I full admit I wanted to do this last week but I was too, busy and then too lazy. One of the reasons I wanted to do it was after seeing some of the unrealistic expectation (in my opinion) after the football team hit a bump in the road this season.
In the infamous words of Denny Smith:
"We are, who we thought we were"
In early December of last year, during our disastrous preseason, I was talking to one of our Basketball coaches and he confided, that in his opinion that team had maybe 2-3 Div 1 calibur players. In his opinion only N. Colorado had less talent than us. Later that season I talked to another coach and out of the blue he stated that in his opinion we most likely had 4-5 D-1 players, and a couple of that number were freshman. While the number differed between the coaches I got the feeling that the level talent is something that concerned them greatly. Despite this observed lack of team talent I would like to point out that 2/3 or so through the conference season were very much in the hunt for a top two conference finish and even numerically had a chance to win the conference crown. Unfortunately coaches started to figure out what we were doing and frankly our team got tired, and we fell to 5th. The coaches had two sets of goals for recruiting. In no particular order, one address the weakness of the returning team that lead to our flame out, and upgrade the over all talent of the team regardless of the position.
Jump ahead to this year, I truly believe we are better and more talented at every position (filling the void left by Dissly might be the one position that is arguable). We are also much deeper, and with the 11 active players and because of the flexibility of our players we can go at least 3 deep at every position. Still a lot of our is team talent is very young. In my opinion our talent level is still not on the level as Montana and Weber. We are most likely very much middle of the pack at best. I talked to Huse about our lack of offence after the Scrimmage this year and he was very worried about not having a lot of scoring on the the team this year. His answer was that he and the coaches were going to have to figure out a way to manufacture scoring this season in key positions. The conversation went on from there but I was totally impressed on how Huse approached the game. He is not a coach that assembles his players teaches them the offence and throws them out on the court, best talent wins. He knows how to coach x's and o's. His Offensive system is a tough one, and players get frustrated by it (example pre conference last year), but when they run it correctly we can compete with any one in the Big Sky regardless of the talent gap. The preseason prognosticators our right on talent alone we are 5-6 in the league (OK maybe a little better), but most of those guy's do not give Huse and his staff enough credit. WE do not have the talent that a lot of teams in the league has but Huse will find a way to manufactured some wins some people think we should not get. The key thing to look for in the pre-conference schedule progress and chemistry improvement with each game. Huse is counting on some players to become bigger and bigger contributors as the season progress. Player who may not be big contributors the first ten games who start contributing as the conference season begins ( ala Davis last year).
Realistically we should look at this team as a 5th place team, Unfortunately we have seen what Huse can do with a scruffy bunch of basketball players, thanks to last year. As a result my expectations are higher. I think a league championship is just to plane unrealistic, I do believe on any given day this team could thrash any team in the league. We may hit some unexpected bumps in the road this year, but it should be a fun ride.
BTW: Just wait until Huse has his freshman based program completely installed. When almost all of our key returning players each year have 1-2 years under their belt with Huse. No more teaching 5 of your top 10 players from scratch how to run his system. Plus we get future Big Sky Conference star players like Howard , Rush, and Miller in the starting line up and taking a leadership role it will be something special.
Just do me a favor: Give a break to our Freshman and Sophomore players. Remember they are still very young and have a whole lot of future in front of them. They are going to make mistakes, let them develop naturally. I am mainly talking about Howard, Johnson Hennessy and Blackshire. Some of these kid have been in the program for a while, came in with high expectations, or where JC transfers. I have the feeling that some fans expect perfection a little too early. Remember though they have limited college experience, but they all have a lot of potential. Understand that they are playing early in their carrier, and still have a lot of development to do. When you see Johnson out their scoring 16 points in a game, and you think but I wish he would do this or that, remember this; he has a lot of time to be taught, (and Huse will teach), but 16 points pretty good for a sophomore. Keep it positive with young kids.
