That’s the question that determines whether this is a top-25 team or a top-5 team.

If I have a knock on Stallings, it’s that players do not improve as much as I’d expect under his coaching staff. They don’t get bigger and stronger, which says to me the nutrition and weight folks aren’t doing what they should. Worse, players here don’t seem to improve their games as much as they should, which says the coaching staff isn’t diagnosing the weaknesses each player has and designing smart exercises to eliminate those weaknesses.

Last year was a big exception to that. JJ and Fez both improved dramatically because they clearly both spent thousands of hours practicing in the off-season. If both of them make similar leaps, this team will be nearly unstoppable. Fez will be among the best big men in the country and JJ will be a even better.

But I’m worried that this won’t happen for several reasons.

1. Fez was injured this off-season, which presumably limited his ability to improve.

2. JJ seems to have physical limitations, particularly quickness and agility. Players his age can still improve in those areas, but most people don’t, and I suspect it’s a matter of whether he has more maturing to do physically rather than a matter of his being willing to work at it. (If it’s a matter of work, he’ll do it because he clearly has the drive.)

3. As I said, players don’t generally seem to improve under Stallings. I could cite a lot of examples here, but I’ll limit myself to two. JT was no better last year than the year before. With his physical gifts, it’s just a matter of doing smart work to develop skills, but no one seems to be managing his progression, so he’s not progressing. AJ Ogilvy would be an even better example. Given what he was as a freshman, he should have taken us to the national championship last year, particularly given the rest of the team by then. But no. He, too, regressed.

It’s not that players don’t improve, which is why all these numbers showing that folks did in fact score more as seniors than as freshmen are pretty meaningless. Everyone (except AJ) improves dramatically from freshman to senior. Freshman are pretty much kids. Seniors are pretty much men. Also, freshmen and sophomores generally get limited minutes, so it’s pretty easy for them to improve upon their stats as upperclassmen. So those numbers are silly.

The question is whether players improve as much here as they would have improved at other programs. My guess is “quite possibly not.” I don’t pretend to be certain because that’s a damned hard thing to measure, but I have felt various people looked, as freshmen, like they might be monsters as seniors and, with the possible exception of Foster, who managed to become a really good college player despite lacking the apparent physical talent to be so, there haven’t been any monsters at Vandy. Quite a few guys have looked a lot less impressive as juniors and seniors than I would have expected, given their talents when they arrived. (Yes, this is gut and memory. I’m far to busy to look player by player.)

Perhaps a better way to illustrate what I’m talking about would be to look at in-season development. Vandy often looks, in mid January, like it’s one of the 25 best teams in the country. By March, however, the team generally gets beaten early in the SEC tourny and then bounced in the first round of the NCAAs. Other teams get a lot better between January and March. A lot better. Vandy, to my eyes, usually not so much. Think about how much UNC improved from the time we spanked them early last year till the end of the year and then think about how much we improved, from a higher starting point, and then think about your stupid stats and your petty dismissal of my point.

Seriously, if you’re going to call me “pretty far off base,” at least have the courtesy to understand the point I was trying to make and to address that rather than some fantasy argument of your own devising. And then, having done that, if you can actually make a case that Vandy players improve as much as players elsewhere, you might want to try something constructive, like proposing your own theory about why very talented Vandy teams keep getting bounced in the first round by teams that are often manned by guys who would have never been offered scholarships to this school as freshmen. Bad karma? Food poisoning? Otherwise, just say, “My gut says different,” and spare me the condescension backed by nonsense.