Penny Hardaway: Memphis basketball 'judged so harshly' by national media
Penny Hardaway believes Memphis basketball is judged unfairly by the national media.
The Tigers’ coach has long contended that from a national perspective, the bar for Memphis is higher than most every other program in college basketball. Hardaway reiterated his stance Thursday after the Tigers (5-1) were still unranked in the AP Top 25 poll and after they fell out of the USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll.
The team picked up quality wins over Michigan and Arkansas at the Battle 4 Atlantis, but an ugly first half in a lopsided loss to Villanova, he said, was all the AP poll voters needed to keep the Tigers out for the third week in a row.
Hardaway was asked if Arkansas’ win over No. 7 Duke on Wednesday reinforced the notion that the Tigers’ win over the Razorbacks was better than some may have thought.
“I mean, we knew it was a good win from the beginning,” he said. “I guess the committee that votes, they didn’t think it was a good win, because Arkansas lost two games in a row. We get judged so harshly. We played five really good halves (at the Battle 4 Atlantis) and one really bad one. And we got judged on the one really bad one.
"Which is what it is at Memphis. We work so hard to get to the top, and all it takes is one loss for us to drop all the way back out of that situation.”
Memphis trailed Villanova (No. 15 in this week’s coaches’ poll) in the Battle 4 Atlantis championship game 44-16 at halftime and fell behind by 35 points with less than 10 minutes to play. But the Tigers finished the game on a 31-12 run to make it a respectable 79-63 final score.
On Monday, after two weeks of being the top vote-getter among all of the teams left out of the AP Top 25 poll, Memphis was still there — essentially slotted at No. 26. Multiple teams leapfrogged the Tigers, including No. 24 Illinois, whose only game was a win over Western Illinois (a team ranked 327th in KenPom).
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The Tigers also have a true road win over Missouri this season and home victories against Jackson State and Alabama State.
The Tigers will face Ole Miss (6-0) in a road game Saturday (1 p.m., ESPN2).
Reach sports writer Jason Munz at jason.munz@commercialappeal.com or follow him @munzly on X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter.
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Penny Hardaway: National media judges Memphis basketball 'so harshly'
