A Promising Start

The Oregon State University men's basketball team defeated Seattle Pacific 71-67 Tuesday night. This brings OSU to a record of 3-5. Seeing that the Beavers were the first team in Pac-10 history to go through conference play with an 0-18 I view this as a promising start.

To hit rock bottom that soundly requires there to be a lack of talent and coaching that isn't matched to what the players strengths are. The Jay John, the former OSU coach, came to with dreams of playing the style of basketball that he watched being played as an assistant at Arizona. This didn't work out very well. I think that he failed to realize that to play Arizona style basketball you need to be able to recruit players with the same level of talent as Arizona recruits. There are several reasons that recruiting a lot of star athletes to go to Corvallis is difficult/impossible (weather, lack of recent success, distance from home, not on TV a lot, etc) if you recruit like all of the other schools recruit. So you need to change how you play the game. The early returns on Craig Robinson's tenure as head coach are encouraging. I think that he is smart enough to realize the challenges inherent in recruiting players to Corvallis and will find a way to play the game and recruit players that can play in a system that will be successful.