A good season to be over.

Back for football

Stay well fellow RCZers,

--RC

I hope Mr. Dickinson comes back but I also hope he realizes how much work he needs to put in to be at least a fair defender. He will never be the defender that Mr. Azibuke was as a senior but he has more game on the offensive end. HCBS has shown how great he is with players that stick around for several years I just hope the young guys on this team have an appreciation for that and the willingness to put in the work to be great.

Who will stay? I will be pleasantly surprised if Jackson and McDowell stick around. If the draft boards are correct, Furphy is gone despite his not being remotely ready for The League. I am paraphrasing, but as the analyst said on CBS today, I love the big guy's offense, but he gives away as much on defense as he scores on offense. Harris is coming back, although Adams says he is undecided. Too many blowouts this year...a team that didn't play defense worth a damn most of the year.
Self played his starters to death, and seemingly every game with a day or two turnaround ended with a bad defeat. I think he could have managed minutes better, and I don't think the transfer portal plays into his strengths as a coach at all. I hope next season we get back to KU basketball.

Good riddance to a bad season and the worst team under HCBS. Thank goodness for 2022, because it’s been 1 and done in every other tournaments since 2018 w/ some true butt kickings

HCBS and the staff need to reset, and go scorched earth. Most frustrating season in a long time, and frankly Kansas is better than this. Their performance has been subpar and this down period is directly tied to the NCAA investigation which is on the staff. Retrospection.


Jayhawk for life so won’t say burn it all down, but dang this season was total crap

I wonder if the players that transferred are glad they did? It will be a long time before they play again and a lot can happen. I think Riverhawk brought up a good point about the transfer portal not playing into HCBS' strengths. I hope the young guys stick around and develop because that is where we have seen the most success. I do not think Mr. Furphy is gone as some suggest as he is not that unusually gifted. If he learns to shoot as well as Grady Dick did last year then that is different, but right now he does not have NBA written all over from my perspective.

Yeah, happy to be done suffering. Ever since the loss at UCF, this team's weaknesses were exposed. Frankly even if McCullar was healthy, I'm not sure we would have gone much further. I have VERY mixed feelings about Dickensen. Ironically, I was thinking of who I wanted him to emulate and I immediately went to Azibuke. Azibuke on offense was 10,000x more aggressive than Hunter. Azibuke dunked literally everything and God help you if you tried to get in the way. Hunter relies in baby hooks, mid-range shots and doesn't seen to want to engage in contact. On defense the differece is night and day in favor of Udoka. Despite this, Hunter seems to get 20 points and 10 boards like clockwork. I just think with his talents, if he could play more physically, we'd be looking at 25 and 15 and probably 3 or 4 blocks per game. I don't know where he'd be on any draft boards, but it appears to me that he could make as much (or more) money in NIL pay at KU than he might if he were drafted in the 2nd round and wound up in the G league.

Anyway, I hate the NIL and transfer portal, so who knows who will be at KU next year. Time to dust off the golf clubs.

Can someone explain how HCBS can miss so badly yet, the always angry Hurley is likely going to wing B2B titles. UCONN seriously a commuter schools might end the year with their 6th NCAAT, including B2B. That really sticks in my craw. KU wins one very 10-15 years and damn UCONN has 5 in 35 years. What the hell is that? UCONn cheated but nothing vacated, just annoying, really want them to fail.

It is annoying that KU cannot have this type of success. Meanwhile Ku has lost in rd of 32 in 4 out of last 5 tourneys.

Thanks HE. Makes me even more frustrated with KU’s 2 in 25 years. UCONN must have a deal w/ the BB devil. The number of low seed UCONN teams winning it all, while 1 seed KU terms blow it is just arggggh!

Can someone explain how HCBS can miss so badly yet, the always angry Hurley is likely going to wing B2B titles. UCONN seriously a commuter schools might end the year with their 6th NCAAT, including B2B.

To be clear, UCONN is not a "commuter school" and frankly is about the same size (and campus population) as KU. It's in rural Connecticut with the biggest "big city" being Hartford which is about as exciting as Topeka.

Their women's program is CLEARLY a blue blood based on their history, which has allowed them to build a big enough basketball fan base to support a solid men's program. They also get to recruit from the Northeast NY/Boston corridor and the Big East has returned to being one of the best and most exciting conferences in the country. Hurley (despite his petulant behavior) is a "brand name" coach and has clearly figured out how to run a program. I don't like him and I feel like if he doesn't change his behavior/attitude it could interfere with his success going forward, but that's really not my problem. Bottom line (and living in the NYC metro area) UCONN is seen very favorably in the eyes of college basketball fans, and I'm sure any HS kid who gets a call from Hurley in this area will be very interested in what he might have to offer.

On the other hand, UCONN never made a final four prior to 1999, so their 5 titles came in very short order. While this might appear to be somewhat "dynastic" based on timing, they also did it 3 different coaches: 3 under Calhoun, 1 under Kevin Ollie, and the most recent one under Hurley. So it's hard to argue that you can have a "dynasty" when the program has changed hands 3 times.

As a KU guy, I'm clearly not a UCONN fan, but as a someone who has lived in their general vicinity over the past 25 years, it's not a mystery that they can be successful. If it makes you feel any better, UCONN fans were seriously angry when Timberlake decided to come to KU as UCONN thought he was theirs. Watching him struggle through most of the season made them feel better about it. If they win it all this year, at least we can say that we beat them early in the season.

Nevertheless, my prediction is that the Hurley era will end a lot like the Bobby Knight era ended at IU, except more quickly as this kind of behavior isn't acceptable nowadays.

Not O- the frustration is UCONN hits bingo way too often, and KU goes decade + . Too many times the Hawks when they should make FF stub their toe or hit bad luck. 1997, 1998, 2010, 2016, 2017, 2020 ( darn you Covid). Then the luck in the championship game has been horrible. 1953, 1957, 2003 Hawks are 6 points from have 3 more titles. This year UCONN is a juggernaut, hope they can be stopped, but man talk about blessed success.