(01-06-2025 10:24 AM)blazers9911 Wrote: I think he will ultimately be a good player. But as we saw last year, dudes aren’t just going to come from Juco and be ready to go day 1. I’ve actually thought Kennedy has done a great job pivoting and getting guys in Juco that are going almost overlooked the past few seasons. Now he needs to pivot back to the portal and find a guy who can play d and has a high a/t ratio. Those guys aren’t going to be recruited by the world because they aren’t scoring 20 a game.
I've never had a problem with Kennedy's ability to attract and (more importantly these days) retain talent with limited resources. We're unlikely to get the perfect player ever again (the days when we compete with UAT and Auburn for talent are just over), but we usually have very good talent, and we don't seem to lose the ones we want to keep at the rate some other programs suffer. That's a testament to Kennedy's specific skills that are, frankly, perfect at this level. McGhee is very good and getting better; he's just not a perfect traditional point guard. Ezewiro was an important addition, and he's going to be even more critical in conference play, but he has flaws that are the reason we got him and he's not a rotation guy at Tennessee. And Kennedy is going to miss on some like Gordon, because every guy in the portal is looking for something to make them money either now or in the future. When they get to a place and it doesn't seem like it's going to work out (and he struggled mightily early), some personalities just walk out. This is going to happen every single year from now on, because Kennedy (for better or worse) will take chances because he has to in this new NIL/portal world.
And I've heard Kennedy talk about his own frustrations with the schedule, so I cut him some slack on that. He got very frustrated in a meeting when someone suggested he should bring better teams to Bartow, and he said, "Alright. You do it; you're in charge since you think it's so easy. I'll play anybody you can find who will come here. Guys, the teams you're thinking about...they won't come."
So the caveat to what I'm about to say is...I'm glad he's here, and I know we can't do better. But my issue is in-game coaching decisions, and it has been since the day he arrived. These are not new problems. And let's recap: We were down 14 to Vermont and 16 against Middle. At home. And we still should have won both those games after massive comebacks. We had 8 point leads against Longwood and Illinois State and blew them late. We had a TWENTY-SEVEN point lead against Arkansas State and lost by NINE. At home. And we had an 18 point lead against North Texas, which is a good team. The issue isn't talent. We have players good enough to dominate at times. They're "ready" enough to
blow people's doors off for parts of every single game we've played this year. We can, of course, blame the players to some extent for these collapses because good players handle pressure better than we have, and basketball is certainly a game of runs in the best case. But good coaches don't blow leads (or get down huge early) like this over and over again
year after year with
different players. I don't know what needs to change, and I was encouraged that we came out and dominated the second half against Tulsa after a great first half. AK's teams do generally seem to finish seasons better than they start.
Maybe he needs to go the way some NFL coaches do and give up some in-game decision making and concentrate on leadership and management at a high level. Because he seems very very good at that part of the job. Maybe there are no better options on the bench to handle that responsibility. But we'd be roughly 13-2 if we could play 40 minutes like we've played 30 in every game this year. We cannot continue to collapse and blame it on the players when there's only been one common denominator these past five years.
(And also when your best player is an incredibly talented passive beta who will probably be better in the NBA than college you have a problem that is very difficult to solve. Vasquez is the only one who might be able to fix it because he clearly thinks he's the best player on the court and sometimes is.)
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Greg Gordon has left the basketball team
