After another tough loss, Mike Stowe looks at how Georgia Basketball fans should look at this season.
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Well ,my fellow Dawgs, I’m not going to lie. That one hurt a bit. The 11 point loss to Kentucky pretty much done away with the Georgia basketball team’s slim chance of making the NCAA tournament . I was really hoping the return of Yante Maten would give UGA the boost it needed to beat one of these elite teams like the Wildcats. It would have been a major a step in an impressive run to winning the SEC tournament. That would have been enough to get into the Big Dance. J.J. Frazier definitely deserved one more run there. But ,alas, NIT again.
It’s not all gloom and doom . The pieces are there to make a run in the NIT. Some good young players like Pape Diatta and Turtle Jackson are returning next season. If, and it’s a big “if”, Yante Maten returns, it should make Georgia a tournament team. It’s just frustrating because the same things we were saying at the end of last season are looking more and more like the same things we will be saying at the end of this season. While this program may never be on Kentucky’s level, it’s players and fans deserve more .
So now , we wait. As the hordes of fans from our rivals at Big Blue nation, Gator nation and Razorback nation make their respective SEC tourney runs and await their seeding in the Big Dance, we await our NIT fate. Regardless of the results there, I believe most people are going to look back on this season and consider it a disappointment. I, like so many of you, think UGA basketball can be so much more. I have a lot of ideas on how we can make that happen. But I’m going to keep a lot of those to myself for now since the Dawgs still have basketball left to play……even if it’s not in the tournament they wanted to be in . As they say …..”That’s another story for another time”.
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So how do we deal with the pain? The thing I’ve found that helps me the most is open, honest discussion. If as a fan you’re not satisfied with the current state of the basketball program, discuss it. While it isn’t going to help to obsess over it, a little healthy debate is fine. I want more for this program and you should as well.