tide humiliated at home by mercer
loss sets the stage for a long and miserable season
Mercer? Seriously? Alabama losses at home to Mercer? I don't want to hear any of this analysis about the Bears having a lot of upperclass leadership. For those who say my negative articles are annoying go be annoyed. We can talk about a momumental upset. That didn't happen. The best team won. This loss makes the VCU game pale by comparison. This is not one of those losses that will cause a head coach to lose his job. It is one of those games that people are going to seriously question whether Anthony Grant is the man for the job In my mind he still is the coach we need. If he can find a couple of decent JuCo inside players things will change quickly.
Let me be clear about this loss. It wasn't the loss that was so bad, but rather the manner in which we kicked away a win. Alabama had to reach deep within themselves to find a way to lose this one. In the last 30 minutes the Tide gave up 32 points to a decent mid-level team. Last week it was blowing a 20 point lead on the road to Texas Tech. I'm well aware that home teams like Tech can make comebacks. This game it was a twelve point lead at home, and we had the ball. We couldn't mount a comeback. This type of loss is simply unacceptable for our program. Tide fans will not be patient with the type of effort they saw in Coleman on Saturday.
I didn't post this blog yesterday. I wanted to give some long reflection and try to put it observations into some type of perspective. This loss is as bad as it gets for a major division one program. Mercer was just a better team. They made fewer floor mistakes, they moved the ball well on offense, their defense was good, and their game plan was excellent. You have to lay this one on Grant. No question about it. His team just didn't seem ready for a slugfest. Here are two words that Tide fans never want to hear - "Bama choked". Two games in succession the Tide has gagged. Earlier we had a big enough lead to hang on. On Saturday we just gave up. We gave up 34 points in the first 30 minutes and then quit, or fell apart. I know our team is young, we have gaps in our recruiting, one player quit, two are injured, and we have no inside game. All of that is understandable, if not liked. But what I witnessed in the last 10 minutes of game was almost inconcievable. We got run off our home floor by a team that had one player who might make our starting five. A local sports announcer and I had a long talk before the season started. He has been watching Alabama basketball for a long time. He laid out the perfect storm which would sink this team, and he got it exactly right. The problems have started coming through - no inside game, poor shooting, Pollard isn't advancing quickly enough to help, and we have defensive lapses. I could see all of those things, but honestly I didn't foresee the poor defense. Anthony Grant just teams don't play bad defense. For ten minutes last night I was correct. The Tide didn't play bad defense, they played horrible defense. For those who are counting that is two of the worst halves an Alabama basketball team has played in my memory.
The game will cause a lot of anti-Grant sentiment to grow. I believe Grant owes the Tide fans an explanation of how he intends to dig his team out fo this mess. In retrospect, this all started with the loss of Carl Engstrom. It wasn't that Engstrom is a great player but he filled a need Bama hasn't filled. I doubt they can this season. Help is on the way, and one season doesn't define a career or a program. No doubt this is highly disappointing to Tide fans. Tide fans will accept losing.They can't and won't accept in the half hearted sloppy manner we all saw yesterday. Losing to Mercer is just not acceptable. The scary part is that this may be the start of something truly awful. For Grant, the goal is not to win a division championship or even make the NCAA. The new goal is to help the team find themselves and then we'll see what happens.
loss sets the stage for a long and miserable season
Let me be clear about this loss. It wasn't the loss that was so bad, but rather the manner in which we kicked away a win. Alabama had to reach deep within themselves to find a way to lose this one. In the last 30 minutes the Tide gave up 32 points to a decent mid-level team. Last week it was blowing a 20 point lead on the road to Texas Tech. I'm well aware that home teams like Tech can make comebacks. This game it was a twelve point lead at home, and we had the ball. We couldn't mount a comeback. This type of loss is simply unacceptable for our program. Tide fans will not be patient with the type of effort they saw in Coleman on Saturday.
The game will cause a lot of anti-Grant sentiment to grow. I believe Grant owes the Tide fans an explanation of how he intends to dig his team out fo this mess. In retrospect, this all started with the loss of Carl Engstrom. It wasn't that Engstrom is a great player but he filled a need Bama hasn't filled. I doubt they can this season. Help is on the way, and one season doesn't define a career or a program. No doubt this is highly disappointing to Tide fans. Tide fans will accept losing.They can't and won't accept in the half hearted sloppy manner we all saw yesterday. Losing to Mercer is just not acceptable. The scary part is that this may be the start of something truly awful. For Grant, the goal is not to win a division championship or even make the NCAA. The new goal is to help the team find themselves and then we'll see what happens.
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