Four years ago South Alabama brought back a coach many thought would continue the basketball programs success. Not only though did coach Ronnie Arrow accept the challenge but also has been at the University of South Alabama before and had pretty good success. Many will remember back in 1989 when South Alabama upset Alabama in the NCAA tournament, South was seeded 15th and Alabama 2nd. Since upon returning back to South Alabama coach Arrow has posted two twenty win seasons and made the NCAA tournament as an at-large team, which is hard to accomplish coming out of the Sunbelt conference.
However, fans are starting to become impatient with Arrow's success since arriving on campus. Ever since the 2008 season the Jaguar basketball program has not been improving but rather declining. In 2007-08 season the Jaguars returned perhaps two of the best players in South Alabama basketball history in guards Doan Merrit and Demetric Bennett and they were able to lead the Jaguars to the Sunbelt tournament as the top overall seed but lost to Middle Tennessee State and had to enter "March Madness" as an at-large bid and not as an automatic bid. The Sunbelt tournament was held at the Mitchell Center that year, so home-court advantage was on the Jaguars side. In the NCAA basketball tournament that year they got a match-up with Butler Bulldogs who like South Alabama is a mid-major team. South Alabama got blown out by Butler 81-61 in Birmingham, Alabama.
That was considered to be coach Arrow's best season since he has been back. Was it a good season? Yes, anyone can see that but the way they looked in the Birmingham regional game was a sign of what was to come. Since then South Alabama basketball has been less than stellar to say the least. 2008-09 had a conference record of 10-8, 8-10 2009-10, and 2010-11 2-5(still in progress). The past three years in the conference alone progression has not been shown clearly but on a slow decline. South Alabama has been known since coach Bill Mussleman as a competitive team that will compete for forty minutes with everything they have playing team basketball.
Now when South Alabama plays it looks more like a bunch of chaos. This year whenever a team plays a type of zone defense the offense looks dead as all of the players stand around behind the three point line waiting for someone to make a move. Most of the time a player will stand in the back-court just dribbling the ball waiting for the shot clock to run down to ten and then start passing it to the wings instead of dribbling in the middle of the zone passing it back out for a shot or finding another open shot. It looks like they are a little unorganized on the court and the defense is still pretty decent at times when it decides to show up but usually it shows up too late.
The season is slowly winding down and it looks like South Alabama is going to have a losing season in the conference in back to back seasons. Coach Ronnie Arrow has done a tremedous job at South Alabama in his two stints as head coach but it is time to move on and hire someone else to take over the program. If coach Ronnie Arrow stays it will just be putting the program back and not moving them forward and two to three years from now South Alabama basketball will go from being a once proud program to being a Sunbelt bottom feeder.
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