.44caliberkiller said:
NowherePoke said:
WestWYOPoke said:
NowherePoke said:
WestWYOPoke said:
2015-16 (Last year under Shyatt): 14-18 RPI: 184
2016-17: 18-14 (23-15 if you count CBI games) RPI: 153
2017-18: 17-11 with 3 regular season and MWC Tourney games to go. Current RPI: 99
Sorry boys and girls...throw out all the anecdotal bullshit and the numbers speak for themselves. Edwards teams haven't been declining at the very least, and arguably have been getting better.
Note: I'm not saying that Edwards is or isn't the answer, I'm just pointing out that there are a lot of people on here bitching about something that the numbers don't support.
RPI is a very poor metric.
You are also very much cherry picking by only picking one of Shyatt's seasons.
Of course I'm cherry picking his last season. This discussion is about Edwards and what he is doing currently. I used Shyatt's last season as a comparison, his prior seasons are irrelevant to this discussion.
And I'm not sure what having 4 seniors has to do with anything. Going in to this season, it was very apparent that Wyo wasn't going to be a stellar team. The fact that Wyo will finish in the Top 8 and still have a shot a being 4th or 5th is better than what I anticipated.
As for next years squad, it's hard to say, we have 2 possible impact players in Mack and Thompson that will have a huge impact (either positively or negatively) on how that team will perform. Wyoming is still a long ways to having a truly good team, which is something they haven't had since 2001-2002.
I don't understand why only one season is relevant. If the argument being put forth is that Edwards is an upgrade from Shyatt or a general improvement from what Shyatt offered, I think you need to look at a more complete picture.
The 4 seniors is relevant because historically teams with more experience (particularly at UW and the MWC level in general) have outperformed teams with less experience (which is not surprising). Next year's team will be much less experienced than this team. Give the same coach an experienced and inexperienced team and they will get very different results. Shyatt didn't forget how to coach between 14-15 and 15-16, he simply went from having a very experienced team to having a very inexperienced team. We are about to see the same drop off next year, but instead of going from 11-7 to 7-11 it will be 9-9 or 8-10 to 5-13 or 4-14 (or something in that general range), which is basically disaster level from my perspective.
Your 4 senior argument holds no water for me because that doesn't account for context. Lou Adams has been inconsistent his entire career. Alan Herndon has been ridiculed by many fans as being weak and lazy (I'm personally a Herndon truther). Alexander Aka-Gorski is widely considered a complete bust. That leaves Hayden Dalton as the only senior a majority of Wyoming fans can seem to agree is a good player. This is how these players have been collectively viewed by Wyoming fans even before the season started, so I don't see why the expectations of our fans on having a good season is correlated to these 4 specific seniors.
Now I agree that it would be ideal that when we have heavy senior laden classes were competing at the top of the conference but 3 of the 4 current seniors are Shyatt recruits. I know many don't care about that since Edwards was on Shyatt's staff and part of the recruiting process but I can't agree with that. In college athletics the buck stops with the head coach and he either gets the lions share of the credit or the blame.
I will have to completely disagree with you. The 4 seniors we had coming in to this year along with Justin James as a Junior and Moemeka who has been here for 3 years now was a very upper classman team and I thought this team talent wise was easily good enough to compete to be in the top 2 or 3 in the conference before the season. I still think talent wise they are.
The problem is that Edwards can't coach. If Shyatt was coaching this years team this team would have 5 more wins at least. One thing Shyatt teams that were half way decent to good never really did was lose games to inferior opponents, especially at home to a team as bad as CSU or UNC. They also never would lose to a team as bad as Denver. Shyatt with this many upper class men on the team would definitely have a lot better record than Edwards does.
People also forget Shyatt lost his best player the one year we went undefeated in non conference or that whole season could have been a lot better also. So far Edwards hasn't had to deal with that or things would look even worse.
The problem is the coaching not the players.
Next year will be a shit show unless Edwards turns into the lord and savior.