Overrated

o·ver·rate
tr.v. o·ver·rat·ed, o·ver·rat·ing, o·ver·rates
To overestimate the merits of; rate too highly.

The big question is, does this word apply to Gerry McNamara?
The answer is still yes, including how well he played in the Big East tournament.
The fact is, he's a pretty good player who tries to do too much, takes terrible shots and makes horrible passes too often.
Here's how it all started for me and McNamara. There was a poll on syracuse.com or something in 2003 that asked who was your favorite player, or best player, or most important player on the team (after the regular season). The answer should have been Carmelo Anthony, but McNamara won. When we met Doug Logan I asked him about it, and chalked it up to race. He famously said "I don't know about all that."
That's when he started to get overrated. As the next two years went on and his uneven play continued I started to realize he was downright bad. This year he was named to all kinds of player of the year lists and he played awful. Not ok, awful. The scouting report on espn.com called him a great shooter, when he was shooting 30%. That's the definition of overrated.
I wrote the above part before the tournament. Obviously the A&M game gives me new insight. The guy doesn't suck, he's just ok. But when people say you are a top player in the conference and even the country, and yet you have horrible shooting games more often than not, that's how you become overrated.
Here is where the "teams double team him" argument comes in. First, teams double team Adam Morrison too. Second, Mike Piazza sucked on the Mets (according to my dad) because he never got to see fastballs because the guys batting behind him sucked. My dad said that while Vlad Guerrero hit .330 on the Expos. I think we throw out this argument because if we accept it, how can we judge him. He's good because even though he sucks, he's so good other teams are trying to make him suck?
I've never seen a player be good as a freshman -- wait let me stop here. If I hear one more time about how great McNamara was in the championship game in 2003, I'm going to puke. Yes he hit 6 3-pointers. Yes, every shot in the title game is big. But he had zero points in the second half of that game. Zero. If we're going to call him clutch for hitting one big shot against Cincinatti, while missing 12, then we have to recognize that he disappeared in the second half of the title game.
Ok, so he was good as a freshman, decent as a sophomore, bad as a junior and terrible as a senior. I've never seen that before.
So how did this overrated stuff happen? Same way "Lazy Sunday" became an internet phenomenon. Lazy Sunday was a pretty funny Saturday Night Live skit. But because the show sucked so bad this skit stood out, because of the internet it spread. Before long people were writing articles about whether Lazy Sunday could save SNL, the internet, western civilization, Teldar Paper and that other bungling, malfunctioning corporation known as the United States of America. Kudos to anyone who knows that movie reference. Anyway, after a while right minded people like myself said "let's not get carried away" it was just kinda funny.
But Boeheim took it to another level with his curse toast. And it actually worked. G-Mac played way beyond his abilities for 3 games, which wiped out 3 mediocre (at best) seasons in the minds of the people who hadn't watched those 3 seasons.
To sum up, I feel badly the way his career ended.
I don't hate Gerry McNamara.
I will always remember him well because he was part of that championship team.
Good luck in Turkey.