What Went Wrong: Loyola Chicago
When keeping it real goes wrong
Every now and then - much more often than that opening indicates - one will find themselves making a Wrong Take in the writing sphere. There’s three possible paths, equally used, that one can take in response:
Own the Wrong Take, regardless of seriousness (mostly of the unserious variety), and adjust your analysis in the future as such.
Ignore the Wrong Take and act as if it never happened. Continue sharing all your wins, obviously, but if you never post the losses, no one knows! You’re batting 1.000, baby.
Become irrationally defensive of your Wrong Take because it wasn’t you that was wrong, it was the subject of the take itself that blew it for you. They won’t do it a second time.
Depending on the time of the year, and depending on my personal investment (non-monetary), I can regrettably be any of these three. I would like to tell you I’m consistently a Take Owner, and for the most part I am, but plenty of times I’ve found myself down the dark path of a Take Defender or a Take Ignorer. (Become one of these two types and you can fit right in with 97% of college basketball media members.)
I bring this up because I’ve said some pretty embarrassing stuff in the last seven months, all surrounding one school. Let’s count the ways…
I declared I was high on this team in the preseason.
I declared this team would contend to make the NCAA Tournament as an at-large.
I said their head coach was a “future coaching star.”
On the Chase Thomas Podcast, a show I make frequent appearances on, I said that Northwestern should fire Chris Collins and hire this coach before “it was too late to do so.” And then said the job was probably too small for him.
And seven months on, the time has come for me to own just how horrific this laundry list of takes was, courtesy of the second-largest preseason-to-postseason underperformance in the last decade.
I was not alone in believing in Loyola Chicago and Drew Valentine. Both KenPom and Torvik had the Ramblers in their preseason top 60, and at least one outlet had them top 50. They’d sustained quite a few losses throughout the offseason due to graduation and would be significantly younger, but nothing about Valentine or the program itself suggested a rebuilding year. Loyola had more or less hit the point of mid-majordom that a few hit where you reload more than you rebuild.
It really may be the wrongest I have ever been on a team. I’m unable to think of any other similar level of an extreme own goal since I’ve been in the public writing sphere, aka 2016 to present. (Saying Miami was an obvious fade as a 5 seed this year comes close, I guess.) Still, a realistic down year to me would’ve meant a step back in the form of merely finishing 100th or so in KenPom and picking up 10-12 Atlantic 10 wins. Getting 10 wins period was not close to my radar.
Instead of a minor setback, they self-destructed. A preseason third-place vote in the A-10 poll turned into a last-place finish. It wasn’t like they were extremely young. It wasn’t as if they lost all of their production. It wasn’t even that they were injured all season long, as they used just three different starting lineups from November until the conference tournament.
How did this turn into a disaster overnight on both ends of the ball, but particularly on defense? Is there a way out of this? Also, how have similar gigantic underperformers done in their following season, particularly those like Loyola with solid returners/additions? Hopefully this time, I’m a little less far off than last October.