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Post by rainbowbadger on Feb 12, 2018 19:09:52 GMT -5
I'm inclined to agree with those who say "inexperience" is a weak excuse. I did expect more from this team. Granted, I also expected we'd get Haggerty back in October. But even without her, there was an element of "not figuring it out" and "not finishing" that bugged me. There were times when I didn't feel like we were getting everything from our team that they were capable of - like the end of all the five-setters we lost. Previous Badger squads have pulled together and found a way to win in those circumstances, and the 2017 squad just... didn't. It was disappointing. Contrast that with the loss to Stanford, which didn't bug me all that much because I DID feel they'd played the best volleyball they could've played, and sometimes the other team is just better than your best. The one item I will question is whether we'd've seen the same play from Loberg that we saw in December if she'd've started in October. Freshmen are wired differently. Some can come in and take a full-on B1G beating their freshman year and bounce back up like one of those boppy inflatable punching clown things*. Others will get worn down when they're scouted and shut down a few times, and lose confidence. I will completely believe that Loberg presented to Sheff as someone who needed some work on the B team to improve and build up her confidence, and I wonder whether the reason she came out with such a bang in December is that she wasn't on the court full-time in October. We won't ever know, but it's a thing to mull over. One thing's for certain: Next year we will have no excuses. *ETA: Apparently they're called " Bop Bags." Huh.
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Post by badgerbreath on Feb 12, 2018 20:30:28 GMT -5
Sheffield obviously made the calculation that the cost of inexperience was more than the benefit. It seems as if Sheffield's mistake was not including more "inexperience" on the floor vs. trying to limit it because adding "inexperience" meant adding something else: Talent. It's probs for the best that I can't figure out how to answer your table point by point. In the end I think it really comes down to the point above. You think it's all about talent, and I think team dynamics play a part. I'm not arguing, nor have I argued, that the badgers were more talented than PSU or Nebraska or Minnesota and lost because of inexperience alone. But BP will tell you that talent does not always win. It just shifts the odds. And in the badgers case, the odds were strange. In the B1G, the badgers won 60% of their sets. But they also won 85% of first sets (17-3), 60% of 2nd and 3rd sets, 30% of 4th sets, and were 0-4 in 5th sets. How do you explain that? They started out with more talent and ended up with less? I'm saying that one explanation might be inexperience relative to their opponents, playing out in particular way as the match wore on - strong early performance, followed by tentative serving, reduced defense, and, finally, increasingly simple offence and dependence on outsides. That is the pattern of play that I saw. The teams they played were just more consistent and more resilient for longer - and the badgers did not really grow out of that. And you are right, I don't know that is what happened: it's a hypothesis to explain a pattern. The real question is, given the talent that the badgers had, would shifting Loberg for Gillis, or replacing Duello with Rettke on the right and bringing in Shanahan at MB, really have resulted in better. And there, we can honestly disagree. Sheffield bet that it would not, but he also probably hoped that Gillis would have better stats. Loberg did great at the end, but was not really a better attacking option statistically when she came in most of the year in the B1G. Now you can say that Loberg did not play well early because of confidence, because Sheff kept lifting her, but then we are no longer talking just about talent. We're talking about managing confidence. And there, you can make a legitimate case that he started her at the right time, because she ended very well.
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Post by badgerbreath on Feb 12, 2018 20:39:35 GMT -5
I'm inclined to agree with those who say "inexperience" is a weak excuse. I did expect more from this team. Granted, I also expected we'd get Haggerty back in October. But even without her, there was an element of "not figuring it out" and "not finishing" that bugged me. I predicted that they would lose 6 matches in the B1G with Haggerty playing, and they lost 9 without her, so maybe my expectations were just different. The thing that bugged me was HOW they lost those matches. Always watching them scream in front and then freeze up was truly frustrating. That OSU match was one of the worst experiences I have had in a while.
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