Penn State Falls to 0-3 In The Big Ten

Me and my brother were talking about it during the 1st half. It looks like a pick up game at the IM building some times. Whatever shortcomings we have in the half court sets are compounded by the fact that teams can run on us whenever the hell they want, which is bad news, because we’re supposed to be a team that’s good a pushing the tempo.

Ugh

running a pick and roll isn’t THAT hard, and it’s not like we don’t have any talent on the team. Intensity is something you need to carry over from practice, as well…

I’m indifferent towards DeChellis, but mainly because I know nothing about the guy. What frustrates me is I can’t even freakin’ tell what kind of offensive or defensive scheme’s he’s trying to run. Offense looks like they’re just kind of giving the ball to Battle and saying “please do something good” and on defense, they just run around sort of playing this half-assed sort-of-man, sort-of-zone thing.

Help please? What did he do at wherever he came from that made him successful enough to be targeted by a B10 program? (or was he not targeted, and he was the only one that came forward and said, “Sure, I’ll coach a school with little to no basketball tradition!”)

But from what I’ve seen and heard via the radio, there’s a certain lack of inspiration in this team, they seem to be mailing it in every game. Battle heats up invariably, but no no one else heats up with him, it’s like the rest of the team just wants Battle win the game for them.

Maybe you need a couple thousand fans instead of a few hundred in the stands to inspire the young players to give it their all, or maybe you need a signature win that would give the team an identity (winning the VT game would have helped)…

But a loss like this is a big step back, and for a team lacking fire and passion it’s probably going to turn into quite a slump before some one other then Battle emerges as a leader.

I miss Cornley.

I’m tired of seeing losses due to some combination of poor free throw shooting, lazy transition defense, poor perimeter defense, poor interior defense, lazy rebounding, and awful offense. For Ed’s sake, I hope this is all due to youth.

The NIT is looking like a pipe dream at this point. I have to think that’s at least one step back on our progress scale.

How do you fix any of those problems at this point in the season?

from what I watched last year, PSU, while not over flowing with talent, played hard. To hear they aren’t playing hard or with effort is disappointing.

No way the Lions should have blown that big of lead! The personnel mix along with the set plays in the second half sucked!

But seriously, that blown lead last night was utterly predictable. Saw it a hundred times before from PSU. Enough for me to tip my hat to the DeChellis haters. There’s too much standing around, too much confusion, and too many unforced mistakes. Nice to see Babb hit a few shots, though. We need him.

Andrew Jones is just lost. Totally and completely lost. He and Ott combined for ONE REBOUND last night. One.

Penn State essentially has one guy who can start on any team in the conference (Battle), a bunch of limited and thoroughly average role players (Babb, Jones, Brooks, DJ), and some freshmen (Edwards and Frazier) who have talent but really don’t know what the hell they’re doing yet.

The Jones/Brooks duo is mystifying — exactly what do either of them do very well? And poor Battle is being run into the ground because the team is hopeless if he’s not on the floor. He’s 18th nationally in %minutes played.

There isn’t one obvious win on the rest of the schedule, with the possible exception of Iowa at home. That’s it.