To be fair I've been there. Well not the in game tickets angle but after the UAB loss I didn't watch any of the tournament until the Elite 8.From Hok forums:
"No thirst for watching college basketball right now, and here I am sitting in Buffalo until Sunday with second round tournament tickets. Yep, it hurts. My pity party aside, I am sure there are 15 young men who are feeling much worse. Damn Spiders!"
Keegan is a big loss but I do think Kris and P. McCaffery take steps forward and somewhat fill the gap. Bohannon is just pretty limited outside shooting 3's and Iowa has guys already on the team who do that reasonably well.I think this is optimistic. Keegan commands a lot of defensive attention and Bohannon spreads things out for everyone else. They are likely to struggle next year.
Iowa and Fran keep proving me wrong. I thought they would have a significant drop this year. It won't surprise me if they're back in the tournament next year.
This is how I feel. I've seen enough statements on how without Garza they'd be trash or previous to that the guard play would be so terrible that they wouldn't the tournament that I'm automatically skeptical of folks saying that again.
Obviously we'll have to see how the transfer portal shakes out, both gains and losses, but keep in mind from last year to this year Iowa lost Garza(NPOTY and top scorer+ rebounder), Wieskamp(2nd scoring+2nd rebounding), CJ Fredrick(4th scoring +3 pt sharpshooter), and Jack Nunge(quality reserve big man). Despite this they still managed to get a pretty high seed in the tournament.
Assuming they can hold on to the key guys this year the base returning looks way better.
Fran is pretty good at reloading, it's winning in the tournament that's his problem.

