So for those of you who are into comic strips, you'll all know Lucy Van Pelt. She's the one who plays football with Charlie Brown. Specifically, she's the holder for Charlie Brown's field goal kicks. And whenever Charlie Brown is just about to kick the ball through the uprights, Lucy will pull the ball away, and Charlie Brown will miss, slip, get thrown up in the air, and fall on his back/head. While this happens, Lucy will start laughing at Charlie Brown, be very pleased with herself, and basically call Charlie Brown a little sissy bitch while she stomps him once in the nuts.
Now, I think that all of us have a little Charlie Brown in us. We're often suckered into thinking that we are wonderful, only to have things crash down on us. And, really, this is what happened to our Illini on Saturday night against Penn St. We got suckered into thinking that we were impervious at home. And really, when I look back at it, I think that this one falls back to coaching style, really.
Gene Keady never won the big one. His teams were usually good, very disciplined, and ran the system that he installed. But that strength was often the downfall against opponents that recognized that and found ways to combat that. The system creates this "right" way of doing things that you have to believe will overcome whatever the environment throws at you. What the system does not do is create an environment that is particularly adaptable. And sometimes teams that have no business beating you score an upset. That seemed to happen to Gene quite often in the big dance. And Bruce Weber is a long-time disciple of Gene Keady's. And we see some similarities (thanks to The Jig).
Penn St. took a page out of North Carolina's book from last year's championship game, and then edited it a little bit. They ran three different defenses against us, and never played any one of them long enough for us to develop a real rhythm. They went man (which never works, but you have to almost do it so that the other schemes work better), 2-3, and 1-3-1. Not matchup, but straight up 1-3-1.
All in all, this an ingenious combination. First of all, they set the matchups such that we needed to run 3 guards to play our best defense. So, our line up goes Dee, McBride, Jamar, Randle (or Warren), and one of the bigs. This left Rich playing the 3 spot, where he was undersized. Visions of Roger getting dominated on D against Iowa, Ohio St., and UNC came to mind. But we'll go with that later. Where I want to go now is with the Illini offense.
On offense, we had two guards who were relatively inexperienced in Jamar and Rich (who is in his first season as a starter). Neither of them look particularly comfortable in the motion, and certainly neither of them have a superior understanding of where to move. That's a problem. Add on the presence of Randle, who just can't shoot past 8 feet, and that becomes a big problem. In the past, we've always had a forward that can step out to 17 and hit open jumpers. Nick Smith and Jack Ingram were very helpful in that regard. We don't have that this year. Auggie seems relatively comfortable with that 17 foot baseline J off the pass. But Pruitt's range stops at 4 feet, and Randle's stops at 8 feet. That would be the logical place for Warren, but Warren is Warren. Anything outside needs to come from the guards.
So, back to our guards. When you have a team that's running 2-3, you need to attack the free throw line, or attack the wings with a skip pass or fast reversal. When you have a team that's running 1-3-1, you can't attack the free throw linewith abandon, and need to attack the corners. When a team keeps changing up their defense, you need to be able to adjust to where your motion attacks. When you have inexperienced guards, that becomes difficult. Particularly when you don't have the mentality to just force the ball inside, and live with what comes out of grunt work inside (which, actually, I thought was the best option all night). And more importantly, why we didn't switch over to playing 2 bigs, and pound them with high-low, I don't know. We would've killed them on the glass (it's hard enough to board out of the zone, much less when we're that much bigger and more athletic). We probably would've lost something with our offense, but really, they only had a couple scorers, and we could've adjusted to what they were running.
Penn St. took advantage by forcing us into a 3-guard lineup on defense, and then attacked our offense with different looks that forced our inexperienced guards to shift on the fly. Ordinarily, that wouldn't have really mattered a whole lot. Our defense would have shut them down and kept them to 50. Only on Saturday, it didn't.
I don't know if it comes through in the stat sheet, but McBride's guy killed us. There was a serious weakness there - inability to stop penetration, the inability to defend the post, and the inability to box out and rebound were all there. It reminded me so much of how we would leave Powell in there to get killed last year. Eventually, we switched matchups with Randle and McBride (very late in the game), after they had done a lot of damage from the 10 minute mark in the 2nd half forward. But even then, you'll notice that McBride's man got the last offensive rebound and put back to win the game for Penn St. And even before that, we had lost about 6 points or so due to McBride's defense. I don't disagree that his shooting was good for us, but we couldn't have him at the 3 position. But last year we'd be okay because we could put either Luther or Deron on a bigger guy on defense and be fine (Deron with his strength, and Luther with his ability to rebound with big men). This year, we can't do it.
Which goes back to one of my ongoing concerns. I still worry about Bruce Weber as an in-game coach. From what I've seen, he recruits well, he develops a good game plan, and he has the team prepared. But when teams have matchup advantages on us, we tend to let them run with it. Usually, we've been good enough to win anyway. But every once in a great while, we lose when we shouldn't because we don't make adjustments. I hope that this is the only time this season that this happens. It only happened once last year (Ohio St.), and even in the championship game, we were getting good looking shots in the first half, but were just missing. Against Penn St., we weren't getting good looks at all in the 2nd half, and we were never able to make the adjustment. Obviously, I'm using the exceptions to prove the rule, but when you're as good as we are, you look at how the losses happen. And I think that there's a trend.
Oh well. Let's see how we bounce back. Back to work in the Big Ten. All of a sudden, we're looking at 11-5 or 10-6, and needing to fight to win a share of the Big Ten, much less take it outright. I still think that 12-4 is possible, though it would take us winning that 5th road game. Regardless, this team is still poised to make a run in March, and maybe even April. Our players are still getting better, and hopefully our in-game coaching will, as well.
-Chairman
