What an embarrassment!!!!

HORRIBLE performance by the Hawks. On par with the Nova meltdown last year.

I sense a pattern here. Not a good one!

Was just lamenting that same thing to HawkErrant offline.

Very dispiriting.

I have no words for this, other than to relay what the halftime folks noted — worst half time deficit in KU NCAA history.

Definitely need to focus on finding fast defenders who can shoot. Don’t need to be top ten, but need to be athletic, which this team, with few exceptions, isn’t.

Enough said... or in this case, written.

I'm not sure if you're referring to my original post, but if so my point was clearly and strictly about last night's performance against Auburn. Nothing more, nothing less. It was abysmal on all counts: coaching, player execution, you name it.

I hear you, and can only speak for me. My post was focused on the game last night, which was the third year in a row we've had our rears absolutely handed to us on national TV in our exit game of the tournament. We can point to myriad reasons for that, from bad fortune (personnel-wise) over the season to poor recruiting (men against boys last night, athletically) to poor scouting to poor in-game coaching to poor player execution (and in some cases, effort, when you see numerous instances of Auburn players out-hustling our guys in transition up the court, and being left with wide open 3s). The latter is partly lack of athleticism (which goes to recruiting as well), but it's all part of the same bag. Just a very bad, abysmal showing all around.

What's odd is that last year we had athletes and great shooters, yet got curb-stomped by a Villanova team that couldn't have played any better. Last night we had players who largely couldn't keep up with a 5-seed team that also couldn't have played any better. Oregon in 2017, anyone? Couldn't have played any better. When we keep facing teams that "couldn't have played any better," it does point back to a pattern and that goes to coaching - in as much as Coach Self often likes to say that the way you win games is to find your comfort zone and force the other team out of theirs. These three successive blowout tournament losses underscore how we've badly, badly misfired on both those counts recently (and several other times in Self's tournament past).

I'll always bleed crimson and blue and love the school and squad with every fiber of my being, but in this particular instance and with this particular team, it's clear that we've got to recruit shooters and athletes, hope that our core of bigs return, and for god's sake adjust our defense to better guard against the 3-bombs. The question is, at this late recruiting stage, who is left. (I'm generally not a fan of really late recruiting, picking up the scraps that no one else has yet landed)