After reaching the Supers (which we hosted) last season, I was more inclined to hope that Holbrook, who was a young coach in charge of his first program, was developing himself as a capable HC as much as he was developing his program. So I defended him to a degree, with a hopeful patience.

But I'm not in that place anymore. With Martin, he took over a program that under Horn was poorly coached, that scored less and allowed more scored with each passing season. Martin started with little next to nothing, and I can clearly see logic and a working philosophy in playing competitive basketball, even if often he doesn't have the talent necessary to play it at a high level, or sometimes they just fail to do so.

When Horn asked his players to play as he wanted them to, and they did, it was often sloppy and undisciplined and seemed like there were no set plays or a team understanding of how to work open, high-percentage shot opportunities. With Martin's early teams, it seemed similar, but as the seasons progressed I saw more discipline and philosophy.

After the 2013-14 season which was Martin's 2nd at USC, and the final 4-2 run the team went on after going 10-18 prior, I saw for the first time some team discipline and team-wide understanding of how they can play winning basketball that I rarely saw under Horn. The MBB team has gone 17-16, 25-9, and 26-11 since then. CFM knows how to develop a MBB program.

With Holbrook, I am sadly doubtful that he can do the job now. He is now talking about player injuries in all of his pressers, tryign to spin the season on falling apart because of it. But for most of the season - well into the SEC conference schedule - all we had was Johnson miss some time. And Tyler was a huge loss for the team for that time, but even before then, the team has been a poor team defensively, a poor team hitting at the plate, and the coaching decisions on baserunners, bunting, and pitching changes have been very poor.

The best aspect of the team during Holbrook's tenure has been the pitching, and that's Meyers' area of responsibility.

Holbrook's stubbornness to stick with team bunting without teaching it properly, to have batters swing free early in pitching counts, etc. even when those things have hurt the team's chances to win games, tells me he is just in over his head. And unlike CFM who knows what its all about, Holbrook's teams aren't getting any better or more fundamentally disciplined: they just keep doing the same bad things...