Or, stated differently, who feels like not talking about the game that the national, local, and any other variety of media is, weirdly, not reporting to be the 20-17 Vols victory that I am certain I witnessed with my own two eyes. Must just be a really large scale typo or something. I'll just leave it at that.
Wes Rucker, who changed jobs and is working for a site that I'm still trying to wrap my brain around, hits us with some notes from Bruce Pearl's press conference from yesterday. Pearl waxed -- and I'm taking great liberties with my paraphrasing here -- about our lack of solid defense as of late, and how it has severely curtailed our ability to run transition offense. When you don't run transition offense, you are, by default, running half-court offense. A wise man once said that a half court offense operates substantially more effectively when the team running it has the ability shoot the basketball. We should be able to shoot the basketball, but we can't. Herein lies a major problem.
Coach Pearl stepped up the intensity level in the BasketVols most recent practice. The idea being to inject back into this team a mindset of defensive toughness. Scotty Hopson approves of the measure....well, at least publicly.
"It was very tough, but you could see we’re getting back to those physical and fierce practices we used to have,’’ junior Scotty Hopson said. "You could see it from position one through five that we were all here to get better, and with the time we have to get ready for Memphis, this was much needed.
I wonder how many of the players would co-sign Coach Pearl's characterization of the practice?
"This was more fun. This was more intense, and we made progress today.’’
As president of the Tyler Bray fan club, I am constitutionally obligated to link this article. When you read the headline of the article you think you're about to read something really interesting about the relationship between Bray and Darin Hinshaw. It quickly devolves into paragraph on top of paragraph about how Tyler is going to gain weight in the offseason. But, as president of the fan club, my hands were tied. I had to link it.
Speaking of presidents, we just got ourselves a new one.