Just reinforces how pleased we should be with what Bucky has put together. It remains to be seen if it works, but he's done a good job of building a roster after starting from complete scratch.

Also, bizarre to see Baylor all the way down at 44. Had the feel for a while they may be a major long term player at the highest level of college hoops, but they have not maintained that level the last couple of years.

i like the mention, but i wouldnt accept it if somehow it was guaranteed that would be our final standing of 2026. No limitations.

halfastros81 said:

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McDermott not even mentioned as a bench piece? That seems like an oversight.

If we were to finish as the 35th best team in the country and just make the tourney that would be a very good first year for Bucky considering the decimation of the roster.

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Also no mention of Agee who I'm sure will be a big piece. McDermott will be interesting, since he's pretty much an unknown vs. a bunch of guys with at least some track record.

We have a very solid roster with 2 potential super stars on our roster. It really depends on if Pop is healthy. After them we have a couple very nice additions and development players.

My biggest concern is how well does the team gel and pick up a new system only 1 guy is coming from Samford so that may be a challenge.

Is our roster better than Houston? Purdue? Duke? Florida?

Is it better than BYU, St Johns, Michigan, Illinois, Arkansas, Kentucky, Connecticut, Tennessee, Kansas, etc etc etc? Like I said, we have a solid roster, but it's not like top 20 or top 15 good. And we probably won't overachieve it either, we will have to grow into it over the season.

I'd be happy get that right now

Any news on who has agreed to play us next year, outside of conference.?

monarch said:

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Any news on who has agreed to play us next year, outside of conference.?

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I was wondering this as well.

Also, are we definitely out of the 2025 Las Vegas NIL tourney? I went last year and it was fantastic!

I haven't seen anything new lately.

Oklahoma State

chap said:

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Oklahoma State

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Any details, like neutral site or at Reed or Stillwater?

Oak Forest Ag said:

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monarch said:

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Any news on who has agreed to play us next year, outside of conference.?

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I was wondering this as well.

Also, are we definitely out of the 2025 Las Vegas NIL tourney? I went last year and it was fantastic!

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As of today they show we aren't in it this year. These are the teams listed on the Players Era website.

Bama
Auburn
Baylor
Creighton
Zaga
cougar high
Iowa St
Kansas
Michigan
ND
Oregon
Rutgers
San Diego St
St Joes
St Johns
Cuse
Tenn
Unlv

Regarding schedules, a ton of schools have released game schedules, even though a lot of those schedules aren't complete. Basketball schedules are easier to put together than football schedules. Fexas has a schedule out, UH does too and so does Rice. Baylor does too. The ACC schools seem to be way out in front with their schedules being published. I read somewhere that we will have our typical Christmas/vacation/holiday sched with games against Lamar, ACU, Houston Christian etc. and some other school, maybe Commerce I think? The concrete game that keeps popping up is the Okie St game but who knows.

Just saw this. We open with UCF at Reed on 11/03, TSU on 11/07, at Okie St on 11/09, Commerce on 12/21 and PVU on 12/29. We are listed as being in the ERA tourney.

Jmo, we're going to need 10-11 guys to play 8-10 mins + per game with this system.

I think the biggest difference from a player rotation standpoint is that we're probably not going to have anyone playing 30+ minutes like they did with Buzz, but otherwise Buzz's teams also played a lot of guys so it's not going to be much of a change as far as how deep into the bench we're going most of the time.

Totally agree wrt no one playing 30 mins + . Buzz used his bench but I always felt like he could have developed the team better by using a few more guys especially in blowout wins so they'd be more acclimated if needed at crunch time in a tight game and overtime scenarios. I think Bucky will do that more partially out of necessity with the pressing and running style . Try to develop as many players as possible that you can trust will know what to do when you need them.

Buzz's sub patterns were sometimes odd I felt. He would pull guys sometimes just when they seemed to be getting in a groove.

Also believe Buckyball might make leg fatigue a bigger factor. Running , shooting and pressing constantly versus watching a 2 man iso game in half court and positioning for rebounds. Not that working for position to rebound doesn't also cause fatigue but I suspect the total steps per player will be higher with Buckyball thus demanding more bench mins

Buzz was also forced to play a couple of guys really heavy minutes the last couple of seasons because they were the only guys on the team who could reliably score normal basketball points (not just off of rebounds or whatever.)

This isn't to say we're going to be amazing under Bucky or anything, basketball can be a complicated game and we were very much a defense-first team under Buzz, but if you were drafting players off of both rosters just on their ability to put the ball in the basket I think like 7 of the first 9 picks would be off of this year's roster.

I think the legs will be a bigger across-the-board factor, but Buzz's defense was exhausting too which is why we played so many guys. That hybrid zone had guys running all over the court. I kind of think how much movement was involved with our defense was part of why our offense was so bad to be completely honest.

Yes but Buzz mostly failed to develop guys into scoring options . They either seemed to have the capability to score from the time they set foot on campus or they didn't. Payne was maybe the exception on this yrs team. I cite Solo as exhibit A. I always felt like he had the tools to be developed into a legit scorer but it never really happened in 3 yrs. No doubt he got better defensively.

I believe Payne was already a capable scoring threat when he stepped on campus but it took a while for Buzz to work him in while he got acclimated to the rest of the game as Buzz wanted him to play it.

Without knowing what exactly we did at practice it's hard to say for sure but the development of just basic offensive fundamentals was a problem the whole time.

We can debate the development of specific players, but I'd think most anyone who watches a fair amount of basketball and watched us over the last six seasons would see that collectively we were terrible at offensive fundamentals. And not like one season we'd be bad at one thing and the next season something else. We were consistently bad at screening guys open and passing the ball. And if you're bad at the basics, it doesn't matter how good you are at anything else.

Take a player like Wilcher, he shot 40% from 3 last season but we couldn't get him very many looks because if he was on the court everyone on the entire defense except whoever was guarding Taylor could cheat off of screens and cuts.

At any given time we usually had at least two players on the court that you didn't even have to worry about guarding, which made life extremely difficult for the players you did.

Agree. Just developing one more guy into a legit scoring threat would have taken stress off of Wade but it never happened . Ball movement was often a glaring issue as well.

That's kind of what I'm saying, I don't know that we needed to develop any particular person into big time scoring threats, we'd have been way better if we could just have gotten everyone to be slightly better at basic basketball skills.

The ball movement is what I'm talking about, ball movement was a problem because nobody was ever open and on the rare times they were open nobody but Taylor and sometimes Phelps could pass them the ball.

I posted about this before, but I think it was the Tennessee game last year where we had, to me, the perfect microcosm of the Buzz experience on offense. We get Wilcher in the game, and then, miracles of miracles, in order:

- Everyone is actually where they were supposed to be to run a set play (this was often an issue and we'd waste time while everyone wandered around the court)
- We actually set two good screens (our screeners were often set up in the wrong spots or not fully set on time)
- Wilcher ran off the screens the right way (often we'd leave too much space allowing defenders to get through the screens or have bad footwork off of the screens that gave defenders time to recover)

So all of that actually happened for once to get our shooter a good look and then the pass hit Wilcher in the foot.