How Do You Feel About Mark Turgeon As Head Basketball Coach?

We currently sit at 14-2 on the season, one game worse than our record at this point last season. You can argue that our conference opener against Colorado in '08 pitted us against a weaker team than our game with Oklahoma State yesterday, so maybe there is a reason we started the season 15-1 last year. Nevertheless, we had an equally dispiriting game in the second game of our conference schedule last season, when we were beaten at home by a mediocre Baylor team in five overtimes, mainly because Turgeon refused to take advantage of our depth in the post after after all of Baylor's big men had fouled out. We now head into our second game of the conference season again getting Baylor at Reed Arena, and judging from the results from our last game, things don't look good for the Aggies.

We don't play together as a team. We seem incredibly discombobulated on the court. We don't look like we know what we're supposed to be doing on offense. I've heard several reports that we spend most of practice working on Turgeon's motion offense, but what we actually run on the floor looks nothing like a motion offense. It seems like Turgeon again either is incapable of getting the players to buy in to what he wants to do on offense, or he is unable to teach it.

Travis Ford has only been at Oklahoma State for half of a season, and he has his team running his offense. Why is he able to get buy-in so easily and Turgeon is not?

Ultimately, the goal for A&M Men's Basketball program is to win a national championship, and I'm still not sure if Turgeon is the guy to get us there. If he needs to wait four years to get "his" guys in to buy into his system, then we've definitely hired the wrong person to head up our program. We don't need four years of treading water as merely a decent program before we can expect to achieve anything noteworthy, not with other Big 12 schools moving forward and improving their teams. I am certain that Turgeon doesn't teach the defensive intensity needed to win at a high level; I think he emphasizes his offense at the expense of defense. It is still early in the year and it is only one conference game, but the blowout loss (and yes, it was a blowout) to Oklahoma State was just a symptom of the many problems we've had so far this season which were hidden by playing a lackluster non-conference schedule.  One has to wonder if this is an aberration, or a sign of real prolems with this team and this program. We'll get a better indication of which way this team is going Wednesday night.