ScotsAU

I think there are too many hypotheticals to answer the OP. Maybe Bruce coaches for longer than that. What if SP strikes out on his own before Bruce retires? He may have already established himself as a solid head coach (or failed as one) by then. When the time does come, assuming he hasn’t flopped at another school as a head coach, I think he should get a look. And I think I’ll leave it at that. I don’t think he should be shoved to the top of the list because he’s a Pearl or because he coaches with Bruce. But he’s done enough for Auburn in his own right that, as of now, I’d say he deserves a look.

I didn’t say for sure that it was. Maybe it wasn’t. But I will say with confidence that this was the second worst showing of Auburn this year. We beat them 9 times out of 10.

Conference tourneys (at least the sec one) actually give better teams an advantage. The seeding that they use for the NCAA tourney is so messy. It isn’t always a major advantage.

This sums up what I haven’t been able to get across apparently. They had their best game. We had one of our worst. That’s why the favorite to win the championship rarely does. Somewhere in the tourney, the best team has an off game at the wrong time and gets eliminated. And

Yes. Yale was the better team with all of their 2 star athletes. 🙄 Seriously dude? 9 games out of ten we beat them by double digits. We had an off day.

That’s not what the poster said. And you’ve taken my comment out of context. The poster said would you rather have a deep run into the tourney or win the conference. I’d rather win the conference. You get a trophy for that. You don’t get a trophy for coming in 4th. But my bigger point was about evaluating the team. It says more to win the conference champ than it does to win an NCAA champ. The NCAA tourney is probabilistically a crapshoot. The favorite at the start has hardly ever won it. The better team gets knocked out a surprisingly high amount of the time. Don’t get me wrong. I’d be thrilled with a final four appearance or a national championship. But, statistically it means less than winning your conference as far as judging how good a team is.

I think we win. But I don’t think we blow them out. We still played awful from the start today. Pretty clear that the players were feeling too good about the SEC championship and came in expecting Yale to roll over.

Talent? Not even close. Discipline? No idea. They played more disciplined today. But that says nothing about how disciplined they were over the season. I said this a few pages back. But I’ll say it again here. I hate that we lost. But this tourney is a crap shoot. All it takes is one off game for a better team or a worse team playing at the maximal level of their performance, and you’re out of it. I don’t think Yale is a better team any more than I thought the team that beat UK was better. So yes. Hate it. But I’m not going to overreact and draw some deep conclusion from this loss. It was one game.

It wasn’t me and I never saw that comment. But I’d agree with them. The NCAA tourney is such a crapshoot. The top teams don’t get any advantage aside from playing a team that is expected to be worse. Winning the SEC championship is a better evaluation of the team’s quality than winning the NCAA tourney.

Didn’t see it either. Pearl said it when they asked him about the ejection. On the previous possession, that player intentionally elbowed him in the throat. Bruce followed that statement by saying CBM should’ve gotten an F1. I strongly agree with him.

Basketball is almost completely about talent. The SEC out recruits Yale level teams substantially. It’s more likely that we all had the same issue. We came in with a sense of entitlement and weren’t playing focused basketball. That’s definitely what caught UK as well. I didn’t see the other SEC games. But I’d suspect the same thing with them as well.

He wasn’t today. The Yale player hit him in the throat. I would’ve been angry too.

Don’t be ridiculous. We had an off day. It happens. Sucks that it happened in the first round. But go look at the stats. We played badly today compared to the most of the rest of the season outside of maybe that loss to UK.

Yep. I have 2 of my final 4 gone already. I won’t be watching any more basketball.

Disagree. He just needs to refocus that energy. When other players mess with him, he gets angry and loses his cool. He needs to flood that aggression into focus and hit them where it hurts.

The only finger I point at officiating is the ejection. It should’ve been an F1, and in no way met the criteria for an ejection. That call was horse s***. CBM is one of our best players, so losing him absolutely affected the game. If he isn’t ejected, we probably win the game and advance. Other than that, the officiating was bad, but pretty equally so.

At this point, who cares about the rest of the teams. My team is out. The only reason to care at this point is if your bracket isn’t totally busted.

Take likely just played their best game of the season and are going to come in too juiced in the next game. I seriously doubt they make it past the next round. So I doubt we will get to see that UConn match up.

This is why I hate this single elimination format. This is way better than what we get in college football. But Yale is not the better team. They probably played their best today. And for us, this was arguably the worst we played all season aside from that UK game. The way we played in the SEC tourney, I had a feeling we were due for an off game. I wish we didn’t have it in the first round.

Not in the slightest. Every team has off games, even the best ones. That’s why I both hate and love this tournament. But any championship structure that has a single elimination component is flawed.

This is inappropriate and actually violates board rules. Not allowed to character attack our players on this forum!

My problem is that it is inconsistently applying criteria. If you want to talk about recruiting, Freeze had a better recruiting class than most of the coaches in front of him. If you want to talk about what coaches have done in the past, he has won more SEC games than most of the coaches in front of him. If’s like they only looked at coaching records last year with no other context and considering no other years. Really dumb way to estimate coach quality. Case in point, Sark’s record prior to this year was 13-12 at Texas. It took Oklahoma taking a step back for them to have any relevance.

I don’t buy into any off-season power rankings. They are all pretty nonsensical. This one is very egregious though. I have no idea what the h*** they are basing their decisions on. At no point were they even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this chat is now dumber for having read it. I award them no points, and my god have mercy on their soul. I mean seriously… Two of the top five have not coached a game as an SEC head coach. I get that year one of freeze was unimpressive on the field. But he did it with no talent. We’ve made massive upgrades in talent this off-season. It looks like they haven’t paid attention to anything that’s happened since like mid-November. Seriously? For some of these newer coaches, they’ve given them complete credit for what they did outside of the SEC and ignored anything that they’ve done in the off-season. Yet they’ve done the opposite for some of the other coaches, including freeze. No idea what the source was for this. But it is typical off-season speculation garbage. Look forward to seeing them proven wrong.

I’m going to say this again . I think this is Pearl’s best team. That final four run was incredible. This is a better team overall, regardless of how far we make it into the tourney.

Anti-Bruce? Eh. We’ve had some games this year where we’ve been on the beneficial side of bad calls. I think bad officiating is all about expectations. Our game against MSU was violent. That game is probably on their mind as they are calling this Ken.