Two and Four -- Finding It Hard to Score

There is an old wise adage that I subscribe to. It goes something like this:

"Ye shall never trust a Bearcat team to do anything that you want them to do because they will let you down time and time again even after they offer you two, maybe three, glimmers of hope but then they always come back and figuratively SMASH your kneecaps with a metaphorical ball-peen hammer of shitty play and then literally make you want to crawl off the very real bar stool you are sitting on and never watch basketball, nay, sports, ever again."

It's not much, but repeating it over and over again throughout the day really keeps me grounded, you know?

UC is 2-4 in Big East Play and they are, by my estimation, 7 wins away from going .500 in the conference. They will most likely need those 9 B.East wins to make it to the NCAA tournament. If they win the rest of their home games and win either at St. John's this Thursday or at South Florida later in the season, they will get those 9 wins. There is no reason to believe this is going to happen.

It's obvious that every B.East team has figured out how to defend us: "Stick the quickest defender on Vaughn for the entire game, frustrate the big men out of crashing the boards and wait for various black and red jersey'd players to throw the ball out of bounds." I'm pretty sure that this is actually written on the chalkboard in locker rooms across the B.East. It is a fool-proof plan. The only team that waivered from this briefly was UConn, who inexplicably went into a zone and let the Cats stay close only to seal the deal by going back into the "face-sit Vaughn at all costs" defense.

Here is what it is going to take to win 7 more B.East games, in 5 easy steps!:

1. Dion Dixon makes consistent three pointers. Dixon is a great sixth man, but we don't have time for that. We need him in the game and we need to set screens for him, feed him the ball, and get him open looks while everyone else focuses on boxing out. Run Dion through some of the multi-screen plays we used to run Vaughn through last year. Vaughn will get open ONLY when Dixon starts shooting the lights out.

2. Mike Williams does the same thing he has done for the past 4 games.

3. Can someone please get Yancey Gates a "5-hour energy" for chrissakes. They cost like 4 bucks. Come On!

4. Rashad Bishop decides to just put his head down and take it to the hole without stopping to think halfway through the drive and pulling up for some lame duck shot or even lamer and duckier pass.

5. New Team Rule: No one pass to Toyloy. He is there for rebounding and getting in the way on defense when Gates gets in foul trouble/gets drowsy. He is a Connor Barwin upgrade, no more no less.

I'll be watching with a checklist on Thursday.