Blaming Chris Mack for Louisville basketball’s recent slump? Child please

"From Louisville fans, to Media, the entire congregation needs to relax and stop overreacting. Yes, Louisville basketball lost in embarrassing fashion but Chris Mack isn’t the reason for it."

How many of you believe the Cardinals would be top five in the ACC with four games in the regular season?

How many of you believed Louisville would be ranked in the AP poll with four games to go?

If you did, you’re a liar.  Chris Mack has done an exceptional job and to decide to criticize him because of a recent slump is blasphemous.

Louisville basketball got crushed by Syracuse and stopped being competitive with 7:06 minutes left when they were down 12-19 in the first half. After that point, they proceeded to get dominated. The Cards lost in almost every phase of the game. Syracuse outperformed Louisville in every concept of this basketball game which shows in the result.

UofL has been in a slight slump dropping three out of their lost four games having lost to the #16 team in the country, the number one team in the country, and a solid ACC team in Syracuse. Now there’s a narrative percolating that Chris Mack should be the subject of criticism.

This is nothing but overreaction and it’s absolute lunacy.

Mack is the head coach and the buck stops with him, but overreacting and criticizing him is lazy.

Mack hasn’t been perfect these past four games but against Syracuse, did Mack shoot 26 percent from floor and 21 percent from three attempting 28 three pointers? There were moments where players were shooting NBA three pointers because they couldn’t penetrate the 2-3 zone of Syracuse.

Did he produce 13 to nine turnovers than assist ratio and get out rebounded 36 to 39 by Syracuse? It’s Mack’s fault that his best three players in Jordan Nwora, Dwayne Sutton, and Christen Cunningham combined to go 4-29 from the floor scoring a total of 20 points. That trio also went 1-13 from the three-point line.

The effort of Louisville was suspect throughout the game and Mack addressed that in the postgame.

“We haven’t been that team that lets offensive struggles or missed shots, for the most part, affect our defensive energy and effort,” Mack said, “but it did tonight.”

Go ahead and blame the lack of effort on Mack when that’s a category of sports where it’s automatic for any athlete. You can extensively game plan prior to a game but if the players don’t execute the game plan then who’s to blame?

Want to point back to the Duke game when Louisville vanquished a 23 point lead in the second half when the Cardinals were up 36-59 with ten minutes to go? Mack tried to slow the momentum Duke during their comeback using three of his timeouts. Louisville committed nine turnovers in the last eight minutes of the game to help blow that lead and only scored 10 points in the last eight minutes of the game. That is a choke job and that falls on the players.

“We haven’t been that team that lets offensive struggles or missed shots, for the most part, affect our defensive energy and effort,, but it did tonight.”

Clemson was a shaky finish, almost blowing a seven point lead with 16 seconds to go. However, almost doesn’t count. Louisville won against a tough and gritty team where Louisville struggled to score majority of the game but found a way to victory. It’s about wins, no matter how they come. In March, we won’t regard the fact that Louisville struggled to close against Clemson we’ll only see it as a win.

Mack is the same coach that helped propel Louisville into the AP poll rankings with wins against North Carolina State, North Carolina, Michigan State, Lipscomb, and Virginia Tech.

To place proper perspective, around this time last year Louisville was coming off two back to back blowout losses to North Carolina 93-76 and Duke 82-56. Louisville was on route to finishing 9-9 within conference play in the 2017-2018 season. Louisville already has nine wins within conference play, with four games to go prior to the ACC tournament.

There aren’t any legitimate reasons to critique Mack when his players haven’t being performing well recently. The college basketball season is a marathon, not a sprint. There are highs and lows of the journey, this is just a slump for Louisville. Everybody needs to relax.