In reading both this board and Orangebloods.com, it appears to me that many UT fans overestimate the quality of the talent we have had at UT, particularly this year. I think we have had some good to great talent over the years, but this talent does not even approach the level of the UNCs, UCLAs, Dukes, Kansases and Memphises of the world. We are heading in that direction and will have a major influx in the next few years, but we aren't there. Each of the teams in the Barnes era have had major shortcomings. Think of last year when we had 2 guards under 6 feet playing at the same time. I think a few have underperformed, but many have overperformed. This year has been a major disappointment to us all, but if we step back, the talent just isn't there. I don't think Barnes did a great job coaching, but he didn't have that much to work with. Ultimately, this is his fault to some degree as recruiting has not panned out the way he would have liked. If we had just hit on one or two recruits who we had a legitimate shot at landing, we would be talking about another Elite 8/Final 4 type year. I think he made some major mistakes in recruiting the last year or 2 (J'Covan Brown comes to mind), but it is hard to argue with his overall success in recruiting. I think talent is more important in college basketball today than coaching. If you have enough talent, it can overcome mediocre to poor coaching. That is becoming increasingly obvious to me. I look at the games we have lost and at other highly ranked teams across the country, and what I see is players making plays. Not all scripted, drawn up plays executed perfectly, but athletes making plays one on one and beating their man. UT just doesn't have those players right now, and most of the years we have gone about as far as our talent could take us. I think Barnes is a good, but not great coach. I don't know how many coaches are better than he is as a combination of both recruiting and x's and o's, but I believe he is good enough to take us more final fours and with a little a luck a national championship. What do others think? It is very hard to disentangle coaching and talent. But I am not convinced that coaches like John Calipari, Billy Donavon, and Jim Calhoun are that much better in the coaching department than our very own Rick Barnes.
There are any number of benefits for college basketball in general --- and UT specifically --- to summer basketball participation. Getting "coached" is not one of them, except in EXTREMELY rare circumstances.
Disagree with OP. I would venture to say that we have more talent than Duke. Duke has better coaching than us. Duke is better than us. Coaching will trump talent.
i agree completely w OP. to me a sure sign that our talent level is not there was Barnes keeping Mason and Atchley in the lineup after some very questonable and mediocre play, consistently missing shots and really bad passes. to his credit we have seen signs of improvement from dex but overall I think his coaching has been poor this year, no question.
Coach barnes is no coach K, but there is no way in the world we have better talent than duke. No way.
i don't know if we have a single guy on our roster that would start for duke right now. pittman and james are the only two candidates, and i'm not convinced they don't come off the bench. barnes doesn't coach offense, and we don't have guys that can create offense. that's our problem this year. barnes is a great defensive coach, a great recruiter and a great ambassador for Texas. i would not trade him. not for anybody. however, our ability to play good offense under barnes seems to require that we have a lottery pick running the point.
Probably true, but my point was to tell the poster that RB estimated, three years ago, that PG would be covered today. It wasn't really a failure to recruit, other than to fail to cover for unexpected good fortune.
Florida won back to back national titles and now hasn't made the big dance in back to back years. Talent or coaching?
No offense, but what do you guys expect? It's just not possible to stay at a high level year after year when guys leave early. Next year we have a #2 recruiting class coming in plus Lucas. We'll reload. But in the current state where guys leave early, or don't come at all (Miles), we are going to have some down years.Barnes is getting way more out of Dex then anyone thought. He got way more out of Klotz, Ivey, and DJ to name a few. With the level of uncertainty coaches have to manage, if we have great talent 3/4 of the time, I think that's a win. We don't have UNC, Duke, or Kansas kind of history. Even in this down year we still have a higher seed then most of Pender's teams.
RB is getting us talent and has done a great job of doing that ever since we landed TJ Ford . This year was an exception. But even returning 4 of 5 starters from an Elite 8 team, I still thought we would struggle this year b/c we don't have people who can create. D. James tried but he is inconsistent.
While it is clearly only one indicator of talent, it should be mentioned that this team has NO players that were McDonald's All -Americans in high school. Compare that to the top teams this year.
Duke has a whole team of McDonalds AA's. For you to say that they don't have more talent is crazy and shows how little you follow college basketball and recruiting. Also, to say that RB doesn't coach offense is argueable also. DJ and Durant didn't get drafted for their defense. Pittman's improvement has been conditioning and on offense. Not defensively. RB just recruited too many guys that can't shoot and can't create their own shot.
Yeah, the comment about us having more talent than Duke left me virtually speechless. Look back at our recruiting classes from 07 and 08 and compare it to Duke's. Sure, some of their players don't pan out like they should but they get some of the best players in the country year in and year out and have been for 20 years. But both our starting point guard and shooting guard can not shoot. And we bring a shooting guard off the bench that, while having a perfectly nice looking stroke, is also absolutely no threat to drain a three. That is absolutely unheard of in a major college basketball team. This team has glaring weaknesses. The talent just isnt there. And that's Barnes' fault as well, but I'm not sure John Wooden could have gotten THAT much more out of this team.
Maybe the backup plan included DJ Augustin not improving so dramatically that he left after 2 years... Jim Boeheim got lucky with Carmelo Anthony, in that his one-and-out guy happened to play with an experienced surrounding cast. If Kevin Durant had come to Austin one year earlier or one year later, that could have been us...
I just looked it up and yes you're right . . . I was thinking of his teammate I guess who coming out of high school was considered the better player . . . can't think of his name right now but he played at New Mexico or NM State.
I've been thinking about how Barnes compares to other top coaches, who some might rate more highly (correctly or incorrectly). Now, this obviously is only one way to look at it and there are many more factors at play than simple coaching ability, but I started a list of some of the (arguably) big name coaches that Barnes has beaten while at UT. Here's what I came up with: Herb Sendek Roy Williams John Calipari (multiple times) Jim Calhoun (multiple times) Bill Self (multiple times) Tubby Smith Billy Gillespie (multiple times) Bob Knight (multiple times) Eddie Sutton (multiple times) Lon Kruger Bruce Pearl Ben Howland (multiple times) Bo Ryan John Belein (multiple times) Jay Wright I'm sure there are others that I've missed. Not solely as a result of this list, there aren't a whole lot of coaches I think could have done better than Barnes has done here. I still think that talent rules the day.
Well, tonight's game should end this debate once and for all - we lost this game completely due to coaching, and for no other reason at all. Damn, you February - March hoops fans were right, I should have listened to you all along...
