2019-2020 Open Thread

[waterhead]

I dont know who shit in your coffee, but you clearly miss everything with this post. Everyone is acted accordingly. We are now playing Tier 1 games instead of tier 4 games. Win or lose tier 3/4 games do absolutely nothing to help you

Yah...this is how you do it! Schedules like this scare me especially after losing some senior leadership. But this is what you want to see...a coach who is not afraid to not only meet a challenge head on but to create the challenge himself. It could be tough to make a tourney run this year but these younger guys are going to be prepared in years to come.

Brannen is ALL IN and is trying to get that national brand back in the big lights. Now it's just wait and see if he can get the job done.

Love him or hate him...Cronin generally avoided stacking the OOC and most years was happy with a string of cupcakes. This is not sour grapes...it was talked about almost every season and was a reality. It was also part of the reason many fans thought we were artificially ranked heading into the dance most years. Because we feasted on too many patsies early on. Of course there was also the theory that we were short on talent (offensively) and didn't have the fire power to keep up when it was a win or go home atmosphere. I tend to believe it was a combination of both.

Cronin worked his system and was very successful (and smart) in a way that may have made him artificially higher ranked as a coach. There is no guarantee that Brannen can make his system work with tougher schedules but I do like the idea that he is going to try.

 

[cincyguy13]

Yah...this is how you do it! Schedules like this scare me especially after losing some senior leadership. But this is what you want to see...a coach who is not afraid to not only meet a challenge head on but to create the challenge himself. It could be tough to make a tourney run this year but these younger guys are going to be prepared in years to come.

Brannen is ALL IN and is trying to get that national brand back in the big lights. Now it's just wait and see if he can get the job done.

Love him or hate him...Cronin generally avoided stacking the OOC and most years was happy with a string of cupcakes. This is not sour grapes...it was talked about almost every season and was a reality. It was also part of the reason many fans thought we were artificially ranked heading into the dance most years. Because we feasted on too many patsies early on. Of course there was also the theory that we were short on talent (offensively) and didn't have the fire power to keep up when it was a win or go home atmosphere. I tend to believe it was a combination of both.

Cronin worked his system and was very successful (and smart) in a way that may have made him artificially higher ranked as a coach. There is no guarantee that Brannen can make his system work with tougher schedules but I do like the idea that he is going to try.

Agree. Cronin’s philosophy seem to be to make the tournament anyway he could. And if he could get 25-30 wins it was going to be hard for the committee to not let us in. He really wasn’t interested in embracing the older players and building the brand. This is where I think he messed up. If you build the program to a national level, you can get better players. Seems like brannen is trying to do that. Like you said, it may not work, but I like that’s he’s trying.

 

[waterhead]

It's going to be very interesting to see what happens with CJB in full control of the players and scheme. I wouldn't call it much of a secret to say that Cumberland dictated a lot of what Brannen could or would do without having a POY that struggled at his natural position in the "preferred" offense.

Putting every player at the preferred position may be just as advantageous as giving Cumberland the keys to run plays designed for him. He did try to run Cumberland from the wing but it just didn't work. Running 5 out motion all the time is going to showcase what Brannen wants to do and what he has been recruiting for. Most of his recruits can play multiple positions.

My gut tells me it's going to be a tough year to make the dance but who knows how things will work when we get to see the real McCoy. It's definitely a reason to maintain some level of optimism for this season. We are just so young and inexperienced with 7 new recruits who don't know how to run his system and the rest have only been in the system for 1 year. It took several years for some of Cronin's guys to master his defense. I would expect a similar learning curve with Brannen's system.

 

[cincrulz11]

We have to remember that going into last year we thought this upcoming season was going to be terrible no matter who the coach was. It was looking like we would have a slim chance to make the tournament.


Now going into this year it looks like we'll be a team around the bubble. Might make it, might not, but the team is going to be very young and hopefully exciting.


That's a much better outlook than we all thought we'd have.