The dreaded players only meeting. Rarely good, almost always bad.
I sure hope I'm wrong, and you all make me eat crow later. But, I think we are on the edge of a big fall and our most disappointing season in a long time. Self is pulling out stops that I've rarely seen before to this degree. Calling out players, benching guys, and seemingly losing key players to attitude or morale issues.
Yesterday we saw almost no emotion or effort. Baylor got numerous rebounds with three KU guys between them and the basket. Turnovers. Horrid shooting. Missed layups. Lazy/bad passes. Giving up tons of layups and dunks. 20 points first half and giving up 50 second half. Starters sitting, and bench now starting, with limited offensive skills.
Here's where I think we are:
1. We are not very talented. I suspect our ineligible players probably compete evenly or beat the active roster in practice, but we play who we have eligible. We have three players that might start on any other high level team. Graham, Svi and Dok. Everyone else is a sub, and maybe not even in a 7 person rotation on the better teams.
2. Our early season success was because we started two seniors and two juniors. With a starting five that experienced, you SHOULD come out of the gate strong. As other teams have matured, our older players lost their edge, mostly because of item #1 above. We can still compete at a very high level, but we need to be mentally tough and motivated - see item #3.
3. Unfortunately, a couple of our starters have mentally thrown in the towel, having seen their futures and NBA dreams deteriorating. Newman isn't the prodigy he was touted as, and is now in his third year showing decent but not great skill and no dominance in any part of his game. Vick seems to have hit his max on talent, and has very limited prospects of playing at a higher level. They both then look at next year, and see guys in practice as good or better, with a crop of 5 star kids coming in to boot. They are consistently not giving the effort Self requires, and have lost motivation (though I would say Vick is far worse than Malik, who still seems to play hard in short bursts).
4. Self has resorted to calling out players, benching them, and starting guys who give effort. His plan didn't work, and we had arguably our worst performance of the year.
5. There will be a players only meeting this week.
6. If the attitude doesn't change quickly, this could go south in a very bad way.
I'm disappointed in all of this, and hope it's just a mid-season lull. But I fear it is not. I really hope I'm wrong.
