str8baller

Agree. Thanks for the recap. Old peegs stuff makes sense; glad my memory still works…sometimes.

IU 76 UK 80

I would love the backstory here…lol. I *think* I remember you kind of promoting this place on Peegs (rivals version) back in the day. Agree the mods are great and the site is one of my favorites. I’m with others that if it is a financial issue, I’m will to pitch in (and I see the link in your sig).

What’s the record for made threes in the game?

Bailey looks so much more confident and energetic coming off the bench.

I can’t believe we lost to Minne-flipping-sota

Clemson is the king of almost getting it done and stepping on their Johnson right before the finish line.

I mean…I don’t really care, nor am I trying to call you out or anything. I don’t follow recruiting and have no predictions—only expectations. Getting to the tourney is a “meet expectations” for me based on what other coaches in his position have done. But I will say if we’re a play-in type bubble team à la 2/4 of Woodys years it’s more of a “barely passes” by the slimmest of margins. Just my opinion based on NIL and the current landscape of college ball.

They’ll shoot until they make it on some possessions.

Typically 12 seeds are playin games/bubble teams for major confs. An 8 seed would put Devries ahead of Calipari and Kelsey last year. Hardly anything to get up in arms about.

If they’re squarely in the tournament are you going to admit you were wrong?

Clemson pulling another Clemson.

A key thing to take from that is that there is estimated another 20 schools in the 7-9mil range. So that’s 30 schools within a couple mil of each other. From there it’s all about evaluation and more importantly returning stars. Guys like Braden Smith are making a little less than if a school like UK or IU would’ve paid them in the open market. Having key returning players is probably worth a mil or so. So right there you have a top 30. That doesn’t even get into schools like Wisconsin that are miracle workers on a budget.

Maybe. Alabama probably has a higher upside because they can possibly elevate on both sides of the ball. But Oklahoma will almost assuredly be a slog with their defense. Could be an Iowa or PSU type game. One possession games can go either way. Bama got whipped by an awful FSU team. Got beat by the aforementioned Oklahoma. Barely got by auburn. Same with weak Missouri and S Carolina teams. And they were flat dominated by Georgia. Odds are IU handles Alabama by two scores if our defense shows up. I think I’d rather play them. I feel good about playing either team though.

Unbelievable buzz saw at this point. Them vs MSU is going to be must watch basketball. (also, it’s not fair, but Dusty doing this in year two ups the pressure on Devries. I don’t even want to think about them winning a title)

Can probably remove “lately.” Grissom through Ballard reminds me of the Colts pre Manning/Polian. A weird combination of dumb and silly

It’s not college football where you have to have a top 10 marquee win. UPS or somebody can step in and explain it better but it’s all Q1 Ws and Ls plus Q2. If we just take care of business we’ll have decent enough Q1 and Q2 record, plus our NET metrics should stay fairly sound. For example we lost by less to a better Lville team than Woodys team last year. Sad that we have to make that comparison but those little things matter. And as mediocre as that team was we picked up wins over ranked MSU and ranked Purdue. And that team had a 1-7 stretch in conference but still was in a position to possibly make the tourney. It’ll sort itself out over the next 20 games.

It’s still really hard to win on the road in conference and that includes people coming to Bloomington. If we drop more than one of the home games vs PSU, Neb, Iowa, NW, Oregon and Wisconsin and don’t make up for it with big wins elsewhere, then the season is cooked and Devries better hope we win the national championship in football to lighten the mood in Btown. Because it’s gonna get testy. There’s still the Woody/Buckner faction, that probably includes some donors, waiting to say “I told you so.” I don’t even know what you say at that point if you have worse than a Woody season. I might be overly optimistic but I don’t see it happening. With the way NIL is distributed I don’t even know how it’d be possible to run out a roster worse than half the league with our budget.

That’s going overboard. B1G has done well so far and our overall SoS will be fine. We’re not in a hole metrics wise like we were last year. Last year at 19 wins we were one of the first teams out with Deevries WVU, oddly enough. At 19 wins this year we are “probably “ in. That just means holding serve at home. The good news is we only play UM and Illinois once and both on the road. Along with MSU, those are the 3 teams that seem like they can absolutely swarm us athletically. Out of those 3 we only have MSU at home, and holding serve at home gets us 10 wins. But we don’t have to do that because we can pick up other games. No reason we can’t split with our in state rival. No reason we can’t pick up another game on the road to make up for dropping the ball at Minny. @ Maryland, @Rutgers, @ ohio st, and the west coast swing are all viable options to pick up a road win. To bring it back to NIL: we still have talent on this team. Everyone is new and having some ups and downs is to be expected. Also, people wanted a 3 point heavy shooting team. That also comes with variance. We’ll drop a couple bad ones but take one or two where we shoot lights out. Even is we lose to UK, 11-9 in conference gets us in the tourney. Every above .500 team in conference last year got in. We also have a chance to win a couple games in the BTT.

Mostly agree, but I’m guessing it’s about scheduling. IU pulled out of the Virginia game this year. If UM and USC had done the same, one of them would be in the playoffs. I think the committee will point to Alabama and say “see we won’t punish you for playing OCC too much.” But USC already pulled out of the ND series and so did Michigan. ND was beating both regularly. And for as much as the B1G wants to say they don’t play anybody they didn’t have any trouble going through us and Georgia last year and beat PSU in a close one. They need a scheduling tie-in to ensure some quality games. Wouldn’t shock me. If TT can keep the money going. An ND tie-in and maybe one other school there can find a sugar daddy and be a contender, they become a bit of a counterweight to the Big 2. ACC is hanging by a thread. First chance they get, FSU and Miami are out of there with UNC and Duke not far behind. And as much as basketball plays second fiddle, there’s no way any new alliance is leaving the NCAA tournament money in limbo. Big 12 is a huge part of that. Them plus the Big 2 plus a few of the Miamis/FSUs/Dukes getting absorbed and you can see the bones of a new super league being formed in the next decade.

Makes sense. The CFP committee obviously wanted ND in this year. Their rankings show that quite clearly. But their hand was forced. Also that ACC statement is hilarious in that there was no mention of their conference champ Duke. lol… With Duke the only really good basketball team, that conference is hanging on by a three.

I would go a step further and reduce it to 8. B1G and SEC champs get an auto and 6 at larges. 25 yrs ago IU would be going to the Rose Bowl to dominate USC/Oregon and then would be the national champs the next day. We’ve come a long way but all these 2 and 3 loss teams jockeying for a shot is ridiculous.

Agree to an extent. No doubt UK spent more money than say Arizona. But UK spent unwisely, apparently. And maybe so did we. We went the midmajor alll-star route. But unlike Cig we didn’t come up with any Sarrats or Fishers. In fact, I don’t think any of our guys are plus-athletes at the B1G level. So that means coach needs to form them into a cohesive unit and quickly. I agree with you that just because we or UK have stumbled doesn’t mean we didn’t spend in the offseason. It’s expensive to get free agents. One thing I wish we would’ve done is get a couple less seniors so we had more returning next year. Going back out into the market for 4 new starters next year is going to be rough, especially when one of them is a big.

I was bored one day and read on a Michigan blog or twitter or somewhere I forget now, a couple Michigan fans talking about how Dusty basically hit the donor circuit from day 1 and the response to him was really positive. I’m sure them just having bought a football championship helped the mood of the donors. Supposedly Cig had similar success with Cuban this off season. You can take all the above with all the credibility a random internet comment deserves, but it seems like a plausible theory given their success and his personality. A hope Devries has a little bit of that in him.

I think so. The big knock on him was defense and he competes hard on that end. And he’s made some nice alley oop passes when driving off the dribble. I actually think he needs to be allowed to dribble and penetrate a little more. I hate to say it, but if anything we rely on creation from Tucker too much. He doesn’t have the athleticism to get anything off the bounce. Yet because our PGs get nothing in that regard either so a lot falls on him. The big thing with Lamar (and all our guys) is that he/they get blocked at the rim a lot. That seems like maybe it makes them shy to cut and back cut towards the rim which then results in a lot of standing around the perimeter.