Chris Datres

You bring up good points about the economics of the landscape and they’re not fun ones. But if the bought talent gets hamstrung by an archaic offense and questionable (being nice) decisions during winning time, who cares what the NIL war chest is. Look at how SB handled the final 3 mins in their upset bid. They played to win and got on a wave. We played not to lose. That’s a mindset and that’s bad coaching. Do you think Samford and Morehead are overflowing with NIL funds? Their conference competition is maybe a tick below ours but they figured out a way to get it done. We’ve had better teams than this fail at this spot. When May’s 3 banked in, I thought it funny that this group would be the one that finally broke through. And then, all of the intelligence drained.

Yep, and that goes to having the wrong personnel on the floor. DW is one of the few offensive bright spots in the first half and yet, Tarke is out there for the first 3 minutes of the 2nd half -- just long enough for him to unnecessarily cheat on defense and leave his man open in the lane for an easy bucket. When Tarke is on it, he's pretty good. But when he's been bad in games -- and we've seen plenty of Bad Tarke -- it's a hilarious disaster. Like, stop shooting dude, they're leaving you open for a reason.

Isn't that always how it works out? If we're able to pull off the win, we'd have had a better shot in the championship.

When you're the better team, you should win that game. We were the better team tonight and the defense against those snipers was on point...for 36 minutes. When May banked in the 3 to put us up 7, I thought that was a sign. But when we got the stop at the other end and decided to go into clockball with 4 minutes left, I knew we were in trouble. This is a choke of epic proportions that puts every one of our past disappointments in the conference tournament down a peg. I have no idea why in the world you wouldn't just keep running your offense and working the ball down low to CT with that 7-point lead. Oh wait, I know. It's because we have a choking tactician on the sidelines. How man free throws did we shoot tonight? 7. Shameful. As soon as we got that 7-point lead, that was the time to run the offense thru Charles and force Charleston to either collapse and open up a shooter or get him to the free throw line. He had finally figured it out in the lane in the first half and yet only had 2 points in the 2nd half (while also committing a couple of insanely dumb fouls for anyone, let alone a 5th year senior). But instead, freakin Paar is in the game and DW is out there on an island all by himself with no one coming to the ball. Then we gotta chuck up crap at the shot clock horn when we hadn't done that the entire game. Tarke should have been stapled to the bench after the first 10 minutes of the game when he showed that he was gonna be Bad Tarke and throw up a bunch of crazy crap around the rim. He did NOTHING tonight. But he could have made it all better if he flushes that breakaway layup. Nope, that was too much to ask of him. Weak. This also points to the lack of player development and regression we've seen throughout the season out of a lot of players. Who got better as the season went on? DW, Tejada (though still an enigma at times), and that's about it. I'd put Lowery on the positive side too but he needs to get tons better at the offensive end. I love his defense and his activity on the boards. So now the elephant in the room. I'm done with Skerry. Great guy, keeps his players out of trouble (for the most part), graduates them, gets them opportunity post-college. But he's hit his ceiling. You have to be a winning coach in this situation when you're up by 7 with 4:00 left against the best team in the conference. You can't have offensive liabilities on the floor during that time. You have to realize that certain players don't have it tonight and make sure they don't continue to hurt you. But most of all, you have to make your players better as the season goes on. The player development over the last couple of years has been lacking. I can't count the number of times I've watched a big man this year take it soft to the basket and miss layups. That should be corrected in the summer, not allowed to fester throughout the entire year. He's brought in a pair of D2 All-Americans in the last 2 years and both players looked like they wouldn't make a roster of any D1 team in the country. Worst of all, we still try to win games via the caveman era. We haven't evolved with how the game has evolved. And yet, when we needed to go to that in the last 4 minutes, the wrong personnel is on the floor and the wrong gameplan is called out. This is a shameful choke.

We've done so well with me not being able to watch or listen to the game live that I think I'll do it again for the semifinal game too unless it rains here which is not in the forecast. Impressive effort by the freshmen to carry the day, especially Williamson. Big step up by Tarke to sort of jumpstart things in the 2nd half and get us rolling. The 3-pt defense since the 12:00 mark of the 2nd half vs W&M has been very impressive. That'll be ultra necessary against Charleston as they'll whip it around the perimeter like they did against us in the home game. Only way we're gonna beat them is if we keep up this same defensive effort and if we shoot like we did at their place. Charleston's that white whale that for the most part we haven't been able to take down in a big spot. We've proven they're beatable. Just have to play that same game from January. Oh, and that's another 20-win season. Of course, there will be those who will foolishly place asterisks on it and that's their agenda. Would you prefer the consistent 20-loss seasons from 1998-2011?

There are 29 teams who haven’t reached a conference championship game since the last time we did in 92. Over half are new to D1 in the last 3-4 years.

Yeah, that was announced a couple days ago. That Pepperdine-Pacific WCC opener will be the battle of the interim coaches.

There was a small piece of schadenfreude last night when ODU lost in OT on the first day of their conference tournament to finish the season 7-25. For any of the other old-schoolers besides Mat and I from the ollllllld CAAZone days, we took a beating from the ODU fanbase among others for how bad we were. They're a good example that the grass isn't always greener as they've only been to 1 Tourney since they left CAA whereas they had been to 4 in the 9 years before leaving.

This would make too much sense, why would you ever present this idea for Towson basketball?? (sarcasm) Our offense often belongs in the peach basket era, especially in these higher-stakes games. We can come out against A&T or Monmouth at home or Arcadia and swing the ball around like an offense should and look like world beaters. But when we get into the butt clenchers, we revert to this archaic, dump-it-in-the-post style that hasn't worked since Benimon was dominating. Too many times today, the ball stagnated. No switching sides or working it inside out. In the chat, I equated Tarke to that guy at the Y who you always leave open because you know he's gonna shoot it and he's likely gonna miss it. Gosh, he was open so many times today and he just clanks one after another. But if you have a lineup of DW, Tejada, May, CT, and either Suli or Jones, you have a ballhandler who has to be monitored for drives, 2 guys who can light it up from outside (theoretically) that you can't help off of and 2 guys who can gather the rebounds on missed shots and be somewhat of a force in the lane. But this goes back too many times to constant substitutions and never getting a good mix on the floor. There were a few times today where the lineup was Tarke, Lowery, Tejada, Paar, and Suli. Where do you think the defense is going to key? It almost feels like sometimes that we put lineups on the floor like a rec league coach would in order to make the parents happy that their kids get into the game. In the first 5-7 games of the non-con season, I can understand it. But now, there's no excuse for it. As for next week, I'd imagine we'll get one since it'll be either A&T or W&M but after that, I have zero confidence that we'll learn anything from today's game to beat UNCW a 2nd time.

Amen to this. It's one thing when you can see the game and you have to endure his soundtrack. But for those of us that go audio only, it's nearly impossible to follow the game. If you run a drinking game for all the names he drops, you'll have to call the ambulance by the under-12 timeout in the 2nd half. As for this game against UNCW, it can be considered a 'big game' due to the top 4 being at stake. We know what our history is in these type of 'big games'. It would be nice to buck our trend and play a complete 40 to get what we need for the CAA Tournament.

Drexel-Delaware right now. Besides structural failure, what do we root for here?

Where have you gone, Luke Murray. Towson turns its lonely eyes to you. (he might make a good head coach candidate)

What will be telling is if someone transfers out, how do they perform at their new school. That will be the biggest indictment. I think everyone on this roster has talent and collectively, they should be contenders. But their overall development has not matured like it should. Charles has regressed offensively. Sulaiman and Jones have not gotten an ounce better from day 1. May’s breakout at the end of last year should have been a springboard to filling Timberlake’s shoes. This isn’t just a this year problem either. We had a big man whose name escapes me that played 5-6 yrs ago who had promise as a youngster but kept making the same mistakes with bad hedges and softness offensively in the lane and he went from being a potential future star as a freshman to a player we weren’t sad to see graduate. It’s not difficult to see the correlation.

Today was the largest glaring example of what works in college basketball and what doesn't. You can hang your shingle on defense and rebounding but you'd better have offensive weapons in order to do that. The years we won the conference regular season and advanced in the CIT, we had guys that could score. You have to go out and find more of those scorers and not just a bunch of brutes that look good in a weight room and can play defense and rebound. Kelsey took the job at Charleston and set about finding the type of players that work -- they're big, they share the ball, they hit open shots. Meanwhile, we plod along and run a low-post offense with zero movement and sometimes a wing and a prayer to get a decent look or a look before the shot clock expires. Twice today, the shot clock was running out and who had the ball? Mekhi Lowery. That can't ever happen. We were largely clueless on offense, finding zero ways to get Tejada open (1 shot in the first half) and showing very little interest in running anything that had ball movement to 3 sides of the floor. Meanwhile, Charleston is slinging it all over the floor and playing an orchestra on our defense (especially Thompson and Paar) with the pick-and-roll action. Charleston's the template of what we should aspire to be. They have D2 players just like we do but they found the offense while we went for the bruising fullbacks. With whatever time Pat has left on his contract, he needs to overhaul his philosophy to be more like Charleston. Otherwise, we've already hit our ceiling and it's never gonna get crashed through.

I’d be hesitant about SulaiJones on Policelli because of his penchant to hang around the perimeter and shoot 3s. Those two guys don’t seem quick enough to get out on a shooter. Long enough, yes, but can they anticipate it like they should? Almost think Tejada on Policelli might be a better option than on Burnham cuz Burnham can out-physical him. As much as we showed it last nite, I don’t know if we can try a high-octane game again vs CoC but if we keep them below 65, I like our chances.

Who would be a good defensive matchup for him vs Charleston?

This is more like it. Given the lives we’ve led as fans of this program, I will never take a winning season for granted. But if some want to continue putting asterisks on wins, so be it. I didn’t see or hear any of the game. Got back to the car and saw the score and smiled. This is building block #1 and it’s great they were able to flush Saturday’s performance. Now go finish the home season strong on Saturday. That one I ain’t missing.

I was one of those 1900 in attendance that night and I remember that JMU seemed to have more people rooting for them than we did people rooting for us. Truax's teams were at least entertaining even though they could be frustrating as hell. He'd schedule anybody anywhere and the majority of the time, they'd hold their own. Just in my time of Towson awareness, they beat St. John's (year before I got there), West Virginia, and Louisville and they went to places like Arizona, Tennessee, and Virginia and didn't embarrass themselves. That was a product of the type of ball that he ran. I wasn't a fan of his firing and that seemed to be the result of a new AD wanting to put his stamp on the program. That led to one bad hire after another that culminated with the abyss that Pat Kennedy put us in. So there's a small history lesson for those young enough to not have had to suffer though the Jaskulski/Hunt eras. What Pat Skerry has done with the foundation he was given is very commendable. At some point (and that point could have come as soon as 5-7 years ago), the level has to improve. Since the last time we went to the Tournament, we're one of 18 teams that haven't even played in their conference championship game (the others -- Army, Central Arkansas, Citadel, Incarnate Word, UMKC, UMES, UNH, Presbyterian, Sacramento State, SIU-Edwardsville, UC Riverside, UTRGV, Utah Valley, Brown, Columbia, Rice, Dartmouth). In Skerry's time, we've had 2 teams that were beyond capable of not just advancing to the Final but also winning it. But as happens in conference tournaments, a bad shooting night can sink your entire season and we've lived that. Rather than being able to continue to raise our level from those teams, we regress and it seems that we don't want to adjust our systems. It's ok to make your mark on defense and rebounding but you'd better have offensive tools to back that up. With the exception of the Benimon team and the 2021 team, we've failed to cultivate any offensive skills. Thus, we win games via smoke and mirrors that may not even crack 60 on the scoreboard. That's entertaining, huh? But the biggest mark against us is the lack of improvement with players who obviously have talent but they're either held back by lack of minutes or lack of continued development (or both). If you didn't know anything about us and you saw a potential frontline of CT, Sulaiman, and Messiah, you'd think that we could be a pretty formidable offensive team in the lane. Nope, far from it. The potential that May showed us at the end of last season only comes in bursts this year. We have the potential to have a point guard that can engineer a transition game but the governor gets put on because we don't like to push the pace. There's 4 regular season games left. There's zero reason why we shouldn't go 4-0 in those games. This conference doesn't have that dominant boss at the final screen that it's had in past seasons. If Elon can win at Trask, we certainly can too. Somehow, we need to flush last week's offensive effort and use these last 4 games to ramp up for the tournament run. But I've also been beaten down by decades of failure so winning games in a big spot are more of a surprise. I let myself believe that 2021 was finally going to be the year and I was treated harshly for the belief. TL;DR -- I'm annoyed that we're living the Groundhog Day of college basketball.

The idea does have a lot of merit. If this were 10 years ago, heck even 5 years ago, I might not have thought as much about it. But this is a new era where you don't build a program with longevity. With the portal and NIL being what it is, it's essentially a free agent world whenever the season ends. AD's will have to be smarter about the way they structure contracts (I've always thought that the immense buyouts given for firing are very irresponsible) and perhaps their philosophies need to evolve where they think more like an owner of a professional team rather than collegiate athletics. In a '5-year world', the coaches will have much more of an urgency to get results rather than biding their time to get 'their guys' in the fold.

Tore his Achilles in those 6 minutes. https://twitter.com/SamGuzmanTV/status/1742658134903009601?s=20

This conference is a real box of chocolates, isn't it? It probably explains why a lot of the Bracketologies have the potential conference champion in the 14-15 hole.

Two other examples of regressing -- Sylla and Sulaiman. Sylla was a player of the year and yet he came in and looked lost. Sulaiman averaged a smidge under a double-double at IUP and while he's shown flashes of brilliance, his overall stat profile is a fraction of what it was and/or what it could be. Perhaps if he was given a bigger workload of minutes. But then, I read somewhere that we weren't supposed to complain about substitution patterns. 😉

1. What would you define as a bigger program? Power 6? If so, none of what we got is that caliber. Heck, I was surprised that Timberlake got the attention he got and now that he's on a big-name team, the rest of the nation is seeing what limitations we had known he had for his career. But if you're talking about a player going from here to an A-10 team or a AAC or goes out west to the Valley or MW/WCC, I think May and Tejada certainly would qualify and I bet certain coaches could get a lot out of DW, Lowery, and maybe even Cole. I've said it once or twice in the chats the last few games that the backslide of Charles around the bucket as well as our softness around the rim plus the pathetic free throw shooting is a direct indictment of how we develop players. How does someone like Messiah Jones, who shot 57% last year at Wofford comes here and often looks lost on the offensive end? But if you get a certain mindset about being in the lane and around the rim and you learn to finish through contact, we don't have the pathetic numbers on layups that we do. If you look at our roster and think back to the beginning of the season, who has gotten significantly better from Colorado to today? I'm not sure if we can answer anyone confidently. 2. No chance. When a player is in the portal, I wonder how much his 'team' looks at the below-the-surface stats like pace, etc and not just look at 'oh, they lost this guy, this guy, and this guy, so you can step right in and be the big dog'. Do they take into account that we haven't been to a conference championship game in over 30 years? How much of that do they even prioritize? Are they more about winning or more about themselves and getting noticed for their future? It would be interesting to hear what the selling points were to bring in the transfers that we have in the past.

I leave these guys alone for one day to go play in a golf tournament and this happens…yikes.

Oh yeah, of course. Who knows what kind of situation he walked into. Also, MaxPreps isn’t the most updated site at the time so 2-14 may have been a bit off. Hope he can be in it for the long haul and build a strong program.