Wednesday, March 08, 2006

The Big Ten Tournament

This should be one of the most interesting editions of the conference tournament yet. Michigan State is playing on Thursday for the first time ever, The top five teams finished so close to each other in the regular season and there were few sweeps of opposing teams during the season. Ohio State looks to top off its outright championship with a tournament victory too, which would duplicate their women's team's tourney crown from Monday night. That would make the Buckeyes only the second school to sweep both basketball tournaments in the same year, with Iowa pulling it off in 2001.
Jeff( http://jeffrey.theutechs.com/blog) posted some of his counterpoints to my earlier post about Alford and this year's team. I used to think that Alford would improve and be a very good coach someday, and maybe I do still believe that to some degree. My point is that in games like this year's loss in Evanston, he still gets outcoached on a fairly consisitent basis. There is some improvement there, and Jeff is very right about that. However, the fact remains that he has yet to really develop a player to his fullest potential and his teams suffer from a lack of motivation at times. If the improvement of Alford's coaching is on the way, next year would be a good time to show it. With a very young team that will lack the leadership and intensity of Horner and Brunner and the inside defensive presence of Hansen, Alford will need to do his best coaching job yet in order to avoid yet another sub .500 season in Big Ten play.

1 comment:

Doogie said...

good points. I'll give you Hansen and the occasional slip-up (even though it seems to happen more to Alford than Weber). I completely agree with your last comment. We shouldn't give him a huge extension just to keep him from Indiana.