I think we gained a lot of respect from other teams that we didn't have last year. Unfortunately, competitiveness and respect are nebulous factors. Records are a more solid measurement of improvement, and the last two years the Buckeyes have finished with identical 10-17 records. He's a young player who has the potential to be a very good player in this league, so I thought he may have helped us win some more games in the conference. But I thought we made some strides.
Strides clearly are in the eye of the beholder.
The question is whether those strides were large enough. In what may have been a telling pregame interview with Rusty Miller of the Associated Press, Gee made it clear that simply showing improvement was never meant to be a yardstick in Ayers' case, anyway. And it was not improvement. It was a very clear set of expectations that our basketball team should perform at a certain level. That's different from improvement.