The latest red flag happened once Penny Hardaway began to explain why he thought David Jones had been neutralized in ways he hadn’t been in almost three months Thursday night.

Fatigue was the primary cause, Hardaway said, from having to chase around North Texas star Jason Edwards on defense. But then his answer veered into territory few coaches in the country would be willing to admit.

“That’s not what I wanted from him,” Hardaway said. “He took the challenge, and it hurt him more than it hurt Jason because he actually had a great game and David, scoring-wise, this is his worst game because, to me, he was tired. I told him to allow somebody else to do it. His pride was like, ‘I got it,’ and it definitely hurt us on the offensive end.”

So it was a problem – Edwards had 30 points; Jones, the AAC's leading scorer, finished with 14 points – and Hardaway realized it was a problem. But then he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do anything about it.

This might be shocking if it weren’t becoming the overarching theme for this meltdown of a Memphis basketball season, which took another devastating detour when the Tigers looked mostly listless in their 76-66 loss to a depleted North Texas team.

Hardaway said last year ahead of the NCAA tournament that he wanted to get his roster in place by June to iron out the inevitable chemistry issues that come with relying on the transfer portal, but then put together a roster this season that still had players coming and going as recently as a few weeks ago.

He said last week he needed to get the rotation down to seven or eight players, played nine players when Memphis had its best performance in months in a win over Tulane, then inexplicably added his son, Ashton, back into the rotation Thursday and never went back to the substitution patterns that worked the game before.

He said on the radio postgame the team had a “brilliant” plan to stop North Texas at the 3-point-line that the players didn’t follow. He then took all the blame at his news conference, noting that “coaching error” led to the defeat.

He said just four days earlier that this team was “back to where we were but it’s even better now because the guys are more committed than they’ve ever been.” And then those same guys fell behind to North Texas, 18-4, almost immediately and “resorted back to some really bad stuff,” Hardaway said, in a game he had dubbed the start of a “do-or-die” stretch.

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Well, the Tigers’ chances of earning an at-large berth into the NCAA tournament aren’t completely dead. But they’re officially being read their last rites after North Texas set a school record by hitting 16 3-pointers.

Memphis effectively would need to win its last six games, starting Sunday at SMU, to feel any sort of comfort about hearing its name called on Selection Sunday without the American Athletic Conference’s automatic bid. But there’s nothing to indicate this group can win six times in a row facing mostly the best teams in the league when it’s 3-5 over the past month facing mostly the bottom-half of the league.

The hope was this could be like Hardaway's team two years ago, which played itself into a rotten spot by the beginning of February only to emerge from it by going on a spirited run through the end of the regular season en route to Hardaway’s first NCAA tournament appearance.

The reality emerging, however, is this is a lot more like his second team – the one that was supposed to feature James Wiseman (like Hardaway thought this one would feature a returning DeAndre Williams). That 2019-20 team reeled off 11 wins in a row to reach the top 10 in the national polls (Memphis won 10 in a row this year to reach the top 10), and then never seemed to consistently find its form again after an injury to D.J. Jeffries (just as this group hasn’t been the same since Caleb Mills suffered a knee injury).

This isn't just Hardaway's fault. Jones and Quinerly were a combined 5-of-23 from the field in Thursday’s loss. Few teams in the country can win on the road against a decent team when their two best players perform the way those two did.

But the underlying damage being done to the entire operation, to the foundation Hardaway thought he had set, is nonetheless troubling. The same issues keep resurfacing for him, regardless if the players are teenagers or 20-somethings, with no tangible adjustments made to address the overarching problems.

Can Memphis get where Hardaway wants it to pressing and trapping full court on defense?

Can it win big playing an NBA-style offense in which the players have “freedom to do whatever we want, as long as defense is involved,” as veteran Malcolm Dandridge said in a pre-recorded interview shown during Thursday's ESPN+ broadcast?

Can it do all that with a revolving door of transfers making up most of the roster?

The results at the moment suggest something is not right with that formula. The question now is whether Hardaway is willing (or able) to do anything about it.

You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Mark Giannotto via email at mgiannotto@gannett.com and follow him on X: @mgiannotto

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: NCAA tournament: Penny Hardaway can't stop Memphis basketball meltdown