Chris Stewart Sports

1 p.m. CST - Monday's Mailbag, and more on Mercer...

From time to time on Mondays, I try to open up my mailbag and pass a few along to the rest of you. 

When you take calls on a football post game show, or you take E-mails on a website geared toward a passionate fan base, you often get calls/E-mails from irate individuals. Sometimes they cross the line and you simply have to hit "Delete" and move on. Although I do my best to respond to all of them, there are some well-written ones that stand out and I try to share those with you when I can.

Below is an E-mail I received this morning, along with my response:

Les,

Can't tell you how much I appreciate your E-mail. And not just because of the fact you took the time to write, but for the words you had to say and the manner in which you said them.

I call so many games over the course of a school year - usually in the neighborhood of 90 to 100. You learn over time to take the good with the bad, although, as a life long Bama fan, that is not easy to do. But when I got home last night, my wife said "You're taking this one pretty hard, aren't you?".

She was right. I was. And I still am.

The biggest reason is the fact that I really thought things were different with this team. I saw a style of play, and an intensity on both ends of the floor, that I've rarely seen the past few seasons. That doesn't mean the kids on those other teams didn't work hard or prepapre themselves, but this squad just had a different feel and look to it coming into Sunday night.

That's what makes it so disappointing.

Now, just like you, I haven't given up on the team, either. And as I wrote in my blog Sunday night, one of the things I love about college basketball is that there is enough "wiggle room" in a long season to drop some games, get better, and still do great things.  

Among the many reasons the football team is ranked No. 1 in the country, is that they have been able to learn lessons while winning. They made mistakes, but still did enough good things to win each game. Even though there have been glaring weaknesses at times that needed to be improved upon, those are easier pills to swallow after you've won.

That's what championship teams do.

The basketball team didn't do that last night. However, I do think they can fix what's wrong. But a program that has struggled to find victories over the past two seasons needs to start winning games - against ANYBODY - in order gain some confidence. There are some brutal non-conference games ahead, and with it will likely come a few more losses.

But those losses don't need to come to teams picked to finish in the middle of the pack in the Atlantic Sun.

A week from now, with two or three wins under their belts, Sunday's loss might not sting as bad. Like you, I hope what happened against Mercer will simply be a bump in the road, and not a sign of things to come.