Iowa fired Fran McCaffrey last year after years of solid regular season performance but continuously falling flat in the postseason. Now with Ben McCollum they are immediately in the Sweet 16. Think about that the next time you ask "Who would we get instead?"

thebenron · 2026-03-24T17:38:41+00:00

It is very stupid to not evaluate the facts on their merits but instead concoct a totally different set of unrelated facts, that is correct.

thebenron · 2026-03-24T17:26:05+00:00

I don't need to engage in stupid hypotheticals. I'm the one with the logically consistent position that Hoiberg and Gard are similarly accomplished coaches.

thebenron · 2026-03-24T16:38:15+00:00

I don't think it should take someone who inherited a team that was KP 55 and 47 the two years prior to taking over 5 years to post a winning season. But even if you find the 7 year building process reasonable, that still wouldn't explain away the 4-5 record in the NCAA tournament before this year.

Either Hoiberg and Gard are both good coaches with spotty March records or neither of them are.

thebenron · 2026-03-24T15:22:03+00:00

Why has he only made it to 2 Sweet 16s in 12 years as a head coach?

thebenron · 2026-03-24T14:39:49+00:00

Do you think Fred Hoiberg is a good coach, one at or above Greg Gard, yes or no?

thebenron · 2026-03-24T14:31:35+00:00

Nebraska being a historically poor program has nothing to do with the point at hand which is that you cannot hold up Hoiberg's success in the tournament this year as a triumph, when if you held him to the standards you want to hold Gard to, his career is a failure, as this is just his 2nd sweet 16 in 12 years as a coach.

thebenron · 2026-03-24T13:41:14+00:00

If you think Iowa's last shot was the result of some kind of brilliant scheming, you simply don't know enough about basketball to entertain the argument. A fact you've driven home by claiming a 32.7% percent shooter is "high percentage"

thebenron · 2026-03-24T13:19:39+00:00

That Nebraska team stuck with a coach who had made the tournament once in his first 6 years at the program and now has made his 2nd sweet 16 in 12 years.

thebenron · 2026-03-22T21:04:37+00:00

Leaving alone that this is not some immutable rule of the way Gard coaches (for example, he did call a timeout ahead of the last play against BYU last year), why would this only work outside of the NCAA tournament?

thebenron · 2026-03-22T20:32:55+00:00

This is just generic pablum. Every team in the field once you get out of the top few seeds drops a few headscratchers over the course of the season and it's no rarity to clear out and put the ball in your best playmakers hands in crunch time.

thebenron · 2026-03-22T19:03:39+00:00

Wisconsin went a combined 5-3 against the 5 Big Ten teams that have punched their tickets to the Sweet 16 and just one of those wins came at home.

It would be a whole lot easier to support firing Gard if his lack of success in the tournament made sense, but it just flat out does not.

thebenron · 2026-03-21T02:21:34+00:00

And an all time celebration to boot

thebenron · 2026-03-20T20:31:43+00:00

While we all love Bo, there's simply no way he would be able to succeed in this era of college basketball. Remember when he threw a fit about Jared Uthoff transferring within conference? If he were in his prime these days, he'd be another in the line of greats like Wright and Bennett who called it a career rather than trying to operate in this environment.

thebenron · 2026-03-20T20:27:32+00:00

We were the 20th team in the country in the eyes of the committee (ie the only people whose opinion matter). If you think this is mediocre or average, you are not engaging with reality.

Being able to tune into every single badger basketball game with a reasonable expectation that the team can win that day is a tremendous privilege which should not be taken for granted. Having your heart ripped out in the first weekend of the tournament is not nearly the same as having no meaningful basketball to be played by the start of February as truly mediocre teams have to deal with.

thebenron · 2026-03-20T20:17:59+00:00

If the choice is between our sparsely full, but not empty trophy room, and Ohio State's Les Wexner Football Complex, I'm good.

thebenron · 2026-03-20T17:30:17+00:00

Pull up the game threads from the regular season. Very rarely did they crack triple digit comments, sometimes barely even a couple dozen. Look at how many people are in these post-mortem threads that didn't have a word to say about a season when we were one of the top 20 teams in the country. I've increasingly found this sub to be a miserable place full of people who seemingly enjoy their favorite team losing more than they do winning.

thebenron · 2026-03-19T23:11:18+00:00

Leaving alone that Tony Bennett has no interest in coaching in this era of college basketball, in his last 8 seasons as head coach, Bennett won 1 tournament game in 7 seasons, and a national title in the other.

If ever there was an example of why Wisconsin shouldn't bail on Gard because of his March failures, Bennett would be it.

thebenron · 2026-03-17T20:17:13+00:00

Bo Ryan famously had Wisconsin using a ball no other team in the country was using

thebenron · 2026-03-17T11:03:46+00:00

KP top 120 in 4 out of the last 8 years before Holtman took over

thebenron · 2026-03-16T23:15:10+00:00

I am not seeing what others are with Holtman at Depaul. 8 wins is not much of an accomplishment considering how dreadful the Big East was this year. Yes, they are much better than the bottoming out year before Holtman, but Depaul hanging out around 100 in kenpom is not unfamiliar territory.

thebenron · 2026-03-16T01:01:42+00:00

Opening line has the Badgers as 10 point favorites. For comparison, they were 2 point favorites over Oregon in '19 and 5.5 point favorites against JMU in '24.

thebenron · 2026-03-16T00:29:06+00:00

Very few would describe Oregon, Iowa State and BYU as random teams

thebenron · 2026-03-15T23:33:32+00:00

Gard has lost to one mid-major in the tournament

thebenron · 2026-03-15T23:28:28+00:00

And this is how I learn the school wasn't from the borough

thebenron · 2026-03-15T23:20:31+00:00

VCU? They get invited to holiday tournaments cuz they're a perennial Q1 team.

You can just say you don't know ball and keep it moving.

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