re: Tired of bashing JJ threads...

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People act like Johnny hasn't been coaching for years and is just oblivious to the game of basketball. He knows more basketball than 99 percent of the world, let alone, on the Rant. Dude got hired for a reason and I have to believe it's more than a token hire and a "favor" to Dale and the governor. Yall trippin.

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Jones was a .500 coach at North Tx for 11 years before LSU hired him. During that time he never won a reg. season conf. title or a NCAA tournament game. There was literally no market for him as a HC outside of North Tx and LSU. If he hadn't played and coached during the glory years of LSU basketball he would have NEVER been considered for the HC job.

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He is getting better as a coach

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This is his 16th year as a HC (4th at LSU). We're not talking about some young assistant cutting his teeth as a 1st time HC. LSU shouldn't be in a position where they have to "wait" for a HC to "get better"

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That game let us know that we are heading in the right direction and just need to tweek a few things and at the end of the day, we only go as far as Ben's aggressiveness and assertiveness when it counts, along with Victor staying out of foul trouble, Quatermann being "engaged" in the game and Gray limiting his turnovers when he is in the game. That's not coaching, that's players knowing their roles and performing accordingly.

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No one is going to dispute that this team is much better with Hornsby/Victor in the line up. Also, even the most ardent of Jones haters can't deny that he generally gets his teams ready to compete in the big games against big time opponents. The problem is the wild lack of consistency. Everything that LSU did well against OU could completely go out of the window in the next game and no one would be surprised. It's plagued Jones for the last 3 seasons now. They could just as easily beat OU or UK as they could lose to an SEC bottom feeder or other below-avg team. That leads to LSU being a consistently good, but not great program.

There are still a lot of important games remaining and LSU is very much in the hunt for the SEC title. Jones deserves credit for that. However, right now this team is on the outside of the NCAAT looking in. I'll reserve full judgment until the end of this season. But if LSU fails to make the NCAAT (which like it or not is a real possibility at this point) then Jones will have had (outside of UK, of course) the most NBA talent in the SEC over the last 3 years and led then to 1 NCAAT birth and 0 NCAAT wins. It would be really hard to say he's doing a great job should that prove to be the case