Did State have any 5-star players? I don’t see any of their names on the nba mock draft boards. I don’t see us as having been less talented than teams that are destroying us.
We absolutely do look like we’re incompetent in many aspects, but I attribute a lot of that to not being prepared for what teams are doing to us. Our guys have shown they can do the things we expect of them. When they don’t do those things, part of the reason has to be that they’re not put in the right situation to be able to do the. And then, because we aren’t supremely talented, things tend to snowball.
We aren’t recruiting at the levels we need to survive with our styles. We, as fans,get overly enamored of whoever we do get, and then the rah-rah bunch tries to tell us that our #50 recruit is really underrated because... the scouts hate us/no one (properly) assesses foreign kids/he was hurt as a junior so e’erbody slept on ‘im/JB will coach ‘m up/he’s ideal for the zone... But really we have a team of 20-100 kids, and we are a better team when we have nba talent.
JB is tired/old/lazy now. The zone doesn’t have the same impact it once did—why would anyone expect that other coaches wouldn’t figure it out? We don’t have pro players. We have fundamental flaws. Our power positions are played by people without power. Our veteran point guard has been displaced by a slow rookie. We don’t have a firm lineup.
It’s lots of things. But it’s not that the other teams are more talented, save Duke.