Is This Rock Bottom? Please Tell Us This Is Rock Bottom.

Anyone who has ever been unfortunate to be on the receiving end of one of our long winded diatribes about JMU basketball knows that we’ve been big supporters of Matt Brady. We like his no holds barred approach and willingness to tell it like it is. We remember just how bad things were under the two coaches who shall not be named. We appreciate how quickly he righted the ship and raised expectations. If you read the blog it’s also probably apparent that we like to avoid any talk about JMU coaches’ job security. It’s just not that fun to question if another man deserves to keep his job (or we’re spineless cowards, it depends on your perspective I guess). I’d much rather make fun of Mason or write something to piss off Liberty fans. But it’s come to a point where the only thing anyone wants to talk about when it comes to JMU basketball is Coach Brady’s job security, so we might as well weigh in.

It is still early, but things don’t look very good. Brady spent the entire off season proclaiming that this was the year that he finally had a team to play his style of basketball. He insisted that Denzel’s departure would be addition by subtraction. He swore that he finally had a leader in Devon Moore, who could help the team play his system of basketball. We’re only 2 games into the CAA schedule, but it appears as if this team suffers from all of the ills that plagued them in the past, plus they have absolutely positively do not have anyone who can score in the paint. They seem to literally have no offensive sets. Instead their “system” seems to center on playing catch 30 feet from the hoop and waiting for someone to get hot from long range. When it works, as it did when AJ Davis went 8 for 9 from long range against Rider, JMU wins. When it doesn’t, they lose to teams as bad as Rhode Island and William & Mary.

Devon Moore, who was supposed to be the veteran leader, has not stepped up and taken control of this team. Worse than that, he seems to have regressed. His shooting percentage is down. His outside shot has disappeared (14% from 3 pt range). He’s not driving to the hoop and therefore not getting to the line enough (his free throw rate is down to 30% after being 60% last year). The team was better off with Humpty running the point. And Humpty has played what seems to be a season’s worth of minutes and it’s the first week in January. He’s been great, but he’s being worked to the bone.

Todd and I have defended Brady for years and still haven’t turned on him, but it really seems like he’s losing this team. He caught a bad break with Rayshawn Goins going down for the season, but he’s failed to recruit any depth down low. Trevon Flores left the team for personal reasons. My heart breaks for the kid who was struggling to deal with the loss of his mother.  However, he was a 6’11” junior who lost his starting job 3 games into the season to a big man transfer who had been out of basketball for 2 years. That same big man, a 6’11” 260 pound big man to be precise, only averages 2 rebounds a game. This is a roster with too many holes and a team without any identify.

I like Brady and want him to succeed. He deserves credit for getting the program back to respectability after the damage the 2 coaches who shall not be named did. This loss to William & Mary is bad news though. It either was rock bottom and it will motivate JMU to get it together, or we’re going to look back 3 months from now and point to it as the thing that sealed Brady’s fate and charted him on a course out of town. I really hope it’s the former. I hope people throw this in my face and mock me for writing it years for now after Brady leads JMU to another CAA championship. This just seems an awful lot like the situation with Bruce Boudreau and the Capitals. Brady might be the coach that could pull them out of the basement and right the ship, but someone else might need to be the guy to take them to the next level.