Tuesday, December 05, 2006

87-114 versus 35-49

Interesting. Oh well, I must just be imagining things.

For reference, front-court scoring in that time has been 138 for AZ to 118 for IL. While Illinois has been more perimeter oriented, they haven't been almost 2.5 times as perimeter oriented as Arizona. Then again, no coach for Illinois has ever run across the floor and cried like a little bitch when one of the little girls on his team started a scrap that he couldn't finish.

Ivy

Do they have a new album coming out or something, because I seem to be getting a lot of hits lately from people looking for pictures of Dominique Durand. Not that it's bad way to waste your time, of course, just seems kind of out of the ordinary.

Monday, December 04, 2006

UC Riverside 38; UCLA 61

Well, they didn't quite shock the world, but hey, we led about three minutes into the game, which was pretty impressive. The Highlanders didn't embarass themselves, and for a team with half the guys either dead, sick, or hurt, they acquitted themselves pretty well. Go Highlanders.

Tough game in which to really judge UCLA. With Saturday's events still fresh in everyone's mind, it had to be hard to concentrate, but the Bruins did what they do. No real impressive performances. Double-Double from LRMAM. Poor shooting from beyond the arc. Kind of a sleepy performance. Next test is this weekend versus Texas A&M.

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Move the Fiest Bowl to Columbus

It's 1997 all over again. You remember 1997, when the coaches gave Tom Osborne and his band of criminals at Nebraska a retirement gift by jumping them over Michigan for a share of the national championship, despite the fact that Nebraska needed an overtime game (which had just been instituted that season), and needed to cheat to win that game (dude kicked a ball into the air that was then caught for a touchdown).

Well, the voters are at it again, ignoring the fact that Michigan is more deserving than Florida simply because they'd prefer not to see a rematch. The basic argument says Michigan had their shot at Ohio State, and they lost, so they shouldn't get another shot. Mind you, these are generally intelligent people making this argument. Do you ever think they'd be in favor of cancelling a super bowl if the teams had met in the regular season? How about if two teams were meeting in the NCAA basketball championship after a regular season match-up? Should we just decide who the winner is based on the previous result?

See, there's this thing called home field/court advantage. The theory is that the team playing on its home field, in front of its home fans, using its own locker rooms, etc, has the advantage over the team that had to travel and play in a hostile environment. It's not a very difficult concept to grasp. For example, noted sports rater Jeff Sagarin pins the home field advantage at somewhere around three points. And guess how many points OSU beat Michigan by in Columbus?

There are also a bunch of revisionists out there who would like to believe that the OSU-UM game was never all that close until the end. Don't buy their bullshit. Until a personal foul was called with about 6 minutes to go, Michigan was going to get the ball back down by four points with a chance to take the lead. On a neutral field, I think each team wins about half the time. And if you think OSU is the country's best team, logic dictates that Michigan has to be number two.

Just another reason the BCS is a joke.