I don't know where this team came from but they are sure fun to watch these days. We've got a nice little 4 out of 5 streak going now as we head for Blacksburg on Saturday. I'll refrain from going into detail on how disappointing it is that we are just now seeing this instead of getting really revved up for today's festivities. Better late than never.
Coach Drew got another skin on the wall, that of a well known Big East team. We also broke through in the post-season for the first time since the Truman administration. Think about that for a second. The football team not being in a bowl game since '94 all of a sudden doesn't seem that bad. It's been a roller-coaster with Drew this season. We were good early, terrible in conference, and now we've turned it on again. Add to this the whole Barnes thing last week and Scott seems pretty questionable (not in a bad way). His recruiting is not debatable. Just about every published record that follows it says he's doing a good job.
Look, I know the real knock on Drew when it comes to recruiting is that he does it by going negative on other schools and hiring AAU coaches. I'm not in the living room with potential players so I won't say for certain that it happens but there is a ton of smoke there if you catch my meaning. It's not a secret that other coaches in the conference don't like him. I think the apologists will say that they don't like him because he has started winning. While this may be partly true, you don't read or hear about bad blood between Mike Anderson and other coaches. Mizzou was worse than we were two seasons ago and they passed us this year. Where is the anger there? On the AAU coaching front, let's just say that I hope we get to a point that we don't need to do that in the near future.
On the coaching side, I think he's grown a little this year but still has a way to go. Discovering that playing a zone defense protects his immobile bigs in the middle and ditching the smurf line-up improved the team greatly. Unfortunately he didn't figure it out until after an at large bid was out of reach.
All this being said, I know that I had said earlier that his seat should get warm if next year looks like this year, but I think he's made enough headway in the past two weeks to put that to rest barring a total collapse or a dead hooker found in his trunk.
So onto Virginia Tech. I haven't seen them play at all this season so no scouting report from me. I think we'll need to get more out of Dugat (0 points last night) if we are going to keep going. We might also consider playing defense in the first half to prevent an opponent from shooting damn near 80% from the field. Just a suggestion.
That's all kids,
Murph
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