A last place team in the Big 12 without their best player shouldn’t even lose to 1-9 Florida A&M. I bet a McDermott team still beats a team like that comfortably without Craig Brackins in the lineup.
Steve Prohm
- Thread starter tyler24
- Start date
I mean I definitely agree, although losing to a 1-9 FAMU team would justify why we might be the last place team in the Big 12. Can't get any worse than last place.
Definitely. I pray Haliburton doesn’t sit out for any reason this year. Without him this team is historically bad.
If he hasn't found a lineup rotation that works with the talent he has yet, then I'm skeptical that he ever will. The pieces just don't all fit together right. Almost any way you cut it you end up with one do-it-all guy, two OK guards with massive holes in their game, and either two posts who don't complement each other or a one dimensional post and a guy who can shoot a little but not do much of anything else. I agree with you; if this team is on the bubble by the end of February I'd call that one hell of a coaching job.
I think this is the primary cause of trepidation most fans are experiencing; unsure as to what type of team Prohm is building.
The alarming thing is we shot well against FAMU, and still lost. Obviously TH would have changed that, but I would have liked to think it would take horrible shooting to lose to FAMU.
Like the McD era, we’ve got a lot of one-way pieces. And Prohm struggles with matchup making as it is.
I think the next game at TCU will tell us a lot about what to expect for the rest of the season. I am not expecting a win, but I am expecting maximum effort; diving for loose balls, fighting like ravenous dogs for rebounds, etc.
I want to see maximum effort from our team, even if the execution is lacking.
I want to see maximum effort from our team, even if the execution is lacking.
Yeah I think the team last year reminded me of some of Hoiberg's teams where if the offense wasn't hitting on all cylinders, the game was going to be extremely tough to win. The talent was definitely there offensively to put you into position to win almost every single game you played. There didn't need to be a ton of structure when things were going well because the guys were able to create so much offense on their own. When things were not going well though, it was hard for those guys to be structured.
The team this year needs to be structured. Although there is talent on this roster, no one besides Halliburton should get free rein to do whatever. Coach Prohm has to run an offense that puts every single player in their best position to do something positive. A huge problem with that is that the greatest ability of our best player is his ability to distribute the ball to open guys and we just don't have shooters. Outside of Tyrese, we flat out don't have guys that can consistently knock down a shot. Tre Jackson and Caleb Grill are essentially unplayable if they can't make outside shots and neither of them have shown the ability to do so. Will they in the future? Probably, but right now they can't and it's absolutely killing us.
Yeah we technically didn't shoot terrible, but putting up 68 points against that team is terrible. I don't care who is out on the floor for us, that's bad. Also, Rasir Bolton certainly helped the percentages going 5-5 from the 3pt line. Nixon again rounds out the night going 2-7, Mike Jacobson goes 0-3, and Conditt decided he wanted to get in on the action I guess with his 0-1 performance. Terrence Lewis looked like he played pretty well, but he only got 2 looks from beyond the arc while Mike, Nixon, and Conditt shoot 11 threes and made two of them.
We also had 18 turnovers.. 18. That's horrific. There was a specific couple of plays for the game that rounded out the entire night. I believe with under 5 minutes left to go we had good penetration from Bolton and he dished it out to an absolutely wide open Prentiss Nixon in the corner. A shooter in the corner typically misses 90 percent of the time short or long, but Nixon's shot was so awful that it clanked hard off the front side of the rim where there was no chance for an offensive rebound. FAMU got the rebound and went on a 2-1 fast break the other way for an easy layup. The next play they trapped Bolton and not one player helped him out. No one flashed high, no one back cut to the basket, and it led to Prentiss running to the half court line. Bolton threw a bad pass right to the FAMU defender and they ran out for another layup.
You're delusional if you think thats as good as it was going to get under Hoiberg, he was just scratching the surface of what the program could have been when he left. He would have had not only one of the best returning teams in the country, but he would have no doubt had some top transfers and Top 100 high school recruits coming in that year also had they known he would be there for years.
This narrative that the program had reached its pinnacle and it was all downhill after is completely laughable. Good programs become good and then they continue to build on that, winning leads to better recruits, college gameday, fan support, creating a hostile home court advantage.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that had he stayed committed to Iowa State we would be a perrenial Top 10-15 program right now, won a Big 12 title, and made a deep tournament run to the Final Four or multiple Sweet 16's and Elite 8s. You're constantly selling him short on what he accomplished here.
Your fanboy is showing.
It stands to reason we were seeing the level it was going to stay remotely close to. I don't think we would have continued to reel off 3 seeds, because Niang and Morris were going, and those guys just don't grow on trees. 3 consecutive 3 seeds is as good as it's likely going to get.
Per Kenpom ISU was 26th, 30th, 20th, and 16th in Fred's last few years. They were 20th in Prohm's first year.
That's the level that was established and it probably would be about the same. ISU finished 15th last year per KenPom, surprisingly the highest of the era. I think if you're assuming it was going to get even marginally better than what was established in that 5 year period you're borderline crazy. The issue isn't that he hasn't elevated the program, it's that the floor is SO much lower.
CycloneErik
Well-Known Member
I'm actually in agreement with you. Although there isn't anything we can use to prove we would've gotten better defensively, with the players Hoiberg was able to yearly bring in, we were bound to start getting better in that category. Had Fred stayed, I'm sure he would've also been able to self reflect and know that his teams were not going to get to where he wanted them to be by just being an offensive power house. Outside of Fred's first year, the teams he put into the tournament all had the ability of going far. I know they ended up not doing so, but like I always bring up, it's all about getting there and we were probably bound to go farther than just the Sweet 16 at some point in time.
Thats all you got huh? Typical, just resort to name calling when you know Im right. Those days are long gone and they arent coming back anytime soon, it took him 5 years to build it into something special, and its taken Prohm about 4 years to completely destroy it.
We shot well, but FAMU shot insanely better. They had to have been well above 60% shooting in the second half, and it's not like we weren't guarding them at all -- we regularly took the entire shot clock away from them and they still made multiple contested/off-balance/otherwise garbage shots. What killed us in this game was the turnovers -- they had 10-15 points on turnover fast breaks alone. Just horrible offensive execution in merely passing the ball around for long stretches of the game. I think TH would've won us the game alone even if he didn't score a single point, just because he would've turned the ball over less.
Maybe. Perhaps. We will never know.
I do know that going from a bottomfeeder to a respectable program is easier than going from respectable to routinely challenging the blue bloods for supremacy (e.g., as Virginia has to UNC and Duke) is much harder. Maybe Fred makes that leap, maybe he doesn't, but the level of competition in that rarefied air is rather homicidal.
Fred is the one who chose not to create that or commit to that.
Maybe you should direct some of your frustration towards him. He left us.
I am on the record that I think the most likely outcome of a longer Hoiberg tenure was more of the same -- good teams, great ones even by our standards, but inconsistency on defense and some lax discipline leads to debacles like UAB that hold the program back from our highest ambitions. We would have been good, but we were not about to replace Kansas as the best program in the conference and maybe in the Midwest.
Taking a trend, drawing a line, and assuming things continue on that trajectory forever is the worst kind of reasoning. Reality is not so linear as you presume.
That is what we were when Fred left, though.
He never won a Big 12 regular season title or made a deep run in the tournament.
The team that wins the Big 12 regular season title and makes consistent runs to the second and third weekends of the NCAA tournament is not the 15th best team in the country. It is like the #5 team in the country, at the worst. See Jayhawks, Kansas.
This is exactly what has me concerned. A coach needs to have an identity for the program and I'm not sure CSP has it right now. Every year is something different and there doesn't seem to be a clear vision or direction for the future of the team. He seems to be getting the best players he can, regardless of fit, and then trying to figure it out when they get here, which hasn't panned out recently.
The problem with that is the fact that Prohm's first two teams would've been immensely greater had Fred stayed. Not arguing that Prohm did a bad job or anything like that, and not saying it wasn't hard for Prohm to start a recruiting base at Iowa State, but had Fred stayed he would've brought in guys like he always had that could've helped the team reach a different level. There also probably would've have been a drop off like Prohm had because Fred was an established coach at Iowa State and had recruiting ties in a lot of areas.
