And that's generally just what these Cinderella teams that shock every year in the Dance GOT.

The reason we ultimately lost to Duquesne had more to do with our lack of depth in the paint --& a reliable rim-runner-- than it did to our lack of dependable shooters or potent scorers, imo. Personnel never allowed us to run our offense dependably through (or around) a presence in the paint. Fouss was either injured too much, or was smothered because no one else could pressure the rim consistently. As valiant & effective as a 6'5 Richie was at getting that additional pressure on the rim, most Big 12 teams had someone who could keep him in check. It's part of the reason Pope was selective in unleashing him (he didn't want the other team to figure out early how to stop Richie).

One athletic 4 generally could hurt us bad. Like Duquesne's did. (He effectively killed Fouss on help & totally shut down Richie & Noah. He sure wasn't the first such player to do that to us.)

And a big reason we were able to take out Kansas was because Self didn't have a strong rim-protector. He probably COULD HAVE played Adams that way — but that really wasn't Adam's primary role. Honestly, I wasn't impressed at all with Self's use of his personnel against us. Pope did a much better job of exploiting his weaknesses than he did ours. As far as I could see they did very little to game-plan specifically for us.

A bit too over-confident, perhaps. Which looked to me to maybe have been our undoing against Duquesne (though I'm more willing to forgive seeings what we went into that game with — when the day before we weren't sure we'd have either Atiki or Aly healthy enough to play). The fact we even played Aly as heavy as we did proved, probably, that we knew we were in trouble match-up-wise headed into the game.