str8baller

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.

Opposite, imo. Big Ten and SEC run the show. ACC and B12 aren’t getting any favors or extra teams unless the committees hand is forced. But like this year the CFP (ie B1G and SEC) will guarantee them a single spot for legitimacy reasons plus basketball. I’m pretty sure they could bring one conf into the fold and tell the other one to go kick rocks if push really came to shove. But the playoffs aren’t going to freeze anyone out or ND ( the team that was runner up last year) for legitimacy reasons except as a last resort. Last thing they want is a competing splinter group. If that were to happen this year and TT beat ND in a B12/ACC/whatever playoff and anybody but undefeated Indiana won the B1G/SEC playoff all of a sudden you have a real issue on your hands. Good forbid a 3 loss Alabama wins and TT or ND won theirs you’d have a majority of the media claiming the other group is the “real” CFP championship. Fox/CBS/NBC would be all over that. B1G/SEC just has to keep everyone happy until they can take over the basketball side and consolidate the whole thing into the top 75 programs or whatever for all sports. The committee wanted both the ACC champ and ND in but got their bluff called when the ACC title game went sideways. That’s why the rankings were the way they were. Push comes to shove they had to take Miami for the ACC. ND can cry about it but that’s the politics of the situation. Really ND f’d over the Big Ten by beating USC. There’s zero reason a 3 loss, 5th SEC team should get in when the B1G is only getting 3 teams in. Obviously I want IU to win the title but if we don’t I hope it is Oregon. There should never be another year where the B1G gets 3 teams and the SEC gets 5. The other 4/12 spots are just place holders to keep everybody happy.

Physically he looked like he belonged. The whole bench pretty much got torched so I’m not sure how much you can take away from it other than he’s healthy.

94 in Kenpom. Marquette is 92 for reference. Of course, Minny is 112. I haven’t watched PSU this year. Those numbers suggest we should win easily but the last 7 days of IU hoops days otherwise.

NCAA has nothing to do with it. And any encroachment they make into college football will just hasten their demise. As soon as the big two confs figure out what to do about basketball and a new governing body the NCAA is dead anyways. I think the latter is something the big 2 doesn’t want to mess with right now.

Kind of depends on what you think of Ole Miss. there’s a good argument they shouldn’t be in the tourney but otoh had they might be the most talented first round team. I like our draw. If those teams weren’t named Alabama and Oklahoma people would see two flawed teams and ones that might not have made it. I might’ve preferred Miami in there but we avoided A&M which I think is a win. They have a talented roster, imo.

No point in going. Any draftees aren’t likely to play. Neither are kids who are going to portal out. All those crap bowls cost programs money to attend, and that money can be better spent elsewhere in today’s arms race. And you get a chance to start preparing your own portal moves early.

Predictable, maybe. Avoidable…nobody knows. I’m not sure what else was out there at what price on what timeline. I know both Mc Neely and Conwell were guys I liked watching last year, obvious high major talents, and in the portal. It’s frustrating to see them both go to Lville and then torch us. But I haven’t a clue if IU had a shot with either. Iirc, Woody might’ve screwed the Conwell thing up. We’ve still got a roster that can compete. Iowa at MSU the other night looked every bit the part of D2 guys playing against the big boys. Outside of MSU, UM, and Illinois nobody in the conference is going to out match us so much physically or athletically to make winning impossible.

Ultimately everything falls on the head coach. My larger point being that it can take more than 9 games to get things sorted with a brand new roster. He could be doing a good job and we might not see the payoff until January. The roster is on him. Short staffed, crunched for time and no real impact players to bring with him besides his son, so it’s hard to quantify exactly how much behind the 8 ball we were. I think the roster is tournament caliber, but next year will have to be much better.

Not with the team that took the floor at the Barn. Probably not the one that played vs Lville either. Minnesota is really bad and that loss is probably somewhere down there with some bad Woody and Archie losses. I think they’re talented enough to make it. Probably like Lville last year…9/10 seed. But something is off. Hard to blame CDD too much this early but his offense has very little answer to teams extending their pressure and daring us to beat them off the dribble.

I mean…you were worried about rim protection. As some of us pointed out there’s other ways to play defense besides to funnel everything to a shot blocking big. Devries has shown he can get an athletically limited group to play sound defense. Our problems right now are offense and nobody really imagined that would be the case. Some of it is athleticism, but currently the problem looks to run deeper than that. Devries has his work cut out for him. I’ll agree with you that whoever put the roster together needs to be reassigned to some other duty next season. You only need to look to Louisville who has two transfers and a euro big helping lead the way, but they’re more proven than ours.

IU 75 PSU 70

Let’s just delete this thread and pretend this game and Louisville never happened.

I probably would’ve stayed up way too late posting with you guys! Welcome back BTB.

One helluva season!

Makes a little bit of sense that we’d over perform the efficiency metrics because they give you credit for wins and we haven’t lost yet. Still, that’s a nice start. Where did you see these at btw? I’m just seeing the old ones on cbs and ncaa’s site.