No you don't get better playing them...

Posted on: November 5, 2018 at 14:51:17 CT

But at some point when your ratio of top 25 teams to cream puffs is so out of balance, it is conterproductive to keep scheduling more elite teams. Yeah, you want the team to improve and get better, but goals like making the NCAA tournament and giving the kids that tourney experience are valuable and important. And that doesn't happen on a team like this Mizzou edition with an unrealistically hard schedule. It's plenty tough enough as is; on my first glance the non conference slate seemed balanced pretty well, but when you add in the SEC opponents, man, this is a killer schedule for a team that is, realistically, still 2 aces away from being a top 16 type team again.

And finishing close to .500 is not going to depend on transfer pitchers winning games. It's going to depend on Norman, Daniel, Scates and Baumgartner (if she can stay out of the doghouse). I don't see us getting very much significant contributions from the transfers Coach Anderson got to come here on very short notice. Don't know if any of them are even D1 caliber. The only one that impressed me potential wise is Koester, and that's because she has decent size and velocity. But she got hit hard this fall. Judge is a wild card, but she sits out this season and will play in 2020, if she is still here (she's already a 2 time transfer). She was very highly rated coming out of high school in Illinois, but I don't think she has even pitched 10 innings of D1 ball. Can she go that long without pitching and become an elite pitcher? That's a big question.