The Memphis Tigers Will Not Win the NCAA Tournament

I love the Memphis Tigers Men's College Basketball Team. But they aren't winning the championship. Not this season. Not next season, nor any season in the foreseeable future.

They have great players, including two of the best players in the nation that will be in this year's draft should they both elect to go on to the NBA. Chris Douglas-Roberts is the team's leading scorer, and he is one of the most athletic players in all of college basketball. He is 6'6" and can do anything you would ever ask a shooting guard to do at any level of basketball. And of course there is the phenom freshman PG Derrick Rose who is one of the best, if not the best, point guard in the nation. He has all of skills you want in an NBA player, but more importantly, he is a true point guard who is looking to pass first and score second, ala a Jason Kidd or Chris Paul.

But as good as those players, and as good as their Coach, John Calipari, can be, this team and basketball program is not built to win a national title.

A national basketball team is made up of many parts. While one of the most talented teams usually tends to win the NCAA Tournament, you have to remember, at the elite level, there is very little difference in the levels of talent between the players. Florida wasn't the absolute most talented team when they won the first of their two consecutive championships, but they won it despite that. They won it because they had the right formula. And they came back the next year to win it the championship when they were the most talented team, because they had the same formula from the year before.

First of all, the schedule makes the team. You can say what you want, but I don't care how good a team is. If they at some point they aren't tested day and day out with winners, than they aren't going to make it through the most difficult tournament in all of sports.

They currently have a conference strength of schedule that ranks 101^st in the nation. There is no way they are going to win a title after playing about 12 games during the season and then 3 or 4 games in the conference tournament against teams that aren't as athletic as them, nor do they know how to win. That's like a varsity basketball team only playing JV competition and expecting to win State. It's not going to happen. Memphis needs to enter a conference so it can experience playing night and night out playing against another team. So they can practice during the season on how not to look past a team, and when they do look past a team, they can learn from it and then use that knowledge from the season in the NCAA tournament.

Most importantly, playing in a tough conference would allow them to make adjustments when they see a team a good team a second time. That can be helpful down the road when they are trying to make adjustments against various teams with different styles, where if they have seen a team with that style twice before, they already knew how it hurt them before, as well as how it can be fixed.

Also, basketball is a lot about skill, and it is not always about having the best athletes on the floor. Yet that is the problem with this Memphis program. Coach Calipari is a great motivator and recruiter, but since his days at UMASS he has always recruited the kids with the most athleticism, but not the most skill. The teams he has assembled at Memphis have been loaded with great athletes, from the best player on the team, all the way down to the 12^th man. But they are just an accumulation of guys that can jump out of the gym, and they don't really have the ability to take over a game when matched against teams with comparable athletes.

They can run the floor, but they can't shoot.

They dunk like crazy, but they can't make free throws.

They can jump out of the gym, but they are out of position on the rebounds.

And while I am over exaggerating it a little bit, those details right there are what can cost you in a six game journey to a national championship. And those details right there, along with the fact that they don't play the right type of schedule, are reasons why Memphis is not going to win it all this year, next year, or any year in the future until they change conferences and their recruiting measures.