VERY wrong, but what was it?

Obviously, something was very wrong with this team last season, but it is difficult to put a finger on just exactly what it was. I have a sneaking suspicion, but I could not prove it, so I will let that lie.

But consider some statistics. We shot 48.4% overall, compared to 44.0% for our opponents. We shot 35.4% from the arc compared to 35.3% to opponents. We averaged 34.2 boards per game while the other guys got 34.5. We had more assists and more blocks than our opponents. And especially look at this stat: we averaged 74.23 points per game and our opponents averaged 75.90 points. That is a difference of only 1.67 points per game. And yet we lost 21 games.

Those numbers would suggest that we should have been in a string of very close games, and we logically would have won our share of them. The stats say we ought to have been 15-16, or maybe even 13-18 or somewhere along there. Instead we lost TWENTY-ONE games. In other words, we were AWFUL!

Something was not right with the Trojans last season, and it showed up in our record, but it did not show up on the stat sheet. Now, I am no Sherlock Holmes, but that suggests to me personnel issues, sometimes called locker room problems. This team was not a team. A team wins its share of close games, because it plays together. Several players from last season are now gone, and that may have fixed the problem. If it did not fix the problem, then the problem was not with the players, but with the staff.