I think those that are thinking we are deep are holding on to what we were thinking we had on way into the year and forgetting we don’t have Fabian White and Mills anymore. Then we would have eight player fully contributing. Now we have six. It isn’t like those after the six are bad. They just aren’t at the real contributor level yet.
While I find most of what the author had to say superficial and click bait (in case there are any Aggies reading - no we are not talking about fishing - I agree wholeheartedly with this bit:
“Jarreau is the team leader and one of the best glue guys in the country as well. Jarreau is a huge part of what the Cougars do on both offense and defense and they would not be nearly as good without him on the floor.”
IMHO Dejon has been terrific on offense - but off the charts good on defense. He has length, quickness and wingspan to a degree that he disrupts everything the other team tries to do to just get in its sets. Not to mention, but UH has faced several scoring “stars” (McClung, Alston, Mahan and more) who all just seem to have an off night against UH. I think it was in the January 21 media availability that CKS went into some tantalizing depth about the defensive metrics/analytics the staff charts. I got the impression that the grades or evaluation for Dejon were quite good, high praise coming from Sampson the elder.
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We haven’t seen a team with quality bigs. Playing the Big 10 teams worry me.
Excellent take on Jarreau!! I’m not sure everyone realizes how much he has stepped up his game all around since the first couple of gms this season. He’s making excellent decisions on both ends of the floor and is always responsible for best shooter away from the paint. His length, quickness plays a huge role in what CKS can put into his defensive schemes. Has cut down on his turnovers significantly also.
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Last years not even close to this season. Sasser, Grimes and Jarreau are all playing at a different level. As Mark rounds back into shape it will be even more apparent.
Jarreau for us is much like what Stacey Augmon was for UNLV but Ithink more of a factor on offense
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You can add Dunn from Temple to that list. He had scored 20 in each of the last two games. He finished yesterday with 5 points on 1-10 shooting
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I do agree a good big can hurt us. Temple’s big doubles his season average against us yesterday.
Is the B1G still a slow basketball league? If so, I am not worried about a non speed team beating us.
Good catch. I am too lazy to do the work, but I suspect if I went back and compared season averages of opposing teams “scoring” guards to their output against UH it would be a significant disparity. Obviously, not all Jarreau, the team does play excellent team defense, but my impression is it all starts with Jarreau (and this is high praise from me) just as it started with #25 from the 33-4 team.
Forrester was mostly the recipient of of leaving him unguarded on our rotations, not controlling the paint
Great comments on Jarreau. I’ve been thinking the same thoughts for several games now. I’m loving his game this year!
If people don’t understand how valuable Jarreau is on offense, watch how difficult the shots are when he goes to the bench.
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And they lost by 17. I hope we get to go against Garza in the Dance to see how we’d do, especially if Fabian gets back. Hard double-downs
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I don’t think it was a bad or lazy prediction, we did not know ALL the things were going to happen. I think we all know he is very talented, it is just the way it turned out!
He works very hard at defense and has so many good physical attributes to go along with it. His height for a guard, long arms etc… He is very tenacious & competitive!!!
It’s lazy in the sense that they just auto filled him in. Caleb wasn’t even projected to start. The pick never made any sense.
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I did! I knew he was going to be a force when he first showed up on the court because he could play d and get to the foul line. Now I will blow the horn on my locomotives 
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Probably comes from watching the 2nd half of the TT game where we slowed down drastically with the big lead
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The offense has picked up because Sampson has asked the players to be more aggressive in scoring with the idea we will likely get the rebound so don’t be afraid to shoot. We are getting more open looks by going earlier in the shot clock.
Jarreau could get 15-20 points a game if he wanted to ISO all the time. He is more of an all around player this year. He and Sasser have started to go to paint more.
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This line makes no sense whatsoever to me. We are scoring 73.8 PPG and giving up 56.3 PPG. If the point is our defense won’t be able to hold better opponents to under 60, or that our offense won’t be able to score more than 60, then I guess that make sense. But just based on the numbers, which are currently the only facts we can rely upon, we don’t need to score 70 to beat anyone. Defense wins championships, so I’ll take our defense and rebounding over higher scoring offenses every day of the week.
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All in all I agree with you except for one point. In NCAA basketball offense wins Championships. You also have to have a defense, but the only team not to have a top 7 offense by Ken Pom and win the Championship was Uconn… twice. So you actually need a top-flight offense
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