a meaningless exhibition game. We had double digit leads twice in the first half and were only down 4 with about 4 minutes to play. Crean has to figure out what he's got and who can play with whom. Looks like Ingram (19 pts.) and JAR played pretty well. TC is probably going to experiment a lot early. I'm sure people are ready to jump off a cliff already, but it's just too soon. Let's see how we do in a meaningful situation before we all commit hari-kari.

Anybody around here actually get eyes on this? Be interested to hear reports on individual players . . .

I didn't even realize the game would be on radio, so I missed it completely.

Looks like their Twitter feed will be a repeat of the past. We got a halftime tweet then nothing...

I would have been disappointed if Crean had only tried to win the game. I want him to build a team. Play everyone to see what they need to work on. A bad coach has never gone to a final four and multiple sweet sixteens.

Crean has to figure out which combinations work best. Not only are the players trying to learn each other, but Crean is trying to learn them, as well.

"The boys and I are getting to know each other, see who we are and what we can be."

-Coach Norman Dale


I don't know if there is a Jimmy walking through the door for Crean

Ole Coach Dale was a pretty smart feller....

Monkdawg said:

---

Crean has to figure out which combinations work best. Not only are the players trying to learn each other, but Crean is trying to learn them, as well.

---

No fluke we lost. Charlotte is predicted to finish 10th in C-USA this year and they have more talent than Crean has going into his fourth season here. They're predicted #153 in D1 while we're sitting at #215. Crean and the players can learn all that's possible about one another and they still won't be able to compete in the SEC. The talent is not there.

It's ridiculous how soft poster's on here are on HTC. It's year four and, now that Horne is out, a walk-on is his top returnee…. YEAR FOUR!! Cook, Ingram, JAR and Oquendo are decent players but are any really a Dawg? Marcus, Nemi, Kenny, Charles, JJ, Yante, etc were Dawgs and will always be Dawgs. The walk-on Etter is the only contender for DGD I've seen in the Crean era. I miss Dawgs.

Those guys mentioned above went five straight years without a losing record in Conference. They played some damn good basketball and I really enjoyed the 42-30 stretch with JJ here. Crean took over a program with one losing record in 6 years and his tenure will end this year with four losing records in four years, and this year he will struggle to best his 2-16 first year.

Just an epic failure.

A bad coach has never been to a final four and multiple sweet sixteens. Never!

Soft on Crean? Hardly. But I'm not going to rag on the players right now, particularly since I have not seen them play. If they can't play one lick, that's not on them. If they don't play hard, then that's on them, and I'll rag on them.

In the short body of work I have seen from Josh Brooks, if this season craters, I have no doubt remedial measures will be taken. And I also wouldn't bet against him to hire someone beyond our perceived attractiveness. My dream is he says enough is enough, and we throw real resources at it, beyond just head coaches salary.

You may be right, but why don't we let it play out a bit? None of us have seen them play. Let's see them play before we jump down their throats and criticize.

Dawg44 said:

---

A bad coach has never been to a final four and multiple sweet sixteens. Never!

---

Average coaches have had outstanding players lead their teams to greatness. It's been 19 years since Dwayne Wade led Marquette to the final four. Crean follows that up with back to back NIT appearances and never again took Marquette past the round of 32. He then went 71-91 at IU
with two good seasons in his nine there. There are tons of average coaches who could get to the Sweet Sixteen with Victor Oladipo and Cody Zeller (drafted #2 and #4). I say they grossly underachieved and I believe Crean is a below average coach that has run our program into a deep ditch.

Nostra you are not on my radar as far as posters to which I'm referring. You have a long history of being reasonable on this site. I'm not ragging on individual players. I live west of Georgia so I can't help but follow AU/UA & UAB and it is abundantly clear our talent level/recruiting is terribly far behind all three. The SEC has GREAT players and we do
not is all I'm saying.

All good SVD. We all want the same thing. I know hopeless basketball lol been watching it since John Guthrie. All I can do is hope, but I hope Brooks realizes I may not have have another 50 years left to wait.

There was no shortage of hope recently.
Don't forget that 42-30 stretch, and winning more games in a three year period (33) than any team but KY. We should have had a minimum of five Tourney teams but Fox screwed the pooch and we got two. Still some good teams with very good players who were DGD's who attended UGA from freshman to senior years. We're a full on dumpster fire now vs then. I've been to around 25 SEC Tourneys and go to all the games, that three in a row of playing on Saturday in the Semis was damn fun as well and is more than the other 22 years combined. The difference of how other fans looked at that G was palpable, we had clearly left the cellar and were respected.

I am not going to try to defend/explain away all that has happened here at Georgia, but I followed Indiana intently during Crean's tenure. Were there issues? Sure. Were there some puzzling consistent deficiencies with those teams? Yes. Did Indiana fans have unrealistic expectations? Yes. Was Crean's overall tenure at IU a success? Yes.

In fact, Crean recruited, developed and led three of Indiana's four best teams since 1994. Not many IU fans, or basketball people in general, recognize that.

You're incorrect and incredibly misleading in stating that Crean only had two good seasons in nine at IU. For starters, considering what Crean began with, the first three seasons cannot be counted against him. He inherited a program beginning at ground zero after the Kelvin Sampson violations. You are fair to evaluate Crean based upon his final six seasons at IU, from 2011-2017. In those six years, IU won the Big Ten outright twice and reached three Sweet 16s (making the tournament four of six years). Crean was named the Big Ten Coach of the Year twice.

Pessimistic/Not as informed IU fans constantly dwelled on (and many still do) the 2013 Sweet 16 loss to Syracuse in which IU appeared befuddled by Boeheim's zone. It was undeniably a poor showing, but many fans refuse to understand that that IU squad was spent by March, having expended so much energy to win a brutal Big Ten that featured several highly ranked teams.

Crean's final year at IU (really his final two) were marred by a significant number of key injuries. That 2016-17 squad began the year with wins over top-five ranked Kansas and North Carolina before injuries set in and a downward spiral occurred.

In an eight game span at the end of the 2016 season and the start of the 2017 season, Crean beat Calipari (in the NCAA tournament), Self and Roy Williams.

Bottom line: I don't know what exactly has happened here at Georgia, but it's a tough tough task to take over a program in a difficult conference. Crean absolutely has personality quirks and shortcomings, but the guy can coach. Perhaps this isn't going to work at Georgia, but there are a myriad of factors at play. Today's world of "What have you done lately?" is so cutthroat. Recruiting is brutally difficult unless you establish immediate success. Crean was likely doomed when the Anthony Edwards season did not result in significant success.

Very well stated. It is unfair to Crean to act as if he has not been successful, particularly at IU, when he took over an unbelievably tough situation. At the end, injuries did him in. Objectively, you can tell by his comments after games that he knows the game. Someone once told me the reason he struggles in recruiting here is that he is not on the same wavelength as the parents and kids in the South. Could be true. But he's been a good coach in the past.

Crean's teams finished above .500 three times in nine years at IU. I almost said three (instead of 2) good seasons but by IU standards does 11-7 really qualify? So let's give him 3 good seasons total and throw out the first three years and he still didn't do much. If you have the #2 (Oladipo) and #4 (Zeller) draft picks in 2013, I'd expect better than Sweet Sixteen.

By Indiana standards set by Bob Knight in the '70s through the early '90s, Crean was not a success. Of course those standards were totally unrealistic for a program that had been largely average from the mid-90s until Crean took over. And IU was at an all-time low when Crean began. By any objective measure, Crean recruited, developed and led three of IU's four best teams since Knight's last stellar group in the early '90s.

The 2013 #1 seeded squad with Oladipo and Zeller was the best team in the country in January and early February. That team swept four games from elite top ranked Michigan and Michigan St, but it was out of gas by March. Crean was blamed for that as well, but the bottom line was that, as outstanding as that squad's starting five was, injuries destroyed its bench and it had very little depth. Although not as hyped as Oladipo and Zeller, Syracuse also possessed future pros and its guards were significantly taller/longer than IU's. It was a terrible matchup.

Players on that 2013 team have since explained that Crean and the staff fully prepared them for Boeheim's zone, but they couldn't replicate Syracuse's length in practice and thus struggled mightily to execute the game plan. Additionally, the consensus was that they were mentally/physically exhausted from the Big Ten gauntlet and from carrying the weight of trying to bring Indiana back to national relevance with a title. That outright Big Ten championship was IU's first since Knight last did it in 1993. Crean and IU won another outright conference title in 2016 despite battling a myriad of injuries again. His final team (2016-2017) couldn't overcome even more injuries. It takes a lot of things to break right to have consistent top level success.

Thanks for your accurate posts. Facts rarely make any difference on our boards. Please post more often. I love to read posts from an honest and knowledgeable basketball fan. A poor coach has never made it to a final four and multiple sweet sixteens. Never!

The 2011-2012 Indiana team that went 27-9 overall and 11-7 in the Big Ten was the one that provided eventual National Champion Kentucky with one its only two losses. IU also defeated #2 Ohio State and #5 Michigan State that season and was on a roll heading into the NCAA Tournament. Had it not been intentionally drawn into the same section as Kentucky (to create a blockbuster rematch for TV), who knows how far that team could've gone. It took Kentucky's best performance of the season to beat IU in a rapid-paced, high scoring Sweet 16 affair.

I would just add this. Be careful what you wish for. I understand that things have not gone well for Crean at Georgia and that maybe there's no marked change on the horizon. His successor at Indiana, Archie Miller, was nearly universally hyped by media and fans. Nearly everyone irrationally believed that Archie was a significantly better coach than Crean. What happened? Archie flopped badly.

On paper, Archie recruited very well (at first), particularly according to IU faithful's demands of securing top in-state talent. Archie also tried to emphasize a grittier defensive culture in response to the outcry regarding Crean's teams' lack of defensive cohesion. But it didn't work. The conference was loaded and Archie's teams never seemed to gel very well. Who knows what exactly happened, but Archie's squads often appeared timid offensively, and they largely struggled to make outside shots.

So again, just realize how difficult it is to come in somewhere and make an immediate major impact. I realize that what has happened at Alabama and Arkansas makes it more difficult to remain patient. It just isn't that easy. The margins are tiny and the factors numerous.

Bout all the facts I need are a coach took over a program that had one losing season in the previous six years and his record through three years is 14-42. Doesn't get much simpler than that. What Crean did or didn't do years ago is a red herring. Crean has already made a major impact on UGA Basketball.

And yet, you are the one who brought up Indiana - "I say they (Indiana) grossly underachieved". We all want to do better. Again, let's see it play out a bit....

Monkdawg said:

---

And yet, you are the one who brought up Indiana - "I say they (Indiana) grossly underachieved". We all want to do better. Again, let's see it play out a bit....

---

I replied to Dawg44's numerous posts re: Crean's record of Sweet Sixteens and a Final Four while at IU and Marquette.

And, this "let's just let it play out before criticizing…" is silly as hell. This is a frigging opinion board. You, and others, can ride a coaches a$$ through a six year stretch with one losing season, I can damn sure criticize a guy that's 14-40 in three years and has us predicted to be a distant last place team this year.

Well, again you intentionally misconstrue what I said. I never implied anything about letting the whole season play out before criticizing. But we haven't even played a game that counts yet. And I could really give a crap what others predict about us, when they haven't seen us either. As I have also said repeatedly, nobody can be happy with our record during Crean's time, but the record is largely understandable when dig into the facts a bit. You just don't want to do that.

Letting the whole season play out before criticizing?? It has never crossed my mind that you were saying anything like that. I'm a data driven guy, I love numbers and facts and my posts are full of them.

We lost our top 6 scorers to the portal and some pretty good programs… Kentucky, Auburn, Ole Miss, Arizona, Dayton. Our incoming players are from UIC, Fla SW St, Cowley College and FAU plus Cook who averaged 4.2pts at Gonzaga, Baumann 3.6 at USC and JAR 0.9 at UVA. The six we lost all averaged 8.7 and higher for us last year. That's enough information for me to predict we will struggle to win more than 2-4 games in conference play. Anyone seen a prediction where we're not dead last? The other bottom 3 teams are Mizzou, A&M and SC and we're not even close to any of those.

Numbers do not always tell the story. To state JAR averaged .9 ppg last season may be accurate, but he hardly played due to injury. Cook was behind a guy who went in the lottery and another pretty good transfer from UF who had been SEC freshman of the year. Cook must have some talent or Gonzaga wouldn't have taken him. Numbers do not tell the whole story. That's why Mark Twain said, "There's lies, damn lies and statistics." Teams/players can have all the talent in the world and not win. Likewise, teams predicted to fail can succeed. That's why they play the game. I will be more than willing to criticize this team once I actually see them play, if criticism is warranted.

A couple of thoughts…..we usually don't get a lot of articles, media, etc for Georgia basketball but this year is the worst I've seen. Literally no excitement. And rightfully so when your entire team left town. I think that is the part that bothers me most. Crean said something about recruiting players that want to be at Georgia. Hmmmm. Wouldn't that just be implied? I would always expect some turnover. Some may can get more playing time. Maybe a smaller percentage would be looking for a better team. But losing your entire team to the transfer really says a lot.