DC Native wrote:

While I respect both of your opinions, we'll just have to agree to disagree on this. Every team in the country, from the blue bloods to the bottom feeders, has a game or two in which they are not mentally prepared and lose to a lesser team. And every team in the country has games in which they are locked in and play better than usual and knock off a better team. But by and large, I believe the record of every team in the country is a pretty good reflexion of how good they are, which is a mixture of: 1) individual talent (the most important); 2) cohesiveness (ability of that individual talent to play together as a team); and 3) coaching (teaching, preparation, and in game coaching). I think expectations and hype play very little roll in how a team's season goes, regardless of their level in the college basketball hierarchy. And also, what exactly are we talking about in terms of hype for this team? While the team might get a bit more attention from local media, the main newspaper in town will still not cover most if not all of our games, let alone the national media. And while we might get a slight uptick in attendance, the Smith Center will still be half empty most games. But if you want to blame the media if the upcoming season doesn't go the way you expect it to, you are welcome to do so.

We are not talking about a "game or two" we are talking about an entire body of work - to be determined next March. Also, no one is going to blame the media. The credit or blame for performance goes squarely as it always has and should on the players and coaches. But pressures resulting from hype can and do impact performance to some degree whether in particular games or more importantly over the course of a season. For every underdog there is a team that didn't live up to expectations. We can cite rhyme and verse of teams who have crumbled under unrealistic expectations. We also can cite the opposite for teams in the weeds that nobody saw coming and just quietly went about their business and suddenly became a revelation in March. The one intangible that no one knows now about this group is how it will handle success or hype before success as well as how resilient it is to failure. You will only know that as it happens. Hype is a dangerous drug. If you let it infect you, it's hard to shed.