Atlantis Panic and Kim English's double-edged sword at Providence
In the wake of an 0-3 week at the Battle 4 Atlantis many Providence fans are angry.
Very, very angry.
And this time their anger isn’t directed at the media, their former coach, the officials, Connecticut, Charles McClelland, Val Ackerman, or Ken Pomeroy, but inward.
A slow start and a stint of poor execution killed Providence in their 79-77 loss to eventual tournament champion Oklahoma in the opener, then they no-showed against Davidson (69-58) on day two, and didn’t have the requisite energy or size to hang with Indiana (89-73) 12 hours later.
Outside of Ed Cooley’s departure, it's hard to remember a groundswell of angst and outrage that bubbled up so quickly in Friartown.
But are we just being prisoners of the moment? Has it been like this in-season previously?
Let’s go back to the beginning of the Cooley era and examine further.
2011-12: Friar fans understood Cooley was rebuilding the program when he had had two losing streaks of four games, and another of five. No real concern throughout this season.
2012-13: Vincent Council, Bryce Cotton, Kris Dunn, and Ricky Ledo in the backcourt? Expectations were heightened, but the program had been so beaten down at that point that no one got Atlantis-level upset when the Friars lost five straight at one point, or during a three-game skid that included losses to Boston College, Brown, and DePaul.
The heart of their star was questioned, however.
In the loss to Brown the Friars were without Bryce Cotton, a guard who had admirably represented the program to that point. He was a late scratch with a bad knee, but questions arose about his toughness after color man Dalen Cuff said Cotton looked fine in warmups and cameras continually cut to him on an exercise bike in the second half. Ironically, Cotton turned out to be one of the true warriors and clutch performers in program history, playing 40 minutes virtually every night as a senior.
2013-14: Now we’re getting somewhere. Cotton, Dunn (for a short while), Henton, Batts, Desrosiers, Harris, Fortune, and Cooley in year 3 – it finally felt like PC was ready to dance again. Then they closed 2013 with an overtime loss to UMass, handed away a double OT game to Seton Hall to kick off Big East play, and got drubbed by Villanova by 30 in early January for their third straight loss. Fans were pissed. This marked the first time they seriously questioned Cooley, and it got ugly before PC ripped off five straight wins following the loss to Nova.
A few weeks later PC lost four of six in February, but it is hard to recall panic setting in that that time. Of course, this team won the Big East Tournament in March, so much of this is forgotten a decade later.
2014-2015: Things got heated after a three-game skid started when Providence sat on the ball and scored 38 points at Kentucky, and returned to New England only to lose to BC and Brown the next two times out. Similar to the year prior, PC then won five straight to silence the critics, but that three-game skid turned ugly.
2015-16: The Dunn/Bentil Friars raced out to a 14-2 start and top ten ranking nationally before a 2-6 stretch in Big East play. Nothing about the anger of Friar fans really stands out from that run. It felt more like frustration at a top seed slipping away — which eventually led to a second round matchup with North Carolina in Raleigh in March.
2016-17: This club went from 10-2 to 14-11 after a prolonged stretch of mediocre play, but expectations were lowered that year in the wake of losing Dunn and Bentil. That group was 1-4 in the league, and later 4-8, before closing the regular season with six straight wins to finish 10-8 to reach the play-in game of the NCAA Tournament.
2017-2018: A pretty wild year. Early in the season PC went: loss at URI, OT win over Brown, loss at UMass, two-point win over Stony Brook, and blowout loss to Houston on a neutral floor following a 6-1 start to the season. This felt like one of the first seasons where fans were really questioning Cooley, but PC rode a 5-2 start in league play to a 10-8 mark by season’s end, before an inspiring run to the Big East Tournament finals solidified a tournament berth.
2018-19: Cooley’s eighth year in Providence came with a 1-4 start in Big East play and later a 2-6 stretch in February. After finishing 7-11 in the league, PC went out with a whimper against Arkansas in the NIT. Everyone just seemed ready to move on to the offseason after an uninspiring season — perhaps because of how exciting the 2018 postseason had been.
2019-2020: This season felt like a turning point at the time. Looking back, since the departure of Dunn in 2016, the Friars used late-season surges to reach the NCAA Tournament, but hadn’t had an exciting season end-to-end.
This six-game winning streak to close 2017 led to a “first four” matchup with USC, where PC blew a lead of nearly 20 and lost.
The 2018 group used the Big East Tournament to play their way into the NCAAs, and into the good graces of Friartown, with a pair of memorable overtime wins over Creighton and Xavier before losing in OT to eventual national champion Villanova in the finals. They fell to Texas A&M a week later, but the ‘18 BET really reenergized Friartown, and a big-time recruiting class was on the way.
2019 was rough, and by 2020 the questions were getting louder.
A 4-4 start included losses to Northwestern, Penn, Long Beach State, and Charleston. Over the next four games, PC eked out victories over Pepperdine (80-77) and Stony Brook (82-78) with blowout losses to URI and Florida in Brooklyn mixed in. Following Cooley’s flirtation with Michigan the summer prior and the mixed results, things were getting pretty uncomfortable.
The narrative at the time wasn’t that Providence was bad under Cooley, but that they were trending in the wrong direction.
2019-20 was like three seasons in one, with all facets of the program being questioned in November and December, PC turning into one of the most dangerous teams in the country by February, and ending the year as one of the all-time what-ifs in program history after the season was canceled in March.
2020-21: Playing in an empty Alumni Hall and falling short of expectations, the 2021 season was kind of blah for so many reasons, but it was excused due to the circumstances that came with the pandemic. This was the team that David Duke and Nate Watson were supposed to lead to the NCAA Tournament. The energy around the program was bad after a 13-13 season and an opening round loss to DePaul in the Big East Tournament that ended the season.
The Friars then enjoyed a massive upswing, seemingly out of nowhere. All of 2022 was magical, and 2023 looked to have just as much potential before the season ended with four straight losses and Cooley’s departure.
Two notes:
1. I didn’t begin this exercise thinking there were that many tough stretches on so many NCAA Tournament teams. For years, Providence made a habit of pulling themselves out of unenviable positions and bad stretches of basketball. Fans would grumble about the offense, PC would do enough late in the year to push for an NCAA Tournament spot, and the cycle would repeat. Patience started wearing thin beginning around 2019, but 2022 ended any speculation and serious griping.
2. The intent wasn’t to look back and calm the masses with stories of the Friars rebounding from losing streaks — I wouldn’t be capable of doing so if I tried.
I was honestly trying to think of comparable reactions to losing streaks, and then what came of it.
While so many of these seasons came with varying levels of fan outrage, it’s hard to remember many losing streak over the past 15 years eliciting the type of response we saw this week, when everything flipped so quickly, despite equal or worse streaks in years past.
If we were to delve not so deeply into the psyche of the Friar fanbase we’d find a group desperate to prove that in the modern era of college basketball their program is strong enough to sustain the loss of the coach who left in 2022.
As much as Kim English has benefitted from a fanbase so invested in his success, it’s also a group that has scars from seeing its undying loyalty to his predecessor blow up in their collective faces.
There’s a “fool me once” aspect at play for some.
English grabbed a gigantic double-edged sword when he took this job after two years at George Mason. He and his staff were embraced fully upon arrival, but the desperation for it all to work out (combined with a social media landscape that has gotten more vitriolic than what Cooley dealt with for much of his PC career) can result in what we saw online over the past week.
There’s no overstating how big the next two weeks will be in building the perception of the early tenure of Kim English at Providence — at least in terms of setting the tone and alleviating fears that so rapidly crept in. The opposition will also be harder than it looked on paper prior to the start of the season.
BYU comes to town on Tuesday with a lethal offense and a potential top five pick in June’s draft, the Ryan Center on Saturday isn’t a great environment for a Friar team still trying to find itself, then an improved DePaul team awaits in Chicago before PC closes out this stretch at Mohegan Sun against St. Bonaventure.
It won’t be easy, but Providence needs to right the ship quickly.