Hideous

I’m not looking foward to the UK game. Right now they would rape us. I hope we can pull it together.

I am 65 years old, 5’8", and overweight. Samardo outrebounded me by just four.

He is a low, slow jumper and worse has no nose for the ball. Worse still is he doesn’t seem to want the rebound.

This team has multiple weaknesses. It may be a very long season.

They let down ADMM.

oh-fer on all DVR’ed games this year (including f-ball, which i know shouldn’t count).

I’m glad I had something going on last night preventing me from going to the game. I’m not sure what my record is for profanity in an hour, but last night would have taken the crown.

To top off this oh so perfect sports day, I now have a sty under my left eye lid which is causing the whole thing to swell up. UL sports is putting me through the same physical transformation Woogie went through in Something about Mary.

And I hate coming to that conclusion and actually admitting it.

Folks, this all boils down to one thing, recruiting. We are seeing what several years of misses and head scratchers have produced. I wasn’t all that upset about last night because I realized just how bad recruiting has been. I know people can point to Samrdo and Jennings, but for each of those we’ve had a Swop, a Kouric, a Goode, a Van Treese, and a Millard.

My view is and has always been there’s no reason why Louisville and Pitino shouldn’t be able to recruit and sign three top 50 players every year. We’re the type of program that can do that. Unfortunately, recruiting under Pitino has been all over the map. I think he needs to reevaluate how he judges talent. We should be reloading, not rebuilding.

I have no idea how this season will turn out, but I suspect it will be more like 2006 than we might like to admit. I also think we need to stop pinning our hopes on this mythical 2011 recruiting class. Considering how bad 2010 recruiting is, it’s going to be two long years before we can count on a bunch of highly regarded freshmen to get things right.

If you don’t think this all boils down to recruiting, look at UK. Last year they were a laughing stock. They changed coaches, signed a great group of players and now they’re on top of the world. I’ll take Wall and Cousins for one year over four years of Swop, Kouric, Goode, and Van Treese combined.

People are saying absolutely ridiculous things. It’s one game where we had two starters and our sixth man out. We lost lottery picks that led us to two consecutive elite eights.

It takes Pitino’s teams a while to figure out their identity. That was true even when we had A LOT of returning talent. We’re very young right now and we have key players hurt. It’s going to be a growing process.

UK has more talent than us this year, they might be us this year after we’ve beat them the past three years. UK is a very good basketball program and we’re not going to beat them or be more talented every single year. In fact, a lot of you are acting like UK basketball fans with your unreasonable expectations and irrationality. Relax and support the team.

Lock this thread? Give me a break. This is not the 2006-2007 season, the 2007-2008 season, or last season. Those pinning their hopes on a “typical” late season surge are missing the point. The frustrations some of us have deal not with one loss. They deal with the culimnation of years of uneven recruiting.

Just for a minute, forget about the three guards who didn’t play and just focus on the frontline. When Pitino came to town, did anyone ever believe our frontline in year nine would feature players like Swopshire and Goode as major contributors? I know I didn’t. These are guys who should be in the Sun Belt, not the Big East.

Something has been amiss with Pitino’s recruiting for almost his entire tenure. Maybe the mythical 2011 class will change all of the that, but that’s still two years off. Unfortunately, the 2010 class looks like a major bust as well. That just shouldn’t be happening in the ninth year of Pitino’s tenure.

I know I’m not over reacting to one loss because it didn’t really bother me. What does bother me and has bothered me is the state of recruiting. If you can look yourself in the face and say it’s been what you expected when Pitino got here, then you and I have different expectations.

Can he really be this bad of an interior player? 1) He won’t play above the rim per instructions from Pitino 2) whom he won’t listen too 3) A lot of people are saying that he won’t put out the effort to rebound, but I fear he may just not be as talented as we thought or is a headcase. Hope I’m wrong, but I think he may be a flop.

Braswell, their freshman big man thoroughly schooled Samardo and Jennings. I had real hopes for Jennings at the end of last season, but he’s gone into the zombie mode. Samardo looks more and more like Ellis Myles.

Don’t know who bartenpa is, but he has the right view on our recruiting. We have a tendency to think that any recruit would be nuts not to sign with us, but the fact of the matter is that it is difficult to expect great classes every year. Really good coaches at good programs are working their butts off trying to recruit the same kids, so we’ll lose most if not all of our targets. CRP will get good recruits to sign in the future, but we should enjoy the growth of the players we have. Van Treese is a project, but could turn out to be very good in a couple of years. Siva will be a player. Buckles could be a star. However, this will not happen this year. Unfortunately, Samuels is turning out to be a real head-scratcher. Go back to the early 2008 games, and it looked like he would have the kind of season that would make us wonder if he would be a “one and done”. Now I seriously doubt that he can even make it in the NBA. Jennings was going to be a star, based on last years improvement. Now he looks like he did at the beginning of last year. What I’m trying to get across is that there is a certain amount of luck in recruiting. Calipari had a fantastic class last year, and it looks like Wall, Cousins and Bledsoe are all the real deal. But that doesn’t mean that he’ll follow it up with hits. Everyone needs to chill and let the season play out. While I can’t imagine being a #1 seed or winning the Big East, some of these kids will be a pleasure to watch as they finally “get it”.

ok take a deep breath and count to 10………..OK now let’s not freak out quite yet, first off in this game we were missing 3 of our best players, secondly the way Charlotte was shooting it might not have mattered if we had Kobe out there. They were shooting out of their minds that was no where near their season averages, Charlotte will not shoot like that again this season. Another thing that we need to remember is when anybody plays us it is their “Super Bowl” these teams come out with a great desire to beat one of the most storied programs in the country and they know this will help their RPI’s dramatically, example, did you see (not if you have directv) how crazy the team and fans were at UNLV, they wanted to beat us so bad they even stormed the court, they weren’t storming the court cause they beat the no. 15 team in the country, they were storming the court because they beat Louisville. We showed in the UNLV game that in a hostile environment we had heart and fought to get back in that game, we could have easily given up, but them tying it late showed me something. Remember this is a young team that just lost 2 players to the NBA Lottery, I said lottery people. I have been watching Pitino for along time as I have had uk season tickets since 1990 (primarily for the Louisville game as I am a Louisville fan) one thing is for sure pitino always gets the best out of his guys and he will have them ready when these games start really mattering. It seems like every year their is a few fans and critics that start to write pitino off, usually about this time of year and then boom, we go win the Big East championship. If anything the Charlotte game might give these guys a little more desire to work hard making this loss a good one in the long run. If you saw saw Preston, Jerry, and Peyton on the bench they looked pretty upset and looked like they couldn’t wait until they get healthy, we will be fine people, we probably won’t be a no. 1 seed but we will be in the mix in march. Now as far as recruiting goes, to be fair to Pitino he has had awfully bad luck, we had the 1 player in the country coming in Jeremy Tyler but some ass lured him to Israel where he is struggling I might add. Also the 2011 class has the potential of being 1 class in the country. Now with all that optimism said, we really need Samardo and Jennings to step up, they are Sophomores now and really need to start dominating the paint. Our 3 point shooting has got to get better, missing wide open looks and forcing bad shots, we need to get our shooting going. The recruiting thing will work itself out, just remember at least with Pitino we don’t have to wonder when our program will have to vacate final fours or go on probation. Hang in their Cards lets stay positive we will be fine!!!

I think the elephant in the room we are all ignoring is whether Pitino is still at the top of his game. Certainly, something has gone amiss with recruiting. I’m not a newcomer to this view either. Recruiting has been my consistent pet peeve with Pitino since his third or fourth year.

We signed some great players who never arrived, but as they say close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades. We’ve also signed a lot of head scratchers and we all know the list of names. Just as importantly, some of the great players who have shown up have been enigmatic at best.

Given the mercurial nature of so many of our top players, I have to wonder why player development has been so spotty. Is it fair to say Pitino’s motivational tactics just don’t work the way they did in the 1990’s. Actually, I think that is the most reasonable answer.

Despite my dour outlook on recruiting, I do think Willard will help keep Pitino from playing as many of the mind games he has played in the past few years. Clearly, they aren’t working as he could never get DC right, lost E5 from time to time, and even fought with Twill (remember the two sparring against MSU last March).

Charlotte’s offensive rebounds – 20
Louisville’s defensive rebounds – 18

It is absolutely inexcusable to get outrebounded with regard to offensive rebounds on your team’s defensive glass. If this team doesn’t start rebounding, there’s no doubt we’re going to see more of the same result. As far as Samuels goes, I don’t see any reason not to sit him down. If we’re going to lose by 22 with him playing, what does it really matter. Maybe that will get his attention and convince him to start playing with a sense of urgency he has yet to show.