03-31-2021, 07:06 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-31-2021, 07:08 AM by Blue Hawk (Mizzou) Card.)
As posted elsewhere, I am a brobdingnagian Tara fan. It has been painful to see her get to the Final Four so often, with no title in almost two decades.
It just seems like she never quite has enough to get back to the title. When she had superstars, she did not have enough supporting players. Now that she has a whole cast of good players, the only thing she is missing is a superstar. Don't get me wrong: We have a lot of really good players. But we don't have a Nneka, Chiney, Candice, Nicole level player right now. When we did, we didn't have the supporting cast that we do now. [I don't have as much time to follow this as I used to have, but if you rank every team's players in order from their best down, I have to believe that Stanford's fifth to tenth best players are better than anyone else's this year. We are so deep, as last night proved, when the tenth player on that list was the key to victory. How many teams can ride the back of someone who did not play (or, perhaps, barely played) in the first half? What a great night for her!!!]
But do we have enough, now that we are facing teams with true superstars? Time will tell.
One thing that does feel different this year: In recent Final Fours, I have thought "we might win this, but we can't win it just by playing our A game, because the other teams' A games are better than ours, so we need help from them." This year, while it is hard to feel confident after yesterday's first half, which we will not recover from if it repeats itself, my feeling is "our A game is competitive with the other team's A games." That doesn't mean we will beat South Carolina, for example. But if we play like we can play, we have a chance to beat them, even if they play like they can play.
As a Stanford women's basketball fan, I have accumulated enough PTSD over the years to not be optimistic about the Final Four. There is no need to alert the woofing gods, because I am by no means predicting victory, even on Friday. South Carolina is a very good team that matches up well with Stanford. There is no reason to be anything but nervous.
But we have a shot. A better shot, in my opinion, than we have had in a while.
Geez, it would be good to see Tara win one. Doesn't karma owe her that, after all she has done for the women's game? Think of how she has built western women's basketball from an afterthought to having two teams in the Final Four. [Obviously, she has not done it alone. But she has gone out of her way to help other western teams, even doing little things like agreeing to play WSU twice at their place when she easily could have avoided that.]
Geez, it would be good to see our women win this year, after the crazy year they have had. They really do feel like a TEAM.
It just seems like she never quite has enough to get back to the title. When she had superstars, she did not have enough supporting players. Now that she has a whole cast of good players, the only thing she is missing is a superstar. Don't get me wrong: We have a lot of really good players. But we don't have a Nneka, Chiney, Candice, Nicole level player right now. When we did, we didn't have the supporting cast that we do now. [I don't have as much time to follow this as I used to have, but if you rank every team's players in order from their best down, I have to believe that Stanford's fifth to tenth best players are better than anyone else's this year. We are so deep, as last night proved, when the tenth player on that list was the key to victory. How many teams can ride the back of someone who did not play (or, perhaps, barely played) in the first half? What a great night for her!!!]
But do we have enough, now that we are facing teams with true superstars? Time will tell.
One thing that does feel different this year: In recent Final Fours, I have thought "we might win this, but we can't win it just by playing our A game, because the other teams' A games are better than ours, so we need help from them." This year, while it is hard to feel confident after yesterday's first half, which we will not recover from if it repeats itself, my feeling is "our A game is competitive with the other team's A games." That doesn't mean we will beat South Carolina, for example. But if we play like we can play, we have a chance to beat them, even if they play like they can play.
As a Stanford women's basketball fan, I have accumulated enough PTSD over the years to not be optimistic about the Final Four. There is no need to alert the woofing gods, because I am by no means predicting victory, even on Friday. South Carolina is a very good team that matches up well with Stanford. There is no reason to be anything but nervous.
But we have a shot. A better shot, in my opinion, than we have had in a while.
Geez, it would be good to see Tara win one. Doesn't karma owe her that, after all she has done for the women's game? Think of how she has built western women's basketball from an afterthought to having two teams in the Final Four. [Obviously, she has not done it alone. But she has gone out of her way to help other western teams, even doing little things like agreeing to play WSU twice at their place when she easily could have avoided that.]
Geez, it would be good to see our women win this year, after the crazy year they have had. They really do feel like a TEAM.