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(02-26-2018 12:37 PM)stxrunner Wrote:  

(02-26-2018 12:19 PM)UCGrad1992 Wrote:  Bump.

I throw my hands up in surrender. Head is hung down. I come peacefully. Out of the darkness and into the light. I have seen enough. For the life of me, we have folks openly questioning Mick on so many different levels as if the season has been a failure, has since concluded and our fate in the NCAAT has been decided. Our team is two wins, TWO WINS, from winning it's first conference championship outright and potentially looking at getting its highest NCAAT seed in the Mick Cronin era. No one is talking about this. It's "we've seen enough to know we suck," "we haven't beaten anybody worth a shat," "Mick is psychologically and emotionally challenged," and "who can replace Mick as coach." It's still February! I just don't get all the negativity. I just don't.

High expectations for the season have been met thus far and can continue to be until the end of March. I look at what we've achieved this year and has a Mick Cronin team been AP ranked this high for this many weeks ever? He's never had a team ranked #5 before that I can tell you. Has Mick ever led wire-to-wire in the conference standings before and considering so doing in an improved conference? Do we see any McDonald's All Americans or 5 star recruited guys on this roster? We played games this year on a "home floor" in another state for flux's sake! We've witnessed arguably one of the greatest players in UC basketball history conclude his Senior year on his home floor. I could go on but eff it. It doesn't matter. Yeah, I get it. This is a sports message board and we're opinionated sports fans. Lord knows I've had my opinions over the years on here too. I guess I need to take a vacation from this stuff lest I get sucked into the black vortex of Cincinnati despair. Bartendress, make that a double!

I know why people are worried, because it feels like we've seen this before. I think most people are just hedging their emotions by saying we stink so that they can at least be right if we don't achieve our goals.

The big thing that people should keep in mind, IMO, is that all our goals are still in front of us. We haven't lost anything yet. Conf reg season title, conf tourney title, sweet 16 are all very much in play. We very much control our destiny in all of them considering our projected games/seeds. This next month is going to be a lot of fun. I'll worry about getting all mad later. This next month is what we wait for all year. We've set ourselves up. If you can't enjoy this next month of basketball, I seriously question why you even watch the sport.

The other thing to keep in mind is that under Mick we actually haven't seen this before. This has been quantitatively the best team of the Mick Cronin era by a large margin. Maybe that leads to the same results and we don't win the conference tournament or go further in the NCAA tournament, but this has objectively been a different kind of team than Mick's other teams. I wrote a long post last year talking about every team since Bob Huggins took over. Their were 5 teams I considered great UC teams (based on numbers/results) and all 5 occurred under Huggins. Mick has had a nice, steady run of good to really good UC teams, but never a team that objectively had these kind of metrics. This is the first Mick team that seems more like that group than the really good group. Hopefully the results starting this week through the end of the season will bare that out.