this team will come together and i'm sure we will
be good, but this is a disappointing start

Defense…. Not existent yet again for the 3rd straight year. You aren't beating any good teams giving up 50 in 1 half.
Rebuilding the roster every single year isn't helping either. A loss was expected tonight. Hopefully we look much improved against Arky who imo is better than the Zags

I see nothing so far that makes me think this team is competitive for the conference or in the tournament. Unless the defense radically changes hard to expect anything else.

I continue to be worried drew did not pull together a complementary roster. He just grabbed the biggest pieces but it's not a good team

The only part of the game that was particularly encouraging was when they got to within 13. But that didn't last long. I'm sure there were other positives in the game but they are far overshadowed by the negatives, especially the final score.

If Baylor has an advantage, it is the presence of four or five perimeter players, all of them quick, most of them undersized. A strong man for man, pressure defense, with switching permitted only when they are exchanging one player for another who is comparable in size, was what I expected to see. Without a commitment to a defense of this kind, every team will do what Gonzaga did in response, as most teams did last year. The fundamental strength of a good switching defense is a lineup without a notable disparity in size, where the attacking team can pass a player off to a comparable defender without a noticeable loss of effective defensive pressure.

One of the observable assets of the Baylor National Champions, was the fact that the core of the outside players on the team were all transfers, and each arrived already capable of playing a stifling defense. Butler was the only exception, since he transferred in as an entering freshman. These players were fundamentally sound and ready to absorb the instructions they encountered at Baylor. I watched them in a Baylor practice and saw immediately that we could play an effective mix of defensive alignments, and Mark Vital was the perfect backstop for this group. He could guard any player anywhere on the court and made exceptional decisions in his defensive responsibilities, the ideal disruptor.

Flo Thamba was rarely called upon to score, but he did participate in the defensive assignments and his size and mobility made it possible for him to move out on the floor, where he became adept at setting screens and rolling to the basket at the offensive end, and to get the occasional block and a critical rebound, while guarding the opponent's player of size. The regression that we saw in his senior year should not obscure the role he played in the championship year, including the championship game in which it is possible to argue that his performance was the best of his career.

Interestingly, Josh O. is one of the best defenders out away from the basket of any of our post players of recent years, but it removes him as a primary defender/rebounder in the deep paint where he is most needed. The switching defense favored by Scott Drew reminds me of the zone which he favored, holding on to that scheme after it was clear that the league had caught up with it and exploited it. The switching man for man is an excellent defense with the appropriate personnel and enough time to absorb its nuances and exceptions, making decisions in mid-flight and communicating with gestures and small bits of information.

It is as important to know what not to do as it is to know what to do, no matter the kind of defensive scheme a coach chooses to deploy. We saw the confusion and, finally, the resignation on the faces of Baylor defenders in the game up in Spokane, and while there is reason to discount somewhat the first game of the season, in light of the number of new players wearing the Green and Gold. playing a team of that quality when your players are still young and green in your preferred schemes, some of which may be ill-suited to the current personnel, has only made the situation more difficult to assess by viewers from the outside.

It's clear that defense like this demands a particular fit in personnel, and maybe that's what made their recent Spokane game so tricky.