The Basketball Blog - Bubbling Over

Welcome back to the world's most disappointed Basketball Blog!

According to Monday’s USA Today, since the publication began administering the coach’s poll in 1991-92, only nine teams that began a season ranked in the pre-season Top 10 failed to qualify for the NCAA Tournament.

There was no mention how many failed to qualify for the NIT.

After a 3-1 start in the Big East, the Irish have dropped to 3-7 in Conference play and are tied for 12^th place.

And though no past Notre Dame squad faced more top-ranked competition through 22 games than this Irish group, no ND team over the last decade responded so poorly, so meekly, and so accepting of its end-game fate vs. top-tier competition.

No less than four pre-season sites/publications listed the Irish among their list of potential Elite Eight NCAA Tournament teams (my own view was Sweet 16 or bust). But the only Elite Eight on the Irish radar these days can be found printed on the back of your handy wallet schedules: Louisville, Syracuse, UConn, Marquette, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, UCLA, and, just for good measure, Louisville in an encore performance this Thursday at the Joyce Center.

Barring a rebirth of Joyce Center magic (or a 30-30 from Harangody and McAlarney), the demoralized Irish will be 3-8 (THREE AND EIGHT) in Conference play with no sure wins on the horizon: South Florida, West Virginia, Providence, Rutgers, UConn, Villanova, and St. John’s.

What would be a bigger surprise at this point, “Losing Out” or five more wins in this lost season?

How'd We Get Here?

In a Conference that boasts three coaching legends (and recent NCAA Champions in Jim Boeheim, Jim Calhoun, and Rick Pitino); two rising stars in the profession (John Thompson III and Jay Wright) and 600+ game winner Bob Huggins, Irish Head Coach Mike Brey entered the season as the Big East Conference’s reigning, two-time Coach of the Year. He deserved both awards, leading the Irish to a combined 26-10 mark in that span, including a Big East Tournament Final Four heartbreaking loss in 2007.

Any logical, level-headed, subjective grade offered to Coach Brey and his staff in those two seasons would be in the A-/B+ range, with the downside in the form of 30 poorly played minutes in a 2007 first round loss to Winthrop, and a disturbingly bad 40 minutes in the 2008 second round disaster vs. Washington State.

Through 22 games this season, the only subjective grade I can offer is an F. (Or a triple F-minus, if we’re grading on a curve). As a team, the Irish don’t demonstrate the desire to box out, regardless if they’re in zone or man-to-man. They don’t help defensively, and that’s a major issue since they don’t actually guard their own men with any urgency either. They don’t attack enough on offense to deserve multiple trips to the free throw line. They show no fundamental discipline when closing out vs. open perimeter shooters (leading to even more offensive rebounds); and they don’t follow their own shots. They just recently started fouling as if they meant it.

They want to win, they try to win (outside of Pauley Pavilion), but there’s no accountability for the little mistakes that make the difference between winning and losing. There’s not a player on the team that shouldn’t have been sat down multiple times (much earlier this season, when it still mattered) for terrible individual defensive fundamentals/efforts, reaching for a loose ball, or the absolute failure to set or fight through a solid screen.

We’re told they need to “grow up” (always a good sign for a team full of seniors and juniors). We’re told they need to play with their backs against the wall (because handling success is such a chore these days). And we were told that the one thing that made the program nationally relevant, a 45-game home winning streak, was actually “a bit of a burden.”

You know what else is a burden? Convincing 6,000 disappointed fans to show up at the Joyce Center for an NIT first-round tilt vs. Drake.

Ten Down, Nine to Go

That’s the most likely scenario facing the Irish if they don’t put in the necessary work to compete with the remaining eight opponents and a now mandatory (no matter how wretched the team’s cumulative effort) Conference Tournament game.

Can they turn it around? Of course it’s possible. There’s not a coach in the country that wouldn’t go to war with Harangody/Jackson/McAlarney and any two college basketball players willing to set a screen or box out his own man vs. upcoming opponents South Florida, West Virginia, Providence, Rutgers, and St. John’s.

The schedule finally affords a relative break, with two of the three toughest remaining teams (Louisville and Villanova) visiting the Joyce Center, where the Irish have won 45 of their last 47 matchups. (At present, there’s no reason to discuss this team’s end-of-the-month visit to Storrs to take on No. 1 UConn.)

The 2009 Irish staff and roster have two choices:

Choice No. 1 is obvious – Compete the way you competed in Maui. Fight the way you fought vs. Georgetown and Louisville. Coach and prepare the way you coached and prepared when you had a legitimate plan to counter the superior athletes you KNEW you would face in every Conference game for the last three seasons.

What’s Choice No. 2? Watch the ball bounce off the rim instead of being the guy that goes and gets it. Run under every screen and hope for a miss; complain about every non-call; and keep wishing those big mean guys would stop competing so hard against you.

Continue to condone lazy defense, indifferent screening, and treat one-half of the basketball court as one of life’s little inconveniences.

Choice No. 2 is the easy way out…they wouldn’t have to change a thing.