I've never wanted to play another team so badly. Ever. I pray we get the opportunity and I hope that 150-95 drubbing we put on Kentucky a while back looks like a buzzer beater game compared to what we do to the Shockers.
The same Shockers who, by the way, have played the 87th toughest schedule in the country. Whoo.
I guess I'm the opposite @nuleafjhawk. The more Marsha talks the more I think I feel sorry for her. That poor homely gal just can't get a date. She's basically just standing in the obscurity that is the MIZZERY Valley Conference and jumping up and down yelling "Look at me! Look at me!"
@nuleafjhawk , let me re-purpose the quote thusly:
"If I were them, I wouldn't give a shit about us either."
I've been wanting this for a long time.
For some reason I think we are going to meet in March...
This thing has become a fish out of water, rotting from the head. Now Weber wants to play the Shocks.
Bring'em on!
Tournament committee might by total chance put us in the same bracket...along w mizzery...now wouldn't that be fun?
My top ten teams I'd like to see us play:
Wichita St. Home and home
Duke Home and home
Syracuse in Allen Field House, and then us in their stupid dome.
Butler in Hinkle but with Stevens coming back as coach.
Miss Ouri One game a year in KC.
Minnesota in their old barn. A great place to watch a game.
Kentucky home and home. It may be ugly for us some years, but it will be ugly for them some years.
LSU in Baton Rouge, every year, so I can see us play every year and only pay about 5 bucks for the privilege.
UNC home and home. This would be great theater. Roy coming back to AFH. Imagine that!
Wisconsin home and home. My secondary college hoops fanaticism. I'd cheer for KU but UW winning wouldn't be bad for me. The Kohl center is a great venue for college basketball.
LSU? Might you be a Lwizyané?
@drgnslayr Yep for now dragon! I've lived a rich and full life which has led me to some great places and it's where I am now. We live just north of Baton Rouge. LSU basketball is depressing in the way KU football is.
@wissoxfan83 The auto format changed my post for some reason. Wichita was supposed to be 10, Duke 9, etc.
I have a feeling that NCAA will put us in the same bracket. Maybe that's who Marsha is trying to get the attention of.
@wissoxfan83 - I envy you. That must be quite the cultural experience. I've always been intrigued with that State.... a collision of so many cultures together.
@drgnslayr It really is a fascinating place. I majored in Geography at KU. As a geographer it is a really fascinating place. As a teacher, 3 days off for Mardi Gras tops the cake!
@wissoxfan83, so, are you familiar with the woman geographer at Bennington College, or somewhere that is building GIS models of Gettysburg and so far has revealed how sight line issues may explain some of Lee's more questionable decisions during the battle? Wish I could recall her name for you, but she's a doer. Her next big GIS assignment is to model the Nazi concentration camps to try to glean some spatial understanding about how the camps location and sight lines in approach zones lead persons into a false sense of trust regarding what they were getting into. As always, technology opens up about as many more questions as it answers, and as always the answers come up with need to be scrutinized from many different fields of expertise, but I was very excited to see someone using GIS in history for strategic analsis, baed on spatial constraints.
@wissoxfan83, isn't it about time you started studying the history of KU basketball with the aid of a GIS framework to inventory and model the spatial and noise variables in understanding why, say, Dick Harp called a play at the end of the '57 NCAA championship for someone other than Chamberlain? :-)
We will call your work "The Spatial Legacy of KU Basketball."
@wissoxfan83 P.S., the woman doing the GIS work is a graduate of Wisconsin's venerable geography department.
All very interesting Jaybate! I haven't heard of her and that work, but it sounds fascinating indeed. Now to link it to basketball, hmmm... the possibilities are limitless.
For example. There is something about the sightlines at the Superdome that affect KU more than their opponents. How else to explain our glaring failures in games in that building? I mean poor shooting alone doesn't explain 14 of 32 FTs against Syracuse. And I think I might know the answer. From my seat there for the Kentucky game I couldn't even see the rims. And I had great seats half way (row 26) up the upper deck, so seeing them from there shouldn't have been a problem at all.
@wissoxfan83 - Physics question: Is a basketball heavier or lighter at sea level versus the 1,020 ft elevation of Lawrence? My guess is it's the same weight, but travels through air lighter in the Superdome.
I have the perfect self-portrait in front of the Superdome, decades before the hurricane. I'm standing on top a car that had been torched right outside the Dome. It was an abandoned fusion of metal and no one seemed to care that it was there. To be honest, it seemed to fit into the environment... at the time, that area felt like scenery out of Mad Max.
@jaybate - Just a question or two: How big is that magic hat you continue to pull rabbits from? Do the rabbits come out one at a time, or is it an explosion of rabbit fur particles and flesh?
Bravo!
Spacial visualization and GIS have been used extensively in basketball for a while now. Most every NBA team has a system of cameras installed that tracks every player about 25-30 times per second and produce tons of data that the better teams use to analyze their plays.
As far as line of sight visualization within the court, there is zero difference between venues. Unlike football, all basketball courts are perfectly flat, with the exact same dimensions and the baskets (backboard and rim) are essentially identical and located at the the exact same location and height. While the background can affect vision somewhat, from any specific location on the court, a player has the exact same look of the rim regardless of venue. For spectators the situation is completely different as every venues outside the court boundaries can be uniquely different, but then, spectators in the stands are not taking the shots, players within the court are. With minor practice, most players have no problems shooting in different venues...and yes, I do work extensively with GIS.
@JayHawkFanToo - Is it GIS they use? I thought GIS was more about geography. Like this:
And if you examine that graphic, you will find one big reason why Kansas is a "basketball State." Because through rural and urban places in Kansas, basketball is popular on a consistent level.
The technology helping athletes most involves sensor-based studies... now they even want to add sensors inside of basketballs!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/490228395/94fifty-freakishly-smart-sensor-basketballs ↗
GIS stand for Geographic Information Systems and it has to do with locating data in space. The space can be the entire United States or a basketball court, same concept, different scale. Those shot charts you see next to score boxes are simply x-y location representation of where shots were taken, i.e. geographic locations. Some times locations can be relative such a player position in relation to the baseline and sometimes they can be absolute where they are geo-coded with absolute coordinates, such as the photos taken by most cell phones that you can physically display in any map with the proper tools.
Enjoying this thread. When I was at KU I took cartography classes and journalism. One of my favorite projects was mapping the number of parking tickets issued by location across campus. There were certain parking lots that had a higher percentage of tickets per parking space than others. Some places had very few... Either no one violated there, or they weren't patrolled as much.
This was a while before Al Gore invented the internet. I had to go through the ticket data by hand ;-)
@JayHawkFanToo I'll take your word for it. :)
@drgnslayr I have zero aptitude in physics, but I would like to see that picture of you in front of the dome.
@nuleafjhawk Chanting Overrated cha cha chachacha Overrated!
@drgnslayr I love maps more than anything in Geography, therefore I am intrigued by this one. I don't quite understand it however. It just doesn't show # of viewers per zip code as it links viewers to some sort of marketing index. I have no experience in marketing.
This map seems to indicate that eastern Kentucky couldn't give a rip about their Wildcats, but we probably know that isn't true. It isn't highly populated there and it is also quite poor, so is that what this is showing, where people with some money watch college hoops? Urban areas seem to show up, so it has to be linked somehow to population centers.
Do you have a link to that map? I'd like to examine it a little more closely.
I don't know the extent of usage for GIS... but doesn't surprise me if it goes all the way down to player movements on the court.
@wissoxfan83 - Sure... I have a link:
http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2011/03/15/march-madness-college-basketball-data-post/ ↗
I believe ESRI is the big daddy of GIS. I think you'll find plenty of fascinating information on this site!
@drgnslayr I may never visit KUBuckets again after seeing that website!