Alabama vs. Valparaiso in Las Vegas!

I think we all better be patient for a lot longer than 3 years in this rebuilding process... We have a dynamic recruiting class coming in next year who certainly can take some starting spots from some of our current players. I expect we will be better next year but thin as we move forward with a different philosophy. It will take more than one recruiting class to get us competitive with the top 40 teams in the country. I think we are now really seeing that we dont know really what CAG's recruiting philosophy was - or maybe sign whoever would come - regardless of roster need. Its amazing how deficient some of our current players are at scoring and how very average our FT shooting is. I often wonder how committed some of our current players are into committing the extra personal time to improve their shooting both FTs and around the arc. If you shoot enough of them you will get better.

Tough loss last night! I feel like it's a chemistry/lil'early kinda thing right now. It's gonna take a few games for this team to find the core, but I suspect they will. Valpo is a tourny team so not to much harm in the short end this early in the season.

Athens-LA-Tide said:

Tough loss last night! I feel like it's a chemistry/lil'early kinda thing right now. It's gonna take a few games for this team to find the core, but I suspect they will. Valpo is a tourny team so not to much harm in the short end this early in the season.

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I agree with you. I'm not going to give up on this team yet. Lots and lots of new faces and CAJ is trying to figure out the best rotation. It was our first game away from Coleman and we had a bad night shooting. Lets not go into the 'we don't have talent", 'we can't shoot' and 'wait until we get our good recruits in' mode just yet.

I watched the whole game last night/this AM on the youtube stream. Looked like we were kind of sleepwalking, maybe due to the late start on our players body-clocks. Also, having about 50 - 100 total people in the stands couldn't have helped - looked like a UAB football crowd. But we seemed lethargic many times during the game, and many open shots weren't taken as players hesitated, and then just passed the ball. At times it seemed like the old CAG offense, where we "just pass the ball 30 times" each possession. But i'm going to stay positive and think most of it was due to a late starting time and an invisible audience. We're better than what we showed last night.

Let me qualify my comments. We're only 4 games into the season and there's a lot of basketball to be played and I'm confident we'll improve as the season goes on because I believe in CAJ. With that being said I'm disappointed we lost 2 very winnable games and these are my thoughts:

My issue is that the loss to Dayton and Valpo didn't have anything to do with talent. We lost both those games because of undisciplined plays down the stretch and things like missing lay ups. I made a long post about the mistakes we made in the Dayton thread so I don't want to rehash everything but these two losses don't have anything to do with talent. I hate to say this but just watching the team play (so far this year) it seems like Grant is still the coach. The 2 games we lost are eerily familiar to when we played Wichita St, Oregon and other good OOC teams. We would play pretty good and then just fall apart down the stretch. Same thing has happened during the Dayton and Valpo games.

Just to clarify, I didn't expect to win the SEC this year or be a top ranked team. I just thought the team would be better coached at this point. If we lose to UK that's fine. They have superior talent. Dayton and Valpo don't. Again, I have faith in CAJ but just thought we would be playing fundamentally sound ball at this point in year 2..

dayhiker said:

Let's back off posting that a player contributed nothing. TF has a policy of no player bashing.

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I'm not bashing anyone. For clarity I should have posted his line from last night: 0-2 from the floor, 2 turnovers, 2 personal fouls, 0 assists/blocks/steals, 1 rebound, 13 minutes played. I'm a Hale fan and wishing, no doubt like CAJ, that more nights were like Ball State and less like Valpo, and how to make that happen because we need lots more of the former for this team to attain its goals.

Just sucks that we lost last night.


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Is Valparaiso a good team?

Mystical said:

Is Valparaiso a good team?

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They're traditionally a pretty good team. Horizon league champs in 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2016. They made the NCAA tournament in 2013 and 2015.

I didn't get to watch the game, so I can't comment on our play. With that said, this game and Dayton are the 50/50 type of games we will need to start winning to turn the program around. Neither team is going to be more talented that we are, but they are both fantastically well coached. Bryce Drew and Archie Miller are both great head coaches, from great families, who bring a lot to the table with their respective teams. We should beat them on athleticism and talent, but we won't beat these teams until we are better coached than they are. I strongly believe Avery will get us there, but I've felt since preseason that we might be a season away from it. Losing these two games just solidifies in my mind that we are close, but not there yet. I do believe we'll get better as the season goes along. Hopefully top 3-4 in the SEC which will probably leave us on the bubble.

There's no shame in losing this type of game, but it would have been a huge bump for the RPI at the end of the season if we do wind up on the bubble. We need to beat St Louis, it might be detrimental if we came away from the neutral site tournament empty handed. Thankfully we still have tough games against Texas and Oregon. Both are winnable, and if we can get one or both, plus the St. Louis game, it would go a long way in legitimizing us in the committees eyes.

To answer the question of how good Valpo is. Like I said, we should beat them on talent, but I have a lot of respect for the Drew family. They've been involved with Valpo for a long time, and they've built a very competitive team. They are usually in the top 2-3 teams in the Summit league, and they can make some noise in the NCAA or NIT wherever they wind up. For those who might not remember, Homer Drew, Bryce's dad, was the coach who built the team from obscurity. He was the coach in '98 when Bryce, now the head coach, hit the half court buzzer beater for a huge upset against Ole Miss in the NCAA tournament. That was their first NCAA tourney win, and they've been pretty consistent since then. Scott Drew, Bryce's brother has built a monster out at Baylor. Great coaching family, solid individuals, and legacies in the game.

dayhiker said:

I looked up the RPI the afternoon of the game and was surprised to see theirs so low.

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So much of the RPI is built around quality of your opponents, and prior to playing us Valpo had a terrible schedule. They beat 1-3 Southern Utah, Trinity Christian, (who I don't even think is D1) and 0-6 Coppin State. Their only quality game was against Oregon in Eugene, which they were blown out. Doesn't surprise me their RPI is low now, but it should be top 75 by tourney time.


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