The winning record aside, Andy Toole’s 16th season as Robert Morris’ basketball coach arguably has been his most confounding.

Just ask him.

“This is the latest in the year that I don’t really know what my rotation is on a game-to-game basis,” said Toole, who at 29 when he took over the program was the youngest Division I coach in the country.

The group he settled on for Saturday’s 71-67 loss to Green Bay at UPMC Events Center surely didn’t get the job done. Not the starters. Not the bench. Not the coaches, he said.

Now, at 45, he’s scratching his head and wondering if he’s come up against his most challenging test yet.

A year after taking the Colonials to their first Horizon League championship and second appearance in the NCAA Tournament — they qualified a third time but didn’t participate during the 2020 covid-19 season — Toole finds himself at a loss to explain his current team’s dilemma.

“Bad coaching,” he said, plainly. “It’s my job to get them to the level they need to be. You don’t always play well, but you can always play hard.”

Toole hasn’t been satisfied with his team’s efforts throughout an up-and-down season that turned downward again in its latest venture.

“We had some guys who touched the court that did not play hard, guys that aren’t giving their best for the team or themselves,” Toole said. “That’s a reflection on me, because I can’t get them to do that.”

The close ones keep on coming at Robert Morris (13-9, 5-6) seemingly at rapid-fire succession.

This time, it was Green Bay testing a Colonials team that’s made a habit of playing nail-biters. This time, RMU took another close loss.

C.J. O’Hara scored 18 points, and Caden Wilkins and Justin Allen added 17 each as Green Bay (12-10, 7-4 Horizon) stopped a two-game skid. The victory avenged RMU’s 80-78 “nail-biter” on the road against the Phoenix on Dec. 4.

As “nail-biters” go, Robert Morris is 4-4 in games decided by four points or fewer.

“Just unable to guard well enough for long enough. That’s what it comes down to,” Toole said. “Some timely errors defensively, breakdowns defensively. We’re not as consistent as we need to be. Even some of the guys who started the game didn’t give the required defensive effort. We make a couple of shots to start the game and we feel like we can relax. Disappointing for us today. Just unable to come away with the win.”

Robert Morris jumped to an 8-2 lead but quickly lagged behind and found itself playing catch-up for most of the afternoon.

The Colonials never were able to stay in the lead for very long.

“We’re not tough enough,” Toole said. “We need to play for certain stretches and then relax. And then, we don’t have the urgency necessary to get as many stops as we need to win the game. We don’t take every possession as important as it is. I’m doing a bad job of communicating that to them. I don’t know how or why I can do it differently. I’m going to try to search for it.”

Toole’s urgent tone reached his listeners, but he doesn’t think it reaches his players.

“I’m doing a bad job of getting them to understand that and be able to sustain their effort for as long it takes to be able to win the game,” he said.

Green Bay enjoyed a 62-50 lead just inside the midpoint of the second half before Robert Morris chipped away and crept within three points on DeSean’s Goode’s 3-pointer with 9 seconds remaining.

After Green Bay’s Marcus Hall missed a free throw, Robert Morris had a chance to tie but turned the ball over with 1 second left.

“Bad decision,” Toole said. “Three turnovers down the stretch were really costly.”

Green Bay, coached by Fox Sports analyst and sports talk radio host Doug Gottlieb, nearly wasted all of a 12-point second-half lead but managed to hang on and rebound from an 88-81 loss two days earlier at Youngstown State.

Toole flicked aside any notion of fatigue affecting his team as the regular season heads to the home stretch.

“It’s a reflection of maturity,” he said. “You get down 12, and now you say, ‘I’ve got to play really hard.’ Instead of, ‘Why don’t we just play as hard as we can all the time?’

“Everyone says, ‘Great job, man. You guys really, really, really fought your way back.’ Fight back? It’s like, ‘How about play your (tail) off on every possession?’ We don’t do that.”

The loss was Robert Morris’s fourth in six games.

The Colonials, by their standards, were coming off a relatively easy 88-76 home victory over Milwaukee. The eight-point margin was more than twice as large as RMU’s 3.0 average margin of victory (78.1-75.1).

Goode led Robert Morris with 17 points and 12 rebounds. Ryan Prather Jr. added 14 points, and Nikolaos Chitikoudis chipped in 10 points and finished with seven rebounds for the Colonials.

Prather, who shot 5 for 14 but was 4 for 9 from 3-point range, saw his streak of at least three 20-point games end.

Robert Morris will attempt to come away with a winning homestand when the Colonials play the final game of three straight at UPMC Events Center on Wednesday night against IU Indianapolis.

RMU lost another “nail-biter” in its first meeting with the Jaguars, dropping a 96-93 overtime decision Jan. 15 in Indianapolis.

“I’ve got this great group of guys, nice guys,” Toole said. “They just can’t seem to understand how hard it is to win every game. You’re not going to win every game, but you can try. First you have to understand how hard you have to play to give yourself a chance to win a game.”

The urgency in his voice now escalating in volume.

“Green Bay had lost two in a row,” Toole said. “They probably were coming in desperate to win the game. We should be desperate. Why aren’t we desperate? We’re trying to work our way up the standings. Why aren’t we desperate? Why don’t we play with a desperation and a hunger?”

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