re: The national opinion on Haith.

Haith might not have coached well at Miami. I dunno. I do know his record at miami places his as probably the best coach in Miami history. That doesn't mean he was a good coach there. He was limited in the number of staff he could hire and he wasn't allowed to pay them well at all.

Since he has been at Mizzou I have seen nothing that indicates he is anything but a good coach. He installed a completely new offense for a group of kids that had been together for 3 years already and taught them how to run it perfectly. He installed a defensive philosophy that kept them out of foul trouble and dealt with a 7 man rotation and no height very well. Not to mention the group was divided and dysfunctional when he took them over.

Hell, even Bobby Knight went out of his way to say the coaching Haith did last year was as good as he has ever seen.

This year was going to be most likely a sub .500 season before Haith took over. He turned it into a dang good year by Mizzou standards. He did it with a bunch of transfers and that is hard. Transfers are transfers for a reason. If they were NBA lottery picks at their last schools, they'd still be there. Oriakhi might be the exception to that. He also lost a 1st team preseason all american mid year. How fricking bad did that hurt?

For perspective, if it was easy to win compiling a team full of transfers, wouldn't more coaches be doing it? They don't because it is very hard to get guys to just come in and mesh.

Another thing, he took a group of short players and produced one of the most efficient offenses in the country while playing 4 guards. This year, he has a very big and athletic team, completely changed the offense, and still coached them to being one of the most efficient offenses in the country. If that doesn't scream great coaching, what does?

He is also bringing in talented players. Next year's class might not be huge, but it is full of national level recruits. Plus, I really like NWC, Jankovic and Rosburg.

As he has been doing all of this, he has been fighting a cloud of NCAA violations hanging over his head which appear to be rather bogus. How he wasn't distracted by that is remarkable. He has been under the gun since the day he was hired and went out and won 50 games faster than anyone else in Mizzou history. Right now, his winning % over the last 2 years is in elite company.

Were there some letdowns this year? Sure. I think 99% of that was because Dixon is gone.

I could go on and on.

Is Haith perfect? Hell no. Is he a good coach? Yes. Is he a damn good coach? From what I can see, yes. Is he a great coach? No, not yet.

I think the national perspective mainly comes from ignorance. They just see a coach of a #2 seed who lost and judge him solely on that combined with some close losses due to terrible PG play.