All the excuses for not playing Cooper are so strange. Yes, he is a freshman. Yes, the bench guys in front of him are older. So what? Every freshman in college basketball is in the same spot. If he is as good as we think, he should be getting minutes. The best team in our league has been playing three freshmen all season, including in games against great noncon opponents. They all struggled to varying degrees, yet wouldn't you know it, Furphy make his first start against us, played very well, and then lit up OSU Tuesday. Notably, he signed with KU very late and missed much of summer and fall due to shin splints. He is a good player, but I certainly don't think he is more talented (and definitely not more athletic) than Cooper. If he can get 15 minutes per game from day one on a top 3 team against far better competition than we played in the noncon, how can anyone argue that Cooper shouldn't have at least been given 10-15 mins a game while we were blowing out NET 300 teams? If he had gotten that chance to learn at game speed, who knows, maybe he could have helped us at TCU and KU when Darthard and Soares were not only giving us nothing offensively, but were struggling to guard bigger players? I heard Kevin Henry say the other day that Cooper is almost as athletic as Moore. Unless he is showing up late to practice and scoring in the wrong basket, you can't tell me that he shouldn't have gotten more time in November and December. If he had played poorly, what is the worst that would have happened? We would have won those games by 25 instead of 30? And if he clearly showed in those games that he wasn't ready for prime time, then you could put him on the pine for league play and it would be absolutely justified.
It just seems like such an old fashioned approach by Moser. Freshmen come into college today far more ready to play than they did 20 or 30 years ago. All kinds of freshmen throughout the country contribute to very good teams. Again, I honestly would love to hear anyone give a reasonable answer to this question: what would the downside have been to playing him more in the noncon, especially the blowouts?