What I think happened last season

The main thing that happened was that Josh Hagins was not there. He had been the heart and soul of the program - a four-year player, leader and clutch shooter who did a little bit of everything and ended up as one of the great players in program history. You just do not lose someone like that without having a big hole. Then Johnson had to move to point, and he was not an outstanding point guard. The rhythm never was there, and frequently it felt like things were out of control.

It may be that Wes Flanigan just simply is not a very good coach. Time will tell. It may also be the case, however, that he got caught in a difficult scenario and simply did not handle it very well. We had come off the most successful season in program history, and while some key seniors were gone, we still had a very large senior class of key returners. Given the emotional nature of that season, it likely would have been a formula for disaster for Wes, having been an assistant under Beard, to have tried immediately to install another system. The problem was that Wes is not Beard: Chris was very intense and Wes is much more laid-back. Even with the same functional system, you necessarily were going to have a different motivational system. When players have had success under a coach at the extreme end of the personality spectrum and have to go immediately to someone on the other end, it sometimes does not work right off the bat.

The team last season still belonged to Chris Beard. You do not have a season like we had had without the outgoing coach casting a long shadow over the program for at least a year. If we had had one or two holdover seniors it might have worked - but we had six.

Just because Wes is not as demonstrative as Beard is absolutely not a negative. There have been any number of really outstanding coaches who have been quite reserved on the sidelines. Brad Stevens, who took Butler to back-to-back championship games, wore a mask on the bench. And then there was that old gentleman named Wooden.

Now this team fully belongs to Wes, for better or worse. This particular season we may not win as many games as we might like because of our youth, but Flanigan needs to show that he has the team under control - and that he can coach.