BGleas

Dick Vitale's charitable work is great! He deserves a ton of credit for that. Otherwise, he is a fraud! His constant defense of coaches is complete b.s. He holds himself up as a bastion of integrity in college basketball and waxes poetic about student-athletes and academics, then praises guys like Calipari, Boeheim, Calhoun, etc. You can't take anything he says about any coach seriously.

I watched a lot of this game, and to be honest other than the UK tourney game last year I haven't watched a ton of WSU the last few years. Well, I came away really impressed. Marshall wants to play an uptempo style, but also puts a great emphasis on defense. I saw a guy like Ron Baker putting a ton of pressure on the ball defensively, and while Baker is somewhat athletic, is he any more athletic than guys like Troy, JBJ, RoJo, Stan, etc? I was really impressed with Marshall and WSU.

I feel like every time I see Maryland on TV they're playing at home.

Yogi does draw a lot of hand-checks off the dribble, but does not get the same respect when he's at the rim IMO. I realize his height doesn't help, but there's a lot of times he gets body contact and knocked to the ground and doesn't get to the line.

Especially when JBJ, and even Yogi a lot of the time, get very little respect. JBJ is constantly getting knocked down on his drives and hardly ever gets the call.

This might have been the worst 30+ seconds of coaching I've ever seen.

Am I being bitter, or should that have been over the back? Had his forearm all over the LSU guys neck.

That was atrocious.

This isn't meant to excuse the end of the '12-'13 season as I think we absolutely stumbled and missed an opportunity, but I agree with you on the lottery pick thing, especially for the year we're discussing. The 2013 NBA Draft is going to go down as one of the worst in recent memory. There really might not be a single All-Star in the bunch. Yes, that does matter. It means the talent gap between 2 or 4 in that draft isn't that wide compared to maybe 6 and 9, or even 12 and 15. Take the 2003 draft (LeBron, Wade, Melo, Bosh) or the Eric Gordon year, and you're potentially getting franchise/multiple All-Star guys at 2 and 4. There's a much larger drop off in talent after that. It's not the same as having two lottery picks in a weak draft, the talent gap in the weak draft isn't nearly as far. You pair Derek Rose and Kevin Love on a college team and you have a much larger gap of talent compared to other college teams that year, than pairing VO and Zeller in 2013.

What a collapse by NW. They gave that game to Maryland on a platter.

I care more about the standings. Would rather have separation from MD.

Even before he got hurt, Boheim made some public comments about knowing McCullough was probably going to leave after one year, but that he really was nowhere near ready to actually go to the NBA.

Agree on Russell. Trimble is 5th in the country in FTA.

Just heard a stat in the ISU/KU game. iSU's point guard leads the country in assist/to ratio, but the stat is that he hasn't had consecutive games with more than 1 turnover the last two years.

I'd put Robert Johnson right in there with McIntosh. Their numbers are pretty close. RoJo also validates your rankings point too.

I'm with you on Crean, but just to touch on this post, I live in Maryland and fans here were to run Turgeon out after this season. His seat was/is just as hot Crean's.

Just my opinion, but I hate that we're in this. I think two days with more schools would make it worse. I hate it even more now with ITH confirming we had to pass on the thing with UCLA, UK and I think it was Duke or UNC because we're in the Crossroads thing. They ended up taking OSU instead of IU.

Would be great to seek flexibility to cancel it.

Nowhere near 17, but I once took 10 3's in a game in college...Don't ask me how many I made, was a little cold that night  :D  

That's ridiculous if true. I remember my high school coach always cut practices down after the holidays. Practices the day before a game would be about 45 minutes to an hour long and mostly just shell/walk through game planning, scouting reports and fine tuning our stuff. We were always better as the season wore on.    My college coach was the complete opposite. He'd run us hard even in February. I remember one time having a full 20 minute intra-sqaud scrimmage the morning of a game, and another time actually running suicide sprints during a game-day morning shoot-around. My college teams were always worse as the season went on. 

We're too busy wasting our time in the Crossroads Classic. While the big boys play each other on ESPN with the entire country watching, we get to play Butler or Notre a Dame and nobody cares unless we lose. Sorry for the rant, but I think the Crossroads Classic is a waste of IU's time and is actually a negative.

Just caught a second of the Michigan game, and they were talking about UK potentially going undefeated. Seth Davis said he would never predict a team to go undefeated, but if UK got to January undefeated then "lookout". That says more about how bad the SEC is then it does how good UK might be.

https://twitter.com/JeffRabjohns/status/534459055105114112/photo/1

I've said this before, but ESPN's coverage on this UNC thing has been an absolute joke!   

I don't like that SMU has a "real" game before our matchup. With us only playing complete cupcakes up until this point and trying to integrate Troy and Stan back in (which shouldn't be a huge deal, but still) I worry about getting of to a good start against SMU.