losing to bad teams anyway. We are just overreacting to all of that, or so we are told.
I can already tell you what next season is going to be like, we'll be told before the year how the roster is so good and the missing pieces can be easily replaced, and then once we inevitably take some bad losses the narrative will flip to "well the roster isn't actually that good and we lost some important pieces from last year." There's always a spin. And if nothing else, the default response is "who are you going to hire that's any better?" as if there aren't dozens of mid-major coaches around the country who get a heck of a lot more out of their teams than we get out of ours. Avery Johnson and Mike Anderson got fired for producing very similar results to what Howland is producing, but they were replaced with strong mid-major coaches and those programs are doing just fine now (or in Bama's case, exceedingly well).
Howland does just enough to stay off the hot seat, but nothing more. We did take steps forward as a program under Howland (as was expected with the talent he brought to campus), but those steps forward were smaller than they could've been and now we seem to be done taking steps forward. You can count on us to do just enough to say "see, we're not that bad," but that's the extent of it, and our fans will constantly be left disappointed as we show flashes of potential only to continuously lose to lesser teams. We'll keep doing this sideways shuffle on and on again as long as he is here.
There is a notion that we shouldn't hold the coaching staff accountable, it's just the fans' fault for expecting too much of them. We're told to stop complaining about the Liberty loss because we should just be glad that our veteran team with three NBA players on it even made the tournament to begin with. We're told to stop complaining about last year's team being on the bubble because we should just be happy to finish 4th in the league and ignore all the bad losses that team had that kept them from being a tournament lock. We're told to stop having any kind of expectations for this team because they were picked to finish 12th in the league and are a young team, even though the reason we are a young team is because many of the players we recruited to be upperclassmen on this team were non-factors who transferred out and Howland's recruiting misses don't ever get talked about, and we've also shown enough potential to suggest we can be good but keep losing to bad teams anyway. We are just overreacting to all of that, or so we are told.
I can already tell you what next season is going to be like, we'll be told before the year how the roster is so good and the missing pieces can be easily replaced, and then once we inevitably take some bad losses the narrative will flip to "well the roster isn't actually that good and we lost some important pieces from last year." There's always a spin. And if nothing else, the default response is "who are you going to hire that's any better?" as if there aren't dozens of mid-major coaches around the country who get a heck of a lot more out of their teams than we get out of ours. Avery Johnson and Mike Anderson got fired for producing very similar results to what Howland is producing, but they were replaced with strong mid-major coaches and those programs are doing just fine now (or in Bama's case, exceedingly well).
Howland does just enough to stay off the hot seat, but nothing more. We did take steps forward as a program under Howland (as was expected with the talent he brought to campus), but those steps forward were smaller than they could've been and now we seem to be done taking steps forward. You can count on us to do just enough to say "see, we're not that bad," but that's the extent of it, and our fans will constantly be left disappointed as we show flashes of potential only to continuously lose to lesser teams. We'll keep doing this sideways shuffle on and on again as long as he is here.
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