This is really an amazing quote from Ferry in the P-G today:

"We got beat by a team I thought was better than us, or at least played better than we did, so we’ve got to learn from it, we’ve got to watch it and we’ve got to move forward.”

Granted, with road wins against Fordham, Bonaventure and Duquesne, UMES just may be a solid middle-of-the-pack A10 team masquerading as a MEAC team. But still, we're in Year 3 of the rebuild, he has all of his own handpicked players in place and this is the result. Let's see, we have wins against a D-II team, two teams in their second seasons of D-I basketball, and Howard. We've been overmatched against two NEC teams and a MEAC team while also losing at home to NJIT.

“I thought UMES has a really good team, their pieces really fit well together and the big kid Myers, we didn’t have an answer for him early or late."

I'll overlook the we just couldn't stop their big kid comment for now and focus on the "their pieces really fit well together" line. Coach Ferry's way of drawing a contrast with his own team? So do the pieces just not fit very well together but they will eventually or is the overall talent level just not there and we can expect a purging and desperate attempt to reload in the offseason? I say the latter. When he's not comfortable substituting for Jones and Colter, it sounds like he really hasn't upgraded the talent much from what it was two years ago. Funny, I remember thinking at the end of last season that Gill and Ridenour could make an all-conference team before their time was up at Duquesne. I expect both to be enrolled somewhere else next year. Perhaps they can make an all-conference team in the Big South or MAC.

As for this season, I'm still holding out hope that they could be a half-decent team by February and March, but that hope is fading. Even in a down year for the A10, it's going to be an uphill battle to get to 10 wins.