You don’t roller-skate in a buffalo herd.
You don’t shave with a rusty blade.
You don’t shine your shoes with barbed wire.
You hit a baseball injected with nitroglycerin.
You don’t bungee jump off the empire state building with a 10 pound test monofilament line.
You don’t play air guitar with running chain saw.
You don’t swallow scorpions.
You don’t suck on a firing machine gun.
You don’t clean your family jewels with a string trimmer.
You don’t push the button holding a nuclear bomb.
You don’t smoke and water ski on a gasoline lake.
You don’t try to jump across a black hole.
You don’t tell your secrets with a laser on your window.
You don’t sit your OADs if you want to sign more.
You don’t get elected President and print your own currency interest free.
You don’t lose the disruption stat on the road.
You don’t try to win games on the foul line on the road, because the refs will never give you a favorable whistle.
You never, never, never, never, never, never, EVER stop shooting treys when you are 1-7 in the second half on the road with less than a 15 point lead.
You don’t pull the mask off the old lone ranger.
And you don’t mess around with Jim.
Oh, and you don't try to limbo under Travis Ford.
Those are big don’ts I try to observe.
Now let’s list a couple things that weren’t the cause of the loss.
Rebounding was irrelevant at 35 a piece and even on offensive and defensive rebounds too.
Shooting 52% from the FT line was not the problem. Had KU shot 70% from the FT stripe, it would only have made 3 more free throws and that would still have left KU down 67-65 at the buzzer.
Shooting 40% didn’t help but it didn’t guaranty the loss. Darby O’Gill and the Little People shot about the same.
What killed us was making six more TOs and getting 4 less strips, and playing to win the game on the foul line on the road and instead getting 7 less FTAs than OSU.
Why was getting significantly fewer FTAs such a big deal?
Because we could have been shooting treys with those possessions.
But those are just the things we did wrong.
The question is why did we do them wrong, when we didn’t have to?
Self went into the Iba tabernacle and began to feel guilty about playing “outside in;” that’s why.
The ghost of Henry began taunting Self.
He said, “Man-up and play us inside-out, or you are not one of my disciples.”
And so Bill manned up and ended the outside in game that worked so well.
And lo he played inside out.
And knowing his bigs could not play Nash and Cobbins that way, he tried to win it by getting into the one and one.
But it did not work, because the referees gave OSU all the calls that all referees give all home teams, when the road team is trying to play the way ghosts want them to.
But to put the game into perspective, playing exactly the wrong strategy for fully one half the game the team only lost by 5.
In a backhanded sort of way, that shows how much better than OSU KU is. OSU could not possibly have lost by only 5 playing exactly the wrong strategy even at home.
But such metaphysics get us no closer to an 11th title.
Time to think next, steal a win the next gam on Tuedsay, and begin planning for trying to win games sick with flu in 7-10 days after exposure to Forte.
Next.
