MartintheMopMan

That points from the bench question is so tricky. My answer is 100% based on what personnel I think we'll have since the calculation is wildly different when your bench is 3 deep instead of 5 deep.

In four years Yogi has played (or practiced at least) with 43 different teammates including 12 walk-ons and 31 scholarship players.   That is a ridiculous statistic.

Gotchu:   22. Memphis Grizzlies   Thomas Bryant Indiana Freshman Center   Bryant's lack of foot speed and elite athleticism hurt his stock, but the guy is money in the paint and has a jump shot that stretches all the way to the 3-point line.   I'm not sure who he guards at the next level, but scouts see upside in him outside the lottery. The Grizzlies could sure use some help off the bench in the paint.   Projected record: 45-37   They charge how much for that?

Of 12 scholarship players we finished the Iowa game with 8 available + 1 Priller. That's pretty wild.   Plus, I'll bet Troy still doesn't feel 100% from that nasty bruise @Illinois. Maybe it's slowing him enough to improve his play against Iowa.

Yes, that is a dumb question.   But no, they aren't. You can tell because all of the VO family's names start with a V (for his twin sister) or K (for his two older sisters). Also, they're girls.

That's great teamwork guys.

It's better to hear it in that gravel voice with all of the emotion, but here is the transcript courtesy of The Assembly Call:   "You guys have earned this memory. You've earned this memory. You really have. You've earned this memory.    "You'll hear the word 'process' a lot in your life. You'll hear it. You'll use it. You'll use it in your businesses, you'll hear it from your next coach someday, because we got a lot guys that are going to play at another level. They really are. A lot of guys.    "And you'll hear that word, and you'll hear all those different things, and then you'll be somewhere where you'll have people that don't believe in you, you'll have people that leave you on the side of the road, you'll have people that tell you you can't do it.   "And then you'll have that group of people that will tell you how good you are, they'll tell you how much you're capable of, they'll tell you what you should be doing.   "And at the end of the day, you go back to this year, and you understand that all that matters, is your faith, is belief, your family, and looking around at each other and absolutely understanding that together you're capable of so much.    "You're going to get into a situation someday in your life, long after this is over, and we're not anywhere close to that, and you're going to have to be the one that picks that team up. You're going to have to be the one that understands the difference ...   "When this person has been beat up.   "When this person is too full of himself.   "When this person doesn't have confidence.   "When this person has got arrogance.    "You're going to have to be that person that says, 'No, this is how you win. This is how you prepare to be a champion. This is how you work every day.' And that is exactly what you guys have done. That is exactly what you guys have done.    "Everything that was left as fact about you, okay, coming up through the season, all it was was a myth. That's all it was. Because every day you worked to build the facts the right way.    "And the facts are: this is a resilient, tough-minded, highly disciplined, love-each-other group that is absolutely committed to greatness. It is unbelievable. It's unbelievable.    "It's an absolute honor to be your coach. It really is.    "Two last things, then we'll close the room, and then we'll finish ourselves here.   "Don't ever, ever, let anybody take away your nerve, take away your spirit, put doubts into your minds and heads that you can't do things.    "And don't ever look at anything in life and say, 'Oh, that's easy.' That won't take a lot of work. I heard Rob say it tonight: 'You want something great? We gotta work for it. It's not going to be easy.' That is how you're a champion. It really is.    "There's a lot of things that have happened in this group, and there's a lot more things to happen, so we're not going to talk too much more in the past tense.   "But the bottom line is: when you believe in what you're doing it is amazing what you get done.    "Now we've got one more regular season game, and there is absolutely no way, there is no way, there's no way, that we're not walking out of that place Sunday with our seniors with their heads held extremely high. There is no way. There is no way that this group is not going to walk out that way. And that's what our focus is going to be.    "I'm proud of you. Congratulations."

Don't tease me baby. I am beyond excited for the future of watching sports. Feeling like you're in the Hall and having instant access to player and game statistics is a dream. I already keep foxsports open to track stats in realtime.

If MSU loses to Rutgers in their first game in March, I think the world may literally end in a fiery explosion.

So jealous. Stupid current students and local residents.   Can't wait for VR viewing. That will be what forces me to buy whatever the hot VR tech is for sure. I'll even pay a ridiculous subscription price if I have to, but I needs to be able to watch these games in VR. The moment I heard that was part of the Cuban Center my world changed.

Yeah, if he's >75% I want him playing at least Niego minutes each game. I don't like the idea of a basketball player taking a 3-week break during the season. Especially given the rust RoJo developed after his last injury.

Why wouldn't record books list them separately? They already do. Is paper going to become scarce?

MSU should be in great shape, @ Rutgers and v. OSU is all they have left. Two games they have no excuse for losing.   Wisco is significantly less likely to make it, traveling to Minnesota and then West Lafayette for their two last games. I don't see them winning @ Tractortown so, they'll end up tied. I don't understand the tie-breaking so I can't tell you who gets the 4 and who gets the 5 in that case. 

You can't spell: Senior Night Edition -   You can't spell "spermary landscapers needed" without Maryland - 73 You can't spell "No need for antivenin, Diana" without Indiana - 89

I'm not going to be exploring things and clicking links Dalton!   But good find, I still think changing the main page is classy as heck. Plus, in 17 weeks the whole countdown is pretty much meaningless, that's exciting. Once the buyout falls to $4m that's such a low amount for how the contract is arranged it's not even worth considering in any "can he be fired?" conversations.

JMor had an MRI and full evaluation last night, so anything that happens today or is news from today should be fairly reliable without much risk of suddenly changing.   I am glad he is doing well and excited to see him in his first Tourney. Maybe we'll see him... nope. Never mind. Was going to comment about the possibility of a JMor v. Shake match-up in the Tourney but, I guess not. Sorry Shake! Enjoy the NBA grimes!

Also, they have an autoplay video, so screw them:   Indiana's miraculous recovery is one shining moment in Hoosiers' recent gloom by Mike DeCourcy   The problem for Indiana and Tom Crean is they can’t just go back and start over.   If they’d met under different circumstances, their relationship might be altogether different. But IU was broken when Crean came along, smashed into a million pieces, and he took the considerable time and care necessary to restore it to working order.   Time does not heal in sports. Time warps.   But it's long past time for the whole of Indiana to appreciate what it has.   The three long years Crean required to return Indiana basketball to respectability fundamentally altered the chemistry between coach and fan base.   So even as the Hoosiers were earning an impressive road victory Tuesday night at Iowa that clinched an outright Big Ten Conference championship the person who Tweets from the “Fire Tom Crean” account  — who has sent nearly 1,800 tweets since February 2012, when the Hoosiers were completing their first 27-win season in 19 years — was complaining about the team’s reliance on the 3-point shot.   Because, as we know from a history that includes Steve Alford, Calbert Cheaney, Damon Bailey and A.J. Guyton — or, for that matter, Jimmie Chitwood — Indiana basketball and the jumpshot have never been much of a combination.   It took far more than a decade for Indiana’s basketball program to be wrecked from inside and out. It began with the final years of Bob Knight, his welcome worn and his fastball fading, six consecutive first-weekend NCAA Tournament losses piling up for the public to see and, on the inside, the conflict and drama growing ever more untenable.   It escalated with the graceless dismissal of Knight, the zero-tolerance policy that humiliated him when the proper course was for the university to make a clear decision: Do we want him around or not?   It was amplified when a fine man and promising coach, Mike Davis, was handed a job for which he was not yet quite ready and a circumstance for which no adult could ever be prepared. Even an improbable run to the NCAA championship game generated little progress. His five seasons on the job in some ways exceeded the final five of Knight’s tenure, but they were entirely lacking in one critical component: Knight himself.   Do we even need to get started on how miscast Kelvin Sampson was as Davis’ successor?   It was like asking Sylvester Stallone to play the Queen of England. Stallone’s got a few Oscar nominations to his credit and 72 credits on his IMDB page, so we know he’s a talent, but the actor has to fit the role. Sampson had an active NCAA case against him when the Hoosiers hired him in 2006. And yes, the search firm that put him in front of IU still gets lots of gigs.   The extent of the mess Crean inherited in 2008 was staggering. It was his misfortune to attract a good deal of the blame for this circumstance as he worked through three dismal seasons to repair it; it was like yelling at MAACO for taking too long to fix the mangled wreck towed into their garage.   It was Crean’s mistake to react to the volume of criticism by turning inward, trusting less, perhaps perceiving the Indiana high school coaches who’d been an intrinsic part of the program’s past success as less essential to its future.   So here we are.   Indiana now has achieved two undisputed Big Ten championships in the past four years, something Knight last accomplished in 1981 and 1983.( In his final 17 seasons, his teams only twice managed to stand alone on top of the conference, and shared the title twice more.)   This is not some historically weak iteration of the conference Crean somehow lucked into; the Big Ten produced four Final Four teams and 20 NCAA entrants over the past three seasons and this year has had four other teams take up residence in the top 25.   That portion of the fan base that regularly fills Assembly Hall to the ceiling, that even showed up Tuesday night to watch the game beamed from Iowa on the big screen and celebrate a Big Ten championship together, seems pleased with the course of the program. One wonders how universal that sentiment might be. Are Crean’s detractors simply dormant, waiting for the first single-elimination stumble to unleash their anger yet again?   One hopes this result has contented them at last. Indiana basketball needs a greater sense of unanimity. The current players deserve a wider sweep of acclaim. They have recovered from an abysmal start to the season that included losses to Wake Forest and UNLV to stand above Michigan State, Maryland, Purdue and Iowa.   It has been so long since the Indiana fan base as a whole has been predominantly happy. There were those displeased with how Knight was treated at the end, and some not thrilled with how he performed in those final years. There was the entire lost decade of the 2000s. And there has been this tenuous relationship between Crean and the Hoosiers.   Think about that: It’s almost 20 years of melancholy. This stuff is supposed to be fun.   On Tuesday night, a Twitter search for “Fire Tom Crean” turned up mostly mockery of the idea that some loud Indiana fans once lobbied for such an action. And an attempt to access the website that has hosted the Tom Crean buyout clock for nearly a year simply failed.   “Error establishing a database connection,” it said.   It would have been more fun had it read: “That does not compute.”

The Sporting News/DeCourcy article must have hit www.tomcreanbuyout.com while they were updating because while he made it into a great closer, the site is still available.   It's actually even more impressive now, it just reads "Congratulations, Tom! INDIANA BASKETBALL 2016 Big Ten Champions" with no buyout clock.

I mean, I get that you are trying to build outrage in the media in support of your client, but you sound ridiculous. Who wants to hire this guy after these public statements?   No, Mr. Jackson, I think it's unlikely the penalty was timed to sabotage UNLV's chances to win the MWC championship from their what, 7 or 8 seed? and as for their Tourney chances... well, if they won the MWC championship they would have some. It seems likely the NCAA timed it so they wouldn't have to go around vacating post-season games with ineligible players (like that Final Four at that one school, oh yeah, UNLV).   And can someone run some quick racial/ethnic demographic numbers for NCAA D1 Men's Basketball? Something tells me "African-American" athletes (though, I'm sure they would prefer the term "black") will not be the minority group there. This is an inappropriate time to play the race card.

Dee Brown from Illinois 2002 to 2006. Two time consensus All-American.   1812 points, 674 assists, 448 rebounds   Yogi is currently at:   1892 points, 603 assists, 421 rebounds

That old ID will totally work FYI.

I doubt it. Michigan is another team with fresh legs (haven't/won't have played since the previous Saturday) and we worked Iowa hard this game. Fran has totally lost the fans too.    Great play by their bench though, if they can maintain it for these next few games they have a shot. I'd be nervous going into Michigan if I were Iowa because they will rock the house since they feel like they're playing to get off the bubble. It's going to be a very good game. KenPom has it as a toss-up.   That likely slides them to the 5 seed in the BTT too, which is not a great place for them to be. No idea what they'll play like during post-season.

If you change your mind, www.seatgeek.com with the coupon code ASSEMBLY gets you a $20 rebate. I mean, still paying a lot of money, but there it is.   All right Jerrod, if you're here you owe me like 3 bucks. I know your former roommate is, but I forgot who it was.

About the same number I'll shed at my house then.   I can't decide. Do I get together a group of alums and go to a bar because it will be amazing to have the shared experience? Or am I too superstitious for that since I missed every alumni basketball event since December?

I want to win this game for three reasons in order: 1. The Seniors; 2. Undefeated in the Hall for all genders; 3. Seeding.   Also receiving votes: 4. 2002 5. My family are UMD alums (and former employees).   I am wicked jealous of everyone in Bloomington right now. If you are there and not willing to shell out a mere... oh my gosh 188 dollars to sit in the balcony?!?!   Well, Nick's will be awesome too.