The first six games of Luke Loucks’ Florida State basketball tenure went exactly to plan.
Five lopsided wins against inferior competition and a very slim loss to a much more talented Florida team.
The last
three had to be humbling for Loucks, his staff and the FSU roster.
A pair of losses to Texas A&M (neutral site) and Georgia (at home) by a combined 70 points followed by a 15-point loss to Houston at a not-so-neutral site.
The Seminoles (5-4) had actually built a lot of goodwill in the metrics over their first six games. They started the season 96th in the KenPom rankings and had risen 30-plus spots to place themselves in the fringes of postseason consideration if things broke right in conference play.
Three games later, FSU is right back at…you guessed it, 96th in KenPom, blowing through all of the positive momentum it had built. Given that those Texas A&M and Georgia teams aren’t bad. They could be quite good and are certainly more talented than this Florida State team. But they certainly aren’t 30-plus points better than the Sminoles.
And so, the expectations have now been firmly reset for this year’s team.
Mind you, the NCAA Tournament wasn’t the expectation in Year 1 under Loucks. Not given the financial situation he inherited and built his first roster constrained by.
A fun and surprisingly good start against overmatched teams may have warped the fanbase’s perception of this team, but it very much remains a Moneyball situation, something that Loucks has been pretty transparent about.
However, multiple 30-point losses also weren’t the expectation. For as bad as things got in Leonard Hamilton’s final four seasons, FSU had just two 30-plus-point losses in that span.
Loucks’ team took them in back-to-back games.
The first-year head coach certainly knows as well as anyone that things have to get better because the ACC is improved this season as a league and will present some challenges to his team.
Texas A&M ranks 54th in KenPom thanks to a few bad early-season losses. Nine of the other 16 ACC teams rank higher than that, including five teams in the KenPom Top 25.
In some ways, it could be considered a good thing that there’s no single thing that has plagued the Seminoles during their current three-game losing streak.
Against Texas A&M, the Aggies had a great shooting day while the Seminoles did not.
Against Georgia, Loucks roasted his team postgame for effectively deciding to stop playing defense when it got off to a poor shooting start.
Against Houston, Florida State actually held up ok on the boards with a 37-35 rebounding advantage, but committed 19 turnovers against the Cougars’ stifling defense.
One common theme — and it’s something that isn’t exactly fixable this season — is FSU’s comparative lack of size and star-power talent relative to these better-funded teams.
That makes this next four-game stretch which concludes non-conference play, starting Saturday vs. UMass in Sunrise, Fla, so important. It’s the final time for the Seminoles to figure out their best way forward before they get thrown into the ACC deep end.
Because that’s lurking at the end of this month with games at North Carolina (No. 24 in KenPom) and vs. (No. 4) Duke and NC State (No. 28) to begin conference play.
KenPom actually projects Florida State to lose its first eight ACC games.
If that — or anything close to that — were to happen, it would really test the morale of this team and make Loucks and the staff’s jobs much harder this offseason as they attempt to raise more money and recruit more talent for Year 2 when expectations will begin to marginally increase.
