Jump to content

Recommended Posts

Posted

IMG_8219.thumb.jpeg.f2a2acdb4c965c4e8a8f1a4d98bab20c.jpeghe’s going to finish with 900+ wins and barring any health setbacks he’s got a legit shot at 1,000. he’s a half of game, legendary coach. i sincerely hope he wins a title before he retires. he deserves it.

  • 4 weeks later...
  • 5 weeks later...
Posted

this tennessee team is going to come back down to earth and regress to the mean, and people are going to call it a choke job, but ask yourself: just how good should this team be?

IMG_2580.thumb.jpeg.584354d7ee34d51e41e51a3d04150843.jpeg

la owe is the only guy with any chance of playing in the nba, and that’s as a role player. zeigler is their best player, and he’s a 5’8” college lifer who isn’t a great shooter. for as mediocre as he is in the tournament, rick barnes is seriously an amazing regular season coach. there’s a reason he’s going to retire with 900-1,000 wins and end up in the hall of fame. this year has been another inexplicably successful coaching job thus far.

Posted (edited)

this team should not be this good. rick barnes is an outstanding college basketball coach. he’s got nowhere near one of the best rosters in america, but his team is one of the very best, even with injury and transfer issues. i thought they’d get blown out tonight, but instead they held the best offense in the country to 53 points and very nearly won. he’s done this for more three decades now, taking lowly rated recruits and creating teams which are far greater than the sum of their parts. i honestly don’t know how he does it.

IMG_2842.thumb.jpeg.c67cef351f879a28e05e0b0e0b0b4697.jpeg

IMG_2841.thumb.jpeg.c98ef29ee2f74e968e5d76943019fc15.jpeg

IMG_2840.thumb.jpeg.fa4157229e665b56f309bae2e61b8a16.jpeg

Edited by Derka
Posted

tennessee has lost 3/4 and i spent all of last weekend arguing with their dumbass fans who once again think they deserve better. but game against florida in knoxville tomorrow. his seat won’t actually be hot if they lose, but those fans are basically only happy whenever they’re mad at rick barnes, and they will have a field day the vols lose that one.

Posted

btw, the end of rick barnes’ tenure here was not nearly as bad on paper as it was experiencing it in real time. i am by no means saying we should have retained him- his time here was done. i’m just saying that the story on paper isn’t nearly as bad as it was when actually experiencing those seasons in real time.

for example: 

IMG_3348.thumb.jpeg.76c633c76610eb951556ad46644373de.jpeg

that’s probably not as bad as you remembered post-2006. then you take his final season here as another example of it being a lot worse in real time than how it looks on paper: we went 20-14 (just not acceptable to lose 14 games with that team, and some of the losses were bad) but we didn’t actually lose to any bad teams. here’s our 14 losses by final kenpom ranking;

39 stanford in OT

38 osu in OT

at 38 osu

at 25 west virginia 

20 butler in the ncaa tourney 

16 isu away

16 isu home

16 isu big xii tourney 

at 14 baylor

12 kansas home 

12 kansas away

11 ou home

11 ou away

1 kentucky

talk about a brutal schedule. yeesh.

Posted

there’s been some discussion lately in other threads about me “pining for texas to hire rick barnes” or how im “obsessed”, or “pretending to be a vols fan now”, so i just decided to address those posts here, in the pertinent thread. none of this is new, it’s all just a reminder:

i did not/do not personally know rick barnes very well. i’ve had a limited number of conversations with the man. i was in 7th grade when he was hired, and i was still around the program at that time, and i met him at his first ever Texas practice, where i spent the day playing 1-on-1 against his on nick, who is my same age.

barnes took over for tom penders, a man i’d known my entire life. one night when i was like 10 years old i got out the family address book and called up coach penders and told him that i thought he should change his starting lineup. that was my relationship with the Texas HC for as long as i could remember, and for 13 year old me, rick barnes was just the new guy in that spot, and i was excited to meet him and to get to know him and his team.

so, barnes takes over, we win the league his first year, and we spend the next decade as one of the 10 best programs in college basketball. rick barnes has taken the thing that i love the most and brought it to greater heights than i’d ever imagined. the guy is hugely responsible for so, so much happiness and fulfillment in my young life. i really do cut for the guy, no doubt.

then things go downhill. and when things go downhill, the torches and pitchforks come out, and i’m here on these boards every day taking exception to the way that people are talking about and treating rick barnes. i get labeled a barnes apologist/sycophant, and this only serves to dig me further in to my position of supporting barnes and disavowing any and all personal shit talk and ill will towards him. i already really really liked him, but i had been radicalized at this point.

now, he gets fired in a horse shit move by the feckless steve patterson who didn’t have the balls to just go ahead and fire barnes, instead hoping barnes would fire all of his closest friends himself in order to save his job. so that was bullshit too.

but here’s what you’ve really got to remember: i had, and still have, many close relationships with several former players and coaches who were here under rick barnes. so when he got fired, so did my friends; so did my mentor. on top of that my mentor’s wife was a teacher at my school at the time and i was very close with her and their children as well. these people’s lives were uprooted when this happened, on top of which is the fact that all of these people who i am friends with genuinely love rick barnes themselves. like actual, real life love. all the while his name is getting dragged left and right on these boards, and im being attacked for defending him. it was personal to me. it affected the lives of lots of people who i really really care about, people who themselves are extremely close with rick and his family. it was a hard time. 

so now, with all of that said, all i have left to say is this: if you really still think im just some rick barnes fanboy who is “obsessed” with our former coach, simply because i still root for him and wish him success, then i just don’t know what to tell you other than it says a lot about your maturity level and understanding of the situation. i am not infatuated with some random former coach, i simply, and unabashedly still support our former coach, a guy who has meant a lot to me without me personally knowing him particularly well, as well as a guy who is very important to lots of people who are very important to me. this is basic human shit here. if you still don’t get it, you probably never will. 

  • Hook 'Em 1

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.



×
×
  • Create New...