The CheckerBoard

Well I will still be at every home game. The season will play out and we will see where things stand.

These last two losses weren't just a couple of early season "off nights". They were historically awful offensive performances neither of which was just about payers missing shots. The kind of woeful performance that has all sorts of national basketball writers raising an eyebrow about UT right now, and not in a good way. For the vast majority of both games (with the exception of a few minutes early in the second half against UVA) Tennessee didn't run anything that you would call an offense at this level. no movement, no purpose, no energy. Martin doesn't like to call plays and when he does he isn't very good at it. Last yr he was quoted as saying that he wants better players, not better plays. Last night he didn't call time outs when the offense broke down play after play, he called one when we had two defensive lapses in a row. this was supposed to be a season where given the skill development and implementation of more of the offense during the offseason trip would pay dividends.

Well, the skill development over the off-season has, so far, turned into skill regression.

Our team hasn't looked this bad in back to back games since bald Kevin #1 was stalking the court, and honestly his teams displayed better offensive execution than we have the last two games. Sure, both those teams are good defensive teams - but we scored less than 0.70 pts per possession against both of them and actually had worse numbers against UVA than we did against GT. If they had held us to 50, we might be talking about good defense. They held us in the 30s. Its the 3rd time in less than a yr and a half that Martin's TN team has gone under 0.70. To put that into perspective, Buzz didn't have a team have that bad a night and in 6 years Pearl's teams had 2 games less than 0.7; the Butler loss at MSG when nobody could buy a bucket and the loss to KY in the SECT in 2010 when the Vols fell apart in the last 6 minutes.

FWIW, the offense against Okie state was pretty putrid too. So far this year the pattern has been, play mid majors and do pretty much what we want. Play teams with the same level of athletes and we can't begin to score.

Still, that doesn't mean we won't make the NCAAT. But we won't make it playing like this and we are gonna have to turn it around before JM gets back unless we want to be in a spot where we have to win the conference to get in.