It’s beyond inexcusable. Worse, they don’t care. They have EVERYTHING you need to recruit and win here. Everything. Except for a school that cares.

I recall recently that P38 was chided for fixating on last year's 17-point blown lead to Princeton. Tonight, Penn was outscored by 12 in the second half. This team fades because it is not talented and not well coached and it knows it, which drains its confidence.

Penn knows it will lose.

Nice to see Holland play well, although 0-5 from three didn't help. 7-7 from the field with 11 boards.

Would have been nice is staff picked up phone for Nana and offered ..as i mentioned since his HS days all he wanted was Penn.

• nychoops Said:

Thanks for the insight as also nyc! Funny, I remember being incredulous when you told us that earlier in the season. That’s for me one of the most annoying parts of this loss. We got worked by a really good kid/player who wanted Penn but we chose to ignore. #%$@ brilliant. I still remember following his recruitment (back when I cared enough to follow recruitment closely) and was really hoping Penn would land him, but offer never materialized. I thought we were out recruited but per your insight it turned out it was just recruiting malpractice.

It’s awful to watch and dictated by their inability to play man.

Imagine deciding to cut the minutes of Ed Holland this year. That alone is grounds for a coaching change discussion. Unless we’re not privy to something.

I didn’t even know Gus Larson left and went to Cal. Lololol. Way to go, Steve!! What are we freaking doing here?!

“He didn’t really get significant time for us.”

BINGO. Steve seems to find the guys he likes and the others just don’t get the chance. Somehow Cal can take him but we couldn’t find him some more minutes and/or make him feel good about staying with a program that has very little front court depth. Any way you slice it this is just another indictment of the coach and program. How much more are we supposed to take??

Not sure that was the thinking for Dingle/Martz. I think Dingle had a lot more to do with Dingle and reaching the NBA than anything else. Obviously they would have a better shot in the Ivy this year as seniors with a good class coming in. With Martz, we’ll see. I tend to agree with you that he will show up somewhere as a grad transfer, though there are those who insist he is done playing. We’ll find out whether he made a decision to play a season elsewhere or simply hung up the spikes. If he does plan to play elsewhere, obviously his decision followed from Dingle’s.

On the point about underperforming the talent . . .. For me, that is always hard to evaluate. None of these guys were heavily recruited coming out of high school. The fact that they appear to be a talented team that underperformed may be something that actually results from good coaching, in a sense. They were put in a position to succeed, at least in some ways. Dingle was an NBA prospect when he played for Steve. He probably isn’t one now. It may be that they look like a talented team because of the coaching, not in spite of it.

In the micro sense, I have trouble with the concept of culpability here in general. Not every player develops, for lots of reasons that may or may not have to do with the staff. Larson was an interesting player, but a tweener in some ways. Guard skills from when he was younger, but center height. Lots that could go right in terms of fit and development, but also lots that could go wrong. I kind of view this stuff in percentage terms — you get a player at larson’s level in the recruiting rankings/offers, you get say a 70% chance it works out. Sometimes you get the 30%.

So like penndemonium, I have trouble with the concept that Larson’s transfer is somehow the ultimate indicator that the coach stinks. That said, my problem is just with (I think) overstating the importance of Larson leaving. The overall record is ultimately what I feel comfortable going on, because after 9 years it smooths out the noise of what may be one off situations. And the overall record says Steve isn’t nearly as bad as he is sometimes described. But the overall record also says that Steve hasn’t been good enough.

Agree with almost all of this. While I quibble with a lot of what is said here, my quibbles are with the level of the vitriol and hyperbole. In the end, the results are the results, and at this point I don’t think they’re good enough, either. Heck, I’m quite confident Steve himself doesn’t think the results are good enough.