Chris – I hear ya and understand your point. It is easy to arm-chair quarterback and say, “We lost when we weren’t scoring so we should push things and score more.” In reality, as Seth said, the style of reducing possessions per game might have been what kept us in games. But I don’t think the results merited sticking with it (freezing the ball).
How many games did we go entire media timeout series without scoring? I bet it happened in practically every ACC game. We had a couple of instances where we went 9+ minutes without a FG. And our end record was 4-12, so was freezing the ball really that successful? Or at some point when you are 1-6 or 3-8 do you say, “what the heck” and throw caution to the wind and try something else? And you don’t have to play up-tempo the whole game, you can pick and choose spots where you press, or run that half court trap, to try and force TOs.
But we all agree the transition game was just awful. Going games with 0 fastbreak points is pathetic. Simply giving up on it and not taking opportunities when they presented themselves (we’d hold the ball after a steal unless EG had a breakaway) was not the answer. You won’t get any better unless you try in game situations. Again — what’s the risk? We were losing anyway.
I feel like we give up on things too easily, and then just crawl into a hole of boring bball for the rest of the year. I’ve seen it year after year — every year you hear we’ll push tempo more, and by game 10 we’ve scrapped it. So either our transition game coaching is bad (I know every school works on it but our results are consistently awful), or we just happen to recruit players year after year that cannot execute a fastbreak.

I will admit that what info I do get is from the player and family side of things, not the coaching side. And I’m not bashing Seth’s style. It is what it is. That’s the way he coaches. It has been very successful here, exceding everyone’s expectations for about 6 years. The problem is expectations then rose and now the last 3 years we’ve come up short on expectations. I’ve chosen to call out things I’ve observed, or been told somewhat consistently by people I trust. That’s not to say Seth doesn’t have a lot of great qualities (he does) and that we aren’t thankful for everything he’s done. I just am skeptical now, believing he may have plateaued what he could do here and that this peak doesn’t meet my long term expectations. Next year will be very telling.