People talk about improvement and not seeing it. The reason, I think, is because we aren't consistent. That will happen playing so many young kids. We just will be inconsistent not only from one game to the next, but within different parts of a single game! But, if you look at the team overall, we are MUCH better than we were earlier in the year. Night and day. Not even a question. I struggle with how anyone that knows anything about basketball, or even just athletics in general, can't see that! And, most individual players have made strides in understanding how to play the game. But, they are freshmen and sophomores and need to have the off-seasons to develop college skills and to get stronger. That's the case with freshmen at most any school (except the blue chip freshmen studs at the power programs). We unfortunately just have to play ours a lot of minutes.

We have games where our improvement in many areas really shows, and other games where we don't see it. But, it is there. And it will continue. I hate how people who don't understand or have knowledge of what it takes to be a D-I basketball player feel able to judge if we have D-I players on our team. I don't have personal knowledge so I don't think I can say for sure what players are D-I caliber, but have studied the game enough to know that you can't judge them as freshmen or even sophomores as to how they will turn out as juniors and seniors. And I think they have shown at certain times that they can perform at this level, they just haven't done it consistently. Several of our players had offers from schools other than NIU, so people who are actually EXPERTS felt they were D-I caliber players. How do you expect us to listen to some of you, with no experience or expertise, telling us they aren't? Guys like Chaz have an obvious beef and agenda against the NIU basketball program, relishing in their struggles. I don't understand it, just have to accept that's why. He/they really can't be that ignorant about the situation to believe the coach and players are as bad as they post in this first year. It has to be more of an emotional response to try to get others to believe the crap they are pushing.

Intelligent posters seem to understand that you can't accurately judge MM, or the young players, yet. But, you can get some ideas. And, I think that MM and the players all show that at times they have the potential to be good as the next couple years go by.