RC107, I realize you gave Manning a solid B for the season. How did you arrive at that score?
Here's how I arrived at my A:
Last year we went 2-16 in a much weaker ACC. This year we went 9-9. That's a massive increase without adding any Top 100 players.
Experts across the country predicted we'd come in the 13th or below in the ACC and have little to no chance to make any post season play after the ACCT. We made The Dance.
We achieved our record against a Top 25 or so schedule.
With only one Top 100 player seeing significant minutes, Danny was able to craft a Top 10 rated offense.
Other than Tim, no Deac has improved year-over-year as much as JC did. Bryant was taught how to truly run a team and along with Frank Jackson will be in the Top 2 PGs in the ACC. Brandon's play improved greatly over the year. Even in his limited minutes, you can see Sam's improvement. Much of the board panned Dinos' play, but he changed his entire game this season. His positioning on the defensive boards allowed JC and our guards to get many unchallenged rebounds. All the above show very detailed and implemented coaching.
The elephant in the room is, "What about our D?" - A top level coach uses a system that best fits his team and gives them the best opportunity to win. A few of us noted before the season that there was no way for this group to be even an average defensive team and compete. If we tried, we could have easily gone back to JC's 1 foul/5 minutes and his numbers would have been much less as he would have been on the court for even fewer minutes. In an league dominated by excellent wings, we had no one to cover them. The results were inevitable.
Some will say, :"Why didn't we play more zone?"-to play a zone you need specific talents. One of which is good or better lateral quickness on the wings. We don't have that. Another thing is if don't you play it a lot, zones can create lay-up drills. Maybe most importantly, in an ACC with a lot of three point shooters, zones give up lots of threes.
Danny made a tough decision to try to outscore teams knowing he'd take a ration of shit for our defensive numbers. It worked. We won 19 games for the first time since 2009-10 and only the third time since 04-05.
When you get this much out of your talent, exceed all reasonable expectations, show great player improvement and have the best record your team has had in seven years, you deserve an A.
It will be harder to reach that grade next year.
