Sprinkle's State of the Union on UW Basketball Was Blunt

After a loss, of which there have been numerous bad ones for the University of Washington basketball program in recent seasons, media members tend to tiptoe around the head coach as if attending a memorial service.

They ask softball questions and get softball answers, such as continually wanting to know what needs to be done to make things better and receiving responses such as, "We need to shoot better."

Well, there's nothing wrong with being respectful, but the exchange tends to become borderline ridiculous as the setbacks pile up. Those guys are never going to shoot better, that's just the way it is.

Mike Hopkins received this sort of insulated and preferential treatment for much of his time in Montlake, even when he lost 13 of 15 games, including nine in a row, in 2020, and 21 of 26 outings over an entire season that came next.

His reaction to the moments of despair sort of bordered on, "Oh, well," -- all the way until he finally got fired.

On Saturday afternoon after his team lost 78-62 to Indiana in a most uninspiring manner, Danny Sprinkle turned the postgame interview session into something truly remarkable because he practically tore down his Husky program right then and there.

No one called him out as a bad coach for having the Big Ten's last-place team (13-16 overall, 4-14 conference). Yet the first-year leader, with a bit of a calculated push, laid things out in a truly raw and forthright manner as to why everything has gone so wrong.

Sprinkle told how he's never lost like this before after playing and coaching at Montana State, and coaching at Utah State, but he expected a difficult first season. That already was somewhat clear to some of us when he canceled the UW-Gonzaga series without playing the Zags even once.

"Obviously, I knew it was going to be a challenge," he said of his new coaching position "I knew that before I took the job. I knew it was going to be hard. I knew the first year would be brutal."

That said, as the Husky coach further explained, he brought in a roster with somewhat of a passive temperament and it didn't work. He didn't check enough boxes in piecing together this team. He will from now on.

"Going through the Big Ten schedule now. I know what we have to recruit," Sprinkle said. "We have to get better at every spot. We've got to get tougher at every spot. We have to have a different mindset at every spot."

Most revealing of all, Sprinkle shared, the overall competitiveness of his players has been seriously lacking. Up and down the roster, not all of his guys are properly motivated to battle and succeed.

"For whatever reason, and it's my fault, at the end of the day we haven't been like just connected where it's just important to everybody -- that's just the truth," he said. "We've got some guys and it's just not the most important thing, and that's a problem.

"I recruited them here and that's on me. Moving forward, it's got to be the most important thing if you want to compete at this level."

With two games left on the schedule, Sprinkle didn't name names, but he certainly addressed the big issue facing these Huskies.

"I'm not calling anybody out," he said. "I'm just saying what it is."

That he did.

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