It was the question most Tiger fans were asking themselves after the University of Memphis men's basketball team fell to the University of Virginia 78-60 in the NCAA Tournament on Sunday night: What should be made of head coach Josh Pastner's struggles in the NCAA Tournament?
After all, players come and go, but coaches remain, and are essential to the long-term success of a program.
Pastner and the Tigers have made the tournament the past four seasons. They lost their first game in 2011 and 2012 and they won their first game but lost their second in each of the last two seasons.
The problem with those losses is that they've had a similar theme. The Tigers dig themselves a hole and start playing hero ball, lacking the mental toughness to stay in the game.
The U of M began all four of those seasons ranked in the Associated Press Top 25 Poll, making the program's failure to make the Sweet 16 in those four years seem like a bigger failure.
Fans want their team to exceed expectations not fall short of expectations.
Maybe the problem is with the expectations. Pre-season polls are inherently flawed because they are released before any team takes the court but don't try to tell an angry Tiger fan that. Also, it's unlikely the AP Poll missed on Memphis four years in a row.
Memphis sports-talk radio was rife with what Pastner would call "Negative Nellies" on Monday. They were calling for Pastner's head and calling the season a drastic failure.
To that I say slow down.
After all, Pastner's first five seasons at the helm have been some of the best debut seasons in the history of college basketball in terms of wins.
He's amassed 130 wins and only 44 losses (.747). Unfortunately for Pastner, most of the wins have come in the regular season against mostly inferior competition, especially when the Tigers were in Conference USA.
Pastner registered his first wins against top-25 competition this season. They won five top-25 games this year after winning zero games over ranked opponents in the last five years, and they were ranked each week of the season except for the final AP Poll.
That was a step in the right direction, but missing the Sweet 16 undid whatever progress was made in those regular-season victories.
Fans and media judge college coaches based off their performance in the tournament, and Pastner has been the first to admit those judgments are fair. He even said it would be fair to judge his performance based on whether or not Memphis made the second weekend of the tournament.
You can make that judgment if you'd like, and you'd probably conclude this season was a failure. However, I'm not going to ignore the regular season.
Contrary to popular belief, I think the regular season still has value. FedExForum was rocking during the U of M's comebacks against Gonzaga and arch-rival Louisville. Senior guard Joe Jackson was blocking 7-footers at the rim and Tiger fans were helping their team roar to victory. It's those types of moments that make college basketball's regular season great.
Yet now that the season is over, critical fans will discount the importance of the regular season, but those same fans sure seemed to enjoy the Louisville and Gonzaga wins at the time.
As much as it pains the Tiger faithful to hear it, Memphis is not Kansas, North Carolina, Duke or Kentucky. The U of M has a great basketball program, but it's not a perennial power that can expect to be competing for a championship year in and year out.
That said, Memphis should probably make the second weekend of the tournament, if not most years, every couple of years - an area Pastner has obviously fallen short.
However, I'm not ready to close the book on Pastner. His first year was spent coaching scraps from John Calipari's era and the last four years have been the same core of players. I want to see how he does with his second crop of guys - Nick King, Austin Nichols, Markel Crawford, Dominic Woodson, Kuran Iverson and others.
The coach always deserves the brunt of the blame, but players should get some of the grief, too. Jackson has had a great career, chronicled in The Daily Helmsman last week, but he struggled in the tournament games he appeared in. Should Pastner be blamed if his players make critical mistakes in big games?
I've sat through practices. Pastner constantly preaches to never cut underneath screens, but there it was on Sunday. Senior guard Geron Johnson cut a screen to give the Cavaliers a wide open look from three. Does Pastner deserve the blame for that?
The great coaches like Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Boeheim and Calipari find ways to keep good players coming in year after year and succeed. Pastner has only had the chance to work with one set of players, and judgment should be held until this next set of recruits cycles through.
Pastner also does a stellar job of graduating his players. The U of M's basketball team has tested their way into the Academic Final Four in each of the last three seasons, posting a perfect Academic Progress Rate last year.
He has pulled guys out of rough circumstances. Johnson came to Memphis with a lengthy history of minor theft and drug charges, but Pastner helped him turn his life around.
Another senior guard Michael Dixon Jr. was dismissed from the program at the University of Missouri for rape allegation although no charges were ever filed. Pastner brought him to Memphis and Dixon succeeded.
Fans will judge Pastner and call for his firing. That's their prerogative, but I think the jury is still out and these next few years will show the fifth-year coach's true colors.
Pastner makes the program about more than just basketball, and that's something Memphis fans can take pride in.
