SFHoya99
Blue & Gray (over 10,000 posts)
Posts: 17,736
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Post by SFHoya99 on Mar 24, 2008 19:16:49 GMT -5
I am surprised by how many Georgetown fans on this board expected less from the team than the team expected from themselves. I don't agree with the premise of the thread, but I also think it is ridiculous to compare the expectations/goals of the players with fans. Athletes, like anyone competing anywhere, need to set both high goals and smaller short terms goals as a means of reaching their ultimate high goal. The best athletes have a sense of realism of their strengths and weaknesses, I think, but not of their potential. Confidence plays a huge role in performance. Having an audacious goal plays a huge role in motivation. Having players or coaches who don't view a national title as an end goal will affect their performance and affect their ability to acheive even lesser goals. There's not a great athlete that isn't confident in that way, from what I've seen. That said, fans' expectations on a shorter term basis -- year to year -- don't seem to have much of an effect on a team's performance. Yes, if there isn't an expectation that the team's goal is to win a national title, that can be an issue if no one else is setting that goal (see the Esherick years), but there's no crime if someone thought it'd be a good year if we made it Elite Eight. Frankly, I have no issue with any fan's expectations. Until it shows up in public blasting 20-year olds irrationally. It's a single elimination tournament. There are TONS of upsets every year. It sucks to be the subject and I hope the returning players learn from it and use it to motivate themselves, b/c it will help them acheive their goals. But the way some people comment on here...as if the players somehow owe them something more than the hours upon hours they have put in. Yes, they get a scholarship. But we know this team works. Criticism is fine, but make it rational, not personal. And it wouldn't hurt to realize this was one of only six losses. The timing and circumstances suck, but we aren't 13-15, either.
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vcjack
Diamond Hoya (over 2500 posts)
Posts: 3,875
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Post by vcjack on Mar 25, 2008 0:27:08 GMT -5
To be honest, I really had no clue. I knew enough during the year that we were a good team but not great team, yet I didn't really see much greatness from any of the other teams in college basketball so I figured that if we were lucky we could probably beat other like teams. Now there are 16 teams left that have an opportunity to become great so I can't say that there ARE no great teams (my money would be on Kansas) but we unfortunately are on the sidelines
The beauty and curse of sports is that your perception is only as good as your last game. This team will be casually remembered as worse than it actually was, just as last years team is thought to be better than it really was. As fans we really can't do anything about but celebrate the wins and mourn the losses but always hold our heads up high.
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prhoya
Blue & Gray (over 10,000 posts)
Posts: 23,259
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Post by prhoya on Mar 25, 2008 0:45:51 GMT -5
To answer the subject's question, and without reading the other responses, I did.
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Post by grokamok on Mar 25, 2008 1:19:00 GMT -5
It's too bad I can't get the search function to work correctly - there was a thread (perhaps more than one) last fall about expectations for the team. For me, the team overachieved by a game or two during the season, met expectations in the BET and underachieved by a game in the NCAAs; on the whole, I would say that the season was about what I expected.
That is not to say that it was that for which I hoped and thought was achievable. I hoped for a victory over Memphis. I hoped for another BET title. I hoped for a return to the Final Four and, yes, I hoped for a national title. But this was not 1985. That year, I expected it.
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lichoya68
Blue & Gray (over 10,000 posts)
OK YOUNGINS ARE HERE AND ARE VERY VERY GOOD cant wait GO HOYAS
Posts: 17,438
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Post by lichoya68 on Mar 25, 2008 5:23:02 GMT -5
to answer the initial guestion i did sad disappointed but VERY PROUD go hoyas its it november yet coach said he wanted to build a PROGRAM yup go hoyas
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Locker
Golden Hoya (over 1000 posts)
Posts: 1,265
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Post by Locker on Mar 25, 2008 5:55:32 GMT -5
I thought there were 7 or 8 teams that had a realistic chance to win it, and that we were one of them. Vegas thought the same thing.
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hoyatables
Diamond Hoya (over 2500 posts)
Posts: 2,603
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Post by hoyatables on Mar 25, 2008 7:02:18 GMT -5
I thought we could win it all. It is all JTIII's fault -- he's conditioned me to expect nothing but the best.
In retrospect, the signs were there all season that we did not have all the pieces in place: the loss to Memphis, the loss to Louisville, the loss to Pitt in the BET. In all three cases, the team played a great 20 minutes against a quality team but failed to continue for the next 20 minutes. All three games were the "biggest game of the year" at that point, and there were similar stakes, and we couldn't win the game.
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tgo
Silver Hoya (over 500 posts)
Posts: 799
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Post by tgo on Mar 25, 2008 10:52:03 GMT -5
i cant believe there are hoya fans here saying they didnt think we could win it all. Almost sounds like -from reasoning people give – that if you didn’t consider GU the favorite to win the title, which of course they weren’t, then you didn’t think they would, that’s ridiculous.
I had my concerns at the start of the tourney. If Kansas, UCLA, UNC or Memphis played their A game against us I thought we would probably go down, but not definitely cause with our ability to shut down opponents I like our A game against anybody and of course nobody brings their A game 6 times in a row, if we get those top four with our A game and their A- game we win, no doubt about it, tell me the team that showed up on thurs & fri in the BET wouldn’t beat anybody in the country.
the first thing i said to my friends when we talked after the game was there was so much unrealized potential this year. If you think we couldn’t win the title or didn’t expect us to then you thought we were outclassed talent wise or couldn’t improve on our faults or a combo of the two.
As i see it the weaknesses this team had were in 4 major categories. (in no particular order) 1. FT shooting 2. rebounding 3. inability to get the ball to roy/ coupled with his lack of ability to consistently take it agressively to his defender 4. lack of a break down guard who could drive the lane and score or dish
of those the first two are things that any team no matter the talent level can work on and correct and be great at. the third was something we should have been able to correct given the experience and talent of our guards and the size and talent of our center.
the last item is a talent issue, maybe chris wright would have filled that hole had he not been injured, but in the end what I saw in the BET and the NCAA was a freshman with little to no court experience playing the most important minutes of the season and we got what you would expect in that situation, flashes of greatness and freshman mistakes.
so we had one major flaw, but there are no flawless teams out there. there have been years in the past where you had a 1985 Hoyas team that was head and shoulders above the field and it would take an incredible serious of coordinated actions to take them down where if you are a fan of someone in the rest of the field you hope but don’t expect to win. there was no 1991 UNLV in this field. And I thought that it was possible that the BET final would refocus them and be a blip and that 8 of our last 9 games would be us firing on all cylinders. Definitely going to happen- no, but possible and likely in my mind- yes.
So yes, I thought that we would win it all this year and so am very disappointed that I need to find a way to use the flight I had booked already for san Antonio on some other trip in the coming months.
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Post by roysgirlfriend on Mar 25, 2008 14:03:52 GMT -5
I didn't expect them to win it all. Good point about the beginning of the season, Big Dog, but still even then, I thought last year's team was better. I thought they would lose in the Second Round, classic overrated team.
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