Welp.
For 12 or so hours I had some hope.
Then to go from the Gottlieb anticipation to the Weber realization was tough. Real tough.
But I'm an optimist and a numbers guy, so off and on for the last day I've been looking at the numbers. And looking...
I've decided that if you took Asbury and combined him with Wooly pretty much what you get is oscar Weber. Instead of a good old boy from a mid-sized Oklahoma City, Weber is the upper midwest version from Milwaukee. And like Asbury, Weber worked up as an assistant, got a BCS job, and eventually forced his employer to fire him by completely losing his team.
First I always wonder about long time assistants becoming head coaches. Weber sat under Keady for nearly 20 years before heading out on his own. That itself is disconcerting.
However, his time at Southern Illinois featured some solid teams and success that he built himself. It looks like it was a fun style, 70 possessions per game, solid at oboarding and getting the the FT line, forcing TOs; actually not too much different than Frank's style.
Then Illinois came calling. With Bill Self's talent some things seemed to change. There was still an emphasis on oboarding early, but as his career went along that waned. His early teams had great guards and shooting was premium, but as more of his own players moved in the shooting got worse. Weber's best team at Illinois shot 39% from 3 and 39% of their shots were 3s. This year's team shot 30% from 3 for the season. Granted the Big 10 is slow in general, but the pace of his teams dropped to the mid to low 60s. The FT rate of his teams at Illinois was mediocre, way below average. TO rate forced only got worse during his tenure as well.
There was a point where it didn't seem like Weber was a SLTH in the style of basketball he played, but he certainly has evolved into one. The classic case of slowing down the game, not taking chances on the offensive glass, not attacking and thus forcing fouls, and not forcing turnovers at a high clip. Weber's defensive numbers are solid (besides when he lost this year's team), but its definitely a style that keeps the offense in front of you and seemingly bores the defense into missing shots. On the offensive end it becames a game of hoping you make shots. The last several years his offense has been characterized by being average at effective FG%, TO rate, and OR% while being terrible at FT rate.
Then you look at the fact that he completely lost his last team, a team he built, and a team with some solid talent. A team that sat at 15-3 and ranked in the Top 25 with adv stats that looked like this:
Total Pace PPP eFG% TO% OR% FTR
Illini 66 1.04 51.6 21.0 33.5 32.8
Opp 66 0.92 46.9 22.0 28.0 34.7
Then the wheels fell off. On the way to being fired and Weber claiming he "guessed" it was his fault, his team went 2-12 with these numbers:
Total Pace PPP eFG% TO% OR% FTR
Illini 63 0.96 46.8 19.7 27.7 28.3
Opp 63 1.07 53.3 18.2 28.5 41.2
So Currie has left us with a head scratching hire. I appreciate the angst of the board, but I leave that to the rest of you who are much better at it than me. Now I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to go back to watching this brand of basketball. Should most of the players stick around, Weber will be fine next year, he won't be able to coach out the toughness that Frank instilled in one year. But as time goes on I'll miss the tenacity, effort, and agressiveness I've comed to love the last 6 years. Many have called it ugly basketball, but its become the basketball I prefer.
Now I'm faced with going back to watching some combination of Asbury and Wooly.
Thanks John Currie.
