My, How Things Change

When this year’s schedule was released, the complaining was overwhelming. The home games were atrocious. It’s bad enough that we didn’t make it into the Big East, but what was UD thinking when they put this thing together?

The Maui schedule came out and most were hoping for one win and hoping that the win wasn’t against Chaminade.

In the first game of the season we played a team that looked more like a set of tiles when playing Scrabble than it did a major college basketball team. It took a miracle sequence of events to start off the season with a victory instead of a crushing defeat.

Even after playing well in Maui we came back in the Top 25 and lost to a .500 team on the road and it was back to business as usual. There was a nice win here and there but then the inexplicable defeat at the hands of USC. NIT, here we come.

The start of the conference season could not have been any more crushing, 1-5 in the conference and looking at last place. Archie had worn out his welcome and the usual radicals were calling for his head. Even more alarming was the fact that several of us long time, loyal fans had begun to stop caring. We had seen this rodeo before. Start off great and then go in the tank when the conference season starts. I personally had lowered my level of caring to just checking out the score at the end of the game. A fan for over 50 years, I was worn out.

Then all of a sudden the team started winning games that they would have lost in the past. Amazingly, we were now above .500 in the conference and I was beginning to get hooked again. I would now check on the score in the middle of a game. We were on a roll and I could feel the hook tightening.

Then came St. Joes and I safely fell back in my “I’m not going to get upset if we lose” mind frame. I was not going to reinvest. Then on to St. Louis and I was totally hooked. D@mn UD! I was just to the point of not caring and they reeled me back in like they have so many times in the past.

Finally, Selection Sunday and the nerves associated with not knowing. Everyone was saying we were in, but we are UD and we know if someone is going to get screwed, we are the first to get nominated. Unlike previous years when we had to wait until the last bracket, salvation came to us early. We could finally exhale and start filling out our bracket and fight our inner self wondering if we should take UD to the Sweet Sixteen.

In the end, we got what we wanted. We have a fairly young team, a young coach and are dancing. What more could we ask for? Of course, we will get greedy and want to win that first game. There is nothing worse that being the first one voted off the island. If we don’t beat Ohio State, the same people that wanted to fire Miller at the start of the conference season will state again and again that we have not gone to the next level. And we start the carousel all over again.

What we have is a good team, not a great one, but one that is getting better. We have a team that has grown up over the last few months and decided that they were tired of being mediocre. Whatever was going on in the locker room, if there ever was anything, is no longer there. They have come to realize that it is much more fun to win than lose and they better understand what it takes to get there.

However, what turned around this season and possibly the program was Miller’s realization that what he was doing wasn’t working and he needed to change. The fact that he realized that his negativity was making them worse instead of making them better. For whatever reason, coaches believe that beating people up (figuratively) gets better results than being positive. Everyone is different and we all react differently to criticism. A good manager understands how to get the best out of his people through the proper approach. It seems like Archie has found that. I’m sure it wasn’t easy to come to that conclusion but he was man enough to do it. As a result, we have a much better coach than we did six months ago. Let’s hope we can keep him now.