Just a reminder: @jaybate 1.0 does not believe there is a conspiracy going on with PetroShoeCos. I believe everyone is operating legally. I have no proven theories or insider knowledge about this. I hypothesize there is just a duopoly, or oligopoly, depending on definition, with participants making moves and counter moves to position strategically for the shoe business. Conspiracy may imply covert illegality to some and that is not how @jaybate 1.0 views this situation at all. Good to see you posting again. Rock Chalk!
jaybate 1.0
10346 posts
I recall individual stories about each of these two deals mentioning these figures.
But I do not recall any single source that tracks shoe contract amounts for all programs. Might be out there though.
I searched and found a few lists of schools and brand of shoe contract. I could never tell how complete they were.
👍 10^1000000000
And you can even down vote yourself! 😄
I believe Jason Sudeikis is the point of contact on that. :-)
Thought provoking take.
How shall I put this?
adidas reputedly tossed UL $45M bones.
adidas reputedly just tossed Miami $33M bones.
That's a lot of calcium.
Its reputedly true that Rick Pitino is irked about a recent decommit and about an unlevel playing field in recruiting. But if you think about it. It makes sense for Rick to take the lead in the charge to the moral high ground of recruiting. He is near to the end of his career. He has taken the most heat and investigative scrutiny due to his troubles with being extorted. No one hired to go after Rick is apt to find much. And a recent quote suggested what he thinks about the NCAA's apparent blind eye: if he were quoted correctly he was saying something like, if the NCAA sees no problem with the unlevel playing field then I don't either. Clever rhetoric.
But I am tiring of the unlevel playing field metaphor.
I think the ocean chopped up with broadside salvos from dueling battle ships may be a more fitting metaphor.
This seems to be a war for the "soles" of college basketball.
If adidas were willing to keep investing these kinds of monies into selected programs, they likely are doing it based on a strategy.
And all strategies with shoes sooner or later involve attracting ever increasing numbers of players into the pre-endorsement fold of college programs hopefully later to be contracted with your own brand to push the brand into the path of global market growth.
With adidas throwing the kind of bones its throwing, I really wouldn't worry about KU eventually getting its share of recruits. I don't think Nike, or adidas, are doing anything illegal. I just think they are doing everything that is legal.
Bragg could easily be the first of several for KU, or maybe not.
I frankly wouldn't be surprised to see Self overhaul the roster after the season more than ever before. 5-8 OAD/TADs on the roster next season is not at all beyond possibility, if historical tit for tat between UK and KU were any predictor.
From the moment Nike-UK got 10 OAD/TADs and Nike-Duke got 9, the talent concentration gloves appeared to come off.
Self's apparent decision to treat the UK game as a practice game left me with the impression that SHOEWARS had already been declared before the season started.
adidas spending the big bones at least appears to suggest they may stay off for awhile.
By the way,adidas decision to win the Miami contract appears a smart one. adidas cannot fight this apparent shoewar without a cornerstone program in Florida imho.
adidas appeared to need a better EST strategy and they just got one.
The game seems pretty obvious to mois.
Stack at least one program in each NCAA region to maximize your presence in the Final Four.
adidas is now positioned to do that. But it still seems stuck in an ad hoc process of its programs having to pry Nike-leans away from Nike-programs, and that appears a slow build, as the relatively lower number of OAD/TADs at adidas programs attests.
Alas, a major uncertainty IMHO is whether team adidas-KU makes heavy rain in Lawrence this season again, or decides to be a good team player and recognizes the need to concentrate in the EST.
Of course there is another way for adidas to approach this. They could concentrate on two regions. Channel talent into two regions to make sure they get at least two of four final four slots. That is the way that makes sense to me, since according to Pitino they apparently have a smaller pool of talent for their coaches/colleges to draw from.
Nerve racking for a KU fan, but interesting.
(Note: all hypothetical opining and speculating as usual.)
I used to get tremendous satisfaction out of Self beating teams that Digital Vital broadcast and spent an entire game asymmetrically hyping. It was one of life's great pleasures.
But then DV became wrong so many times that one could not really get such heightened pleasure, because there was no suspense. Each time he hyped an opponent of KU's one began to expect him to be proven wrong.
Fortunately, thanks to ongoing incompetence of ESPN, they elevated Doogie Godlove to a point where he could perpetually reinsert his foot in his mouth.
Now, I am fulfilled almost weekly by the Doogmeister's misguided takes.
But because both Digital Vital and Doogie Godlove both DO love the game, mercifully, both can have sublime moments inspite of themselves--moments where they rise high above their bottom feeding schilling and schlepping for EST eyeballs and clicks.
I will always be grateful to Doogie for his moving tribute to the fat man, the human ice cream event horizon, that black hole for fried foods, Rick Majerus. Majerus was a great, great coach operating on the fringes of the big time. He was a true original amidst the revenge of the clones. And he knew basketball up one side of a sugar cone, and down the other. He was brilliant. And Doogie Godlove did right by Majerus, like no other broadcaster, or writer did.
So, Doogmeister, don't say I never gave you a full stroke.
At the same time, don't think you don't deserve the back hands you get for your remarks about KU that lack such insight as to make hair brains seem to tower over you!!!!!
Rock Chalk!
"but I'm sure they will stumble into the championship like a drunk sailor stumbles into a brothel (with his pants on backwards, like Gottlieb)."--slayr
PHOF!
LOL!
There was a brief interlude where a routine got switched on accidentally by the proprietors that enabled down voting.
A sudden flurry of playful down voting broke out, of course. :-)
Not surprisingly, I got my share. :-)
@VailHawk was shrewd enough to capture one and make it his avatar.
I howl everytime I see it. :-)
Thanks for weighing in with we knuckle draggers in Peoria, JNew!!!!!!!
I want everyone to realize what a terrific thing this is.
JNew is taking this interactive thing up, up. up, or should I say out, out, out, in every direction.
JNew is linked to KENPOM. And JNew is enabling us to link to both.
What other sports journalist is doing this?
He's linking on CJonline.com and he's linking on KUBuckets.com.
This is the future NOW.
I-N-T-E-R-A-C-T-I-O-N-!-!
Dynamic interplay.
No boundaries. Just frontiers.
The world is NOT flat, like Thomas Friedman said.
It has topography and legacy related to that topography that make interactivity amplify those legacies. Robert Kaplan has it mostly right. Read Kaplan's "The Revenge of Geography." It does for the world what Jesse and Ken are doing for basketball.
Who else but JNew let's you interact creatively with KENPOM?
regarding things within our topographic set of sports interests, whether we are there actually, or virtually?
Ken Pomeroy cannot interact with everyone everywhere. Its digitally feasible, but the complexity of the topographic legacies (this is KU country; that is KSU country; that is Duke country; that is Tar Heel country, etc.) is too complicated for Pomeroy to know where and how to interact his numbers with the fans of those sports countries. Because he is brilliant, he can know what numbers to collect from all of the sports countries, and he can run them, but he cannot know what fans in those countries actually want to know. He cannot know in detail what might be worth knowing in a specific sports country without feed back from someone like JNew posing the right question. And JNew discovers those questions both from his insight, the coaches and players he interviews, and from the insights of we fans. This is the awesome epistemic efficiency and beauty made possible with digital connectivity.
Pomeroy can receive feedback through a trusted channel from an informed community and both supply it QA insights AND build his trusted audience/consumer/fan base. It is a win-win for Ken. It is a win-win for Jesse. And it is a win-win for we fans in KU digital country.
But TRUST in interactivity is the coin of the realm.
I am mastering the obvious here, because sometimes when the obvious is first perceived it can slip under the radar.
Ken Pomeroy is reaching out and connecting.
JNew is reaching out and connecting.
There is a supply chain here.
And KUBuckets would be wise to reach out and connect to cement the virtue of the precedent and the supply chain.
What I want to say here is that we need to extend the kind of curtesy, and fan sophistication, to Ken Pomperoy and JNew that we "mostly" extend to each other.
Ken Pomeroy and JNew are professionals in their businesses. They have to make moves and build relationships that make sense. Respect and curtesy have to be instituted for them here to be able to afford to reach out and connect. This is their meal ticket. We do this for fun. We both want it to build to something better and better.
None of us needs each other.
But together we are all better.
Team. Pulling together. It may sound corny outside basketball, but it is true.
Our means of expression--our language and our graphics--have to track with what is tolerable for them on threads involving them. Irreverence is okay. Challenging them is okay. But we need to think about what they need too. We need to realize that what they do with us will be linked to other sites and that they have to bear that linkage and see it as a net benefit to them. Yes, we can be a bunch of online Don Imuses with them, but I am not sure that is what is best for the KU Legacy, which is why we are all here.
I am a staunch advocate of free speech and of exploring all the boundaries of our digital medium for the advancement of our legacy. I am as irreverent as they come. I pretty much have no sacred cows. And I view everyone here pretty much as KU Buckets family that one can let one's hair down with.
But I am also a big believer in being polite and curteous to company that comes to visit. :-)
These pros are reaching out directly, or indirectly, to connect for many reasons and we don't have to know what they are, or discuss them, or care, because it is their own business. This is our house and they deserve to be treated with respect, when they make the effort to come in.
What I know for sure is that this is a breakthrough moment in interactive sports journalism and we must seize the moment as best and as curteously as we can.
We are dating here. I know Jesse visits occasionally. But I kind of drug Ken Pomeroy in indirectly through my link of Jesse's story. Its more of a first date for him. And an indirect one at that. We need to put our best foot forward to Jesse, as usual, and to Ken. Me especially.
My original post above was written in great excitement at the prospect of what Jesse and Ken had apparently done together by linking up in a story by Jesse on the CJonline.com site.
I meant for my post to extend the story and their linking up to all of us.
I realize that in my excitement I resorted to one of my Marine Corps schticks and unintentionally (and wrongly) created, in pursuit of humor, a conflicted, rather than a cooperative linkage. Us versus them. QA that says KU can't win the B12 versus "oh, yes, we can, leathernecks." That was not what I meant to do. I meant to have some fun, while also calling attention to what great QA I thought they had done.
And it is terrific QA. And it does call all of our attention to exactly why we have all been posting voluminously about ways to get better in preparation for the conference. KenPom's and Jesse's numbers quantify what we already knew. Self has to keep working the problems for this team to be put in a position of winning a 12th title, or what ever the counter is at right now. These numbers are confirmation. But run the numbers based on the last game, the latest version of 2014-2015 Self Ball and KU might rank as having the highest probability of winning the conference. Our team is a moving targets. It can and does get better. But so do other teams. That's why the QA is worrisome, but that's also why it is not set in stone as an accurate predictor.
In any case, Jesse, I am exceedingly sorry, if I did anything here to make it more difficult for you to link with Mr. Pomeroy, and if I did anything to make it more difficult for your linkage with Mr. Pomeroy to become over time even more interactive with you and us over time, here, on your live blog, or on your blog at CJonline.com.
And bottom line: I loved the significant effort that you and Ken went to try to make some sense out of this unusual KU basketball season with state of the art QA tailored squarely to KU country.
If I made a mistake, I made a mistake with the best intentions of advancing interactivity on both your site and this site and among all of us basketball geeks.
Please forgive me.
Yours very truly,
@jaybate 1.0
MEMO
FROM: Director, jBIA
TO: Most board rats
RE: How to win ugly playing outside-in
Yes, Mr. Self is a genius. He has added, rediscovered, or extrapolated the known tactics of the game of college basketball in the first and second thirds of his career, as much if not more than anyone else in his coaching generation. I won't list them here, because a third of my posting over the years has been pointing them out, trying to figure them out, and just plain scratching my medulla at them.
All persons that innovate later face a risk: they become prisoners of what works, when others catch up by copying. Eventually, they have to re-innovate, if you will. The case in point here involves Self's innovation of THE SHORT TREY offense.
Self did not invent, but refined the concept to a surgical laser degree of fineness, stopping cold shooting trey ballers from shooting BEFORE they missed a lot of shots. He apparently did this, when he figured out, perhaps in part with Danny Manning, the fine points of post play that allowed above average to very good big men to shot 55-60% within 5 feet of the rim AND get a free throw. It was what was called above THE SHORT TREY offense. Stop missing from outside before you miss too many and cram it inside and keep cramming it inside until you gain enough separation to go back to taking a few trey looks to see if your trey shooters will get untracked. If they don't, repeat.
Self kept 40% trifectates on the wings and stopped them from pulling the triggers almost from the second they missed two. Last year it got to where it was if they missed one. Ask Conner and Brannen. Miss two and stop and have the team cram it into the bigs for the short trey, as long as it takes to separate. That was the innovation. Pre-empt the missed trey possessions.
These last five years it got him an 84% W&L Statement. A bunch of titles. And everyone from Jim Calhoun to Rick Barnes, fully half to 2/3s of coaches, began to copy him. Opposing teams began to walk, talk and crawl on their bellies like Bill Self teams, except for the Dribble Drive, apparent Nike Stacks in places like Lexington. Coaches like Buzz Williams and Lon Kruger that were already Okie Ballers, saw their stars ascend. Guys like Billy Gillispie got elite major jobs. KU staffers were hired like genetic engineers that held joint-patents on key parts of the Olivia Wilde genome.
But over this time other coaches and teams have done two things.
They have, as already noted, copied the system as much as possible, at least as much as one can from the outside looking in.
And they have studied endless feeds of how to stop it.
All strategies and tactics have counter strategies and counter tactics. This is the second rule of strategy--the first being you've got to have a strategy.
Which brings us to the present.
We lack the key ingredient to play this inside-out, short-trey way, i.e., the rotation of three dominant bigs that one can cram it down into on the low blocks 10-15 straight possessions for ten minute stretches to break opponents backs and guarranty separation. Further, opposing coaches have also copied our defensive schemes that Self and Danny apparently came up with that let us hold other teams to 35-45% on 2ptas inside, whilst also denying treys. And of course, zebra redirects by some as yet not fully understood Star Chamber have led to foul calling that makes the short trey game oddly more difficult, after initially seeming to favor it.
It is that ability to deny KU a high percentage inside-out game that has caused this team not only to win a bunch of ugly games close, but also to get absolutely beheaded by UK and Temple. And don't forget that Florida beheaded KU the first half and simply self destructed the second half, or we would be talking 10-3.
And so from early on in this remarkable, odd season--this winter of our big man discontennt--it has been the policy of the jBIA (jaybate Basketball Intelligence Agency) to promote that agenda of micro-bursting treys and in some minds blaspheming about shooting >25% treys, preferring 50% treys, and idealizing as a not impossible dream, but admittedly Quixotic dream at this juncture, 100% treys.
To this end, jBIA has been using the usual psy-ops sigint techniques of mind control suggestions and thread jacking, multiple aliasing, appeals to WWII and Marine Corp myth and metaphor, and subliminal graphics like hot pictures of Olivia Wilde as KU Muse with recurring subliminal micro imaging of the phrase "Shoot the Trey/Outside In" at font scales just below consciously perceivable.
Each has been part of a grand psychological operation carried out by special agent @VailHawk and independent three-point and outside-in super patriot @HighEliteMajor and yours truly @jaybate 1.0, the jBIA director equivalent of the teeny little man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz inside the ghastly post apocalyptic head of Zardoz.
jBIA has in this operation gone to the trouble of getting @approxinfinity to deactivate @jaybate 1.0 and turn it into @jaybate 2.0 as a counter basketball terrorism tactic against lowly basketball terrorist types embedded into the KUBuckets.com community for nefarious purposes aimed in part at stealing the bodily fluids of all real KU Jayhawk posters here at KUBuckets.com, but, as my alias often says, it digresseth.
Regardless, we have completed the prospect of psychologically re-engineering the collective consciousness and unconsciousness of the community, and having done so, jBIA next turned to covert insertion of this manufactured psychological consensus of outside-in into the neural nets of that redoubtable Tumble Weed Buddhist, HC Bill Self, and into the collective id/ego/super ego complex that is the team's collective psychology.
This part was very slow going and took a great number of tactical posts and even adoption of some of the advanced mind control techniques alluded to in the George Clooney flick "The Men Who Stare at Goats," based on the book by Jon Ronson, one of many quasi distinguished and perhaps (or perhaps not) intel-embedded discourse framers regarding mind control and conspiracy-mongering working today in contemporary spy-and-informant-riddled mainstream media.
jBIA is of course not at liberty to reveal which techniques were applied but rest assured that you would not be thinking as you are now thinking, had these techniques NOT been applied effectively, and Coach Self would NOT be uncharacteristically letting his team full of indoctrinated inside outers suddenly and non linearly begin playing outside in with none other than The Designer bombing 3s as if from behind the fabled chest of drawers in reputed spook C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. But again, the alias digresseth.
Which brings us to the final step of reengineering minds on the subject of outside-in, mass basketball casualty trifectation.
There will be times in playing outside in, as there are times playing inside out, when nothing goes right; that separation cannot momentarily, or even for extended periods, be achieved, and that some 16% of the time dreaded Ls will be added to the W&L statement. There is no more perfection in mind controlled states than there is in non mind controlled states. Just ask Mark David Chapman.
Controllers of mind controlled states can at best aspire to conditions of similar probabilities of actions and outcomes and can at most devise legends that enable mass distraction when the mind controlled agent goes bat-shizz awry.
Hence, in plain English, there will be times when the treys don't fall.
And it is during these junctures that the most backsliding is to be expected among online subjects and on-floor subjects, and on-bench subjects.
jBIA cannot work miracles. It is a basketball intelligence agency set up by the Dulles Brothers back in the late 1940s that has operated under many acronyms inside and outside government and only lately operates as jBIA. The director, jaybate 1.0 is but the latest in a line of fictional directors based in no small part on Leo G. Carroll's "The Professor" in Ernest Lehman's script of Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest," the fat man's (note: not to be confused with Sidney Greenstreet) rosetta stone for the then soon to emerge post modern witty paranoia trend; which was itself, foreshadowed in Wylie Sypher's rosetta stone for the unspoken end of the American Enlightenment, "The Four Stages of Renaissance Style," which ended with Sypher studying Nicholas Poussain's eerily calm portrayals of post-renaissance twilight and shepherds and flocks oblivious to the meanings of infrastructures left behind by early optimists, later mannerists, and latest baroque-ists of the gone-swelter of creativity and innovation that was the renaissance.
To wit, we seem to find ourselves in the spent phase of the American renaissance, or at the very least the residue of a baroque coda, which began imprecisely in 1776 and collapsed into a post renaissance phase about 9.11.01.
It is in this post renaissance state that the jBIA was surreptitiously appropriated by a small enclave of folks old enough to still recall at least the late stages of the American renaissance, and began the long laborious task of cataloguing the basketball portion of that knowledge of the late renaissance for its storage in an underground vault beneath Allen Field House for eventual reapplication at a future time when the forces of darkness have receded sufficiently for the rekindling of yet another renaissance, as occurs intermittently throughout human and sports histories.
SHOOT THE TREY AND TRANSITION WHEN YOU CAN--this is the inscription above the entrance to the vault where the ark of the James Naismith Covenant is stored and within it is stored not only the grail, but also what knowledge we have to pass on to our posterity.
But as D-jBIA, @jaybate 1.0, I am authorized forthwith to reveal to you the secret of winning ugly outside in.
KEEP SHOOTING THE TREY NO MATTER WHAT UNTIL YOU HAVE ACHIEVED SEPARATION. THEN AND ONLY THEN MOVE IN.
It is a simple algorithm.
Miss ten treys? Shoot 15 more.
Miss 15 treys? Shoot 30 more.
Never, never, never, never, ever, ever, ever EVER stop shooting treys when you are missing.
Only stop shooting treys when you have separated and only then when you are confident the clock and the opposing stretched defense is ready to enable a very high percentage of 2ptas before time runs out in either half.
Basically, the way to win ugly with the trey is the same as the way to win ugly with the inside trey.
STICK WITH THE PLAN.
Just as missing bunnies can only be corrected by continually creating and taking more bunnies, missing treys can only be corrected by creating and taking more treys.
As D-jBIA I am also authorized to reveal one more secret of winning ugly outside-in. It is a prescription of what not to do.
He who thinketh he can playeth outside-in AND inside-out will wind up like the Nazi sipping the water of the Holy Grail in George and Steve's Xcellent Third Indy adventure.
Never feed the Mogwai after midnight and never, never, never, ever, play outside-in and inside-out in one game...EVER.
Your team will incinerate from the inside out.
Rock Chalk!
Note: this memo will self destruct in 60s seconds, Mr. Phelps, and Ethan will cease to be a recurring character, too, and Francis Underwood will inherit the earth, if outside in and inside out are attempted within the two halves of a single game.
Way to play dueling numbers!
If shoecos really do stack certain teams, and that is only a hypothesis, I keep hoping adidas will reduce its OAD/TAD types to just two programs: KU and one other. Then KU will have 10 OAD/TADs easy to go out and slay UK.
Looks like only wishful thinking right now though.
http://cjonline.com/blog-post/jesse-newell/2015-01-05/kureview-jayhawks-are-underdog-win-big-12#comment-1186251 ↗ ↗
Yea, I know its not good news for the Hawks, but a Marine platoon caught in a tough fire fight eats tendencies for MRTEs.
Difficult comes easy...impossible takes a little longer.
Gunny Mason: Sir, KENPOM says we can't take Hill B12 TITLE again, sir.
Captain Self: Gunny, not only are we taking the hill, we are going to kill us enemies of every race, color, creed and gender preference along the way. Basketball god has a hard on for Marines, Gunny Mason. You know that. He saves basketball souls, Gunny Mason. And what do Marines do for the basketball god, Gunny Mason.
Gunny: Sir, we ship freshly slaughtered basketball souls to heaven, especially on a Saturday-Monday games.
Captain Self: That would be correct, Gunny. On Saturday-Monday games, we Marines offer the basketball god a two for one deal on dead basketball souls. We kill enemy on Saturday. And then we kill enemy on Monday. And how do we kill enemy, Gunny Mason?
Gunny: We cut the head off and the body dies, Lieutenant, sir.
Captain Self: Lock and load, Gunny. The blood bath is about to begin with that bunch of Christian Bears in Waco. This Marine platoon is going send the basketball god a bunch of hot steaming basketball corpses. Now, dismissed.
"I am woman hear me roar."
Please forgive me if I have recalled your gender incorrectly.
Either way: you're an absolute man for sticking with your logic.
It doesn't look good, but remember the 2012 Final team? Five deep plus Teahan! Tyshawn down with a scoped knee and then coming back in 10 flipping days. Remember Withey going in? lots of questions. Played in Africa with AIA, or something. Serious doubts about the big skinny. No one was sure if Travis and EJ's wild hairs were still ingrown or not. But they had Thomas who grew into an absolute beast.
Soon much depends on three things.
1.) Do the players on this team have the kind of character and will to get better that those '12 guys had?
Answer: This team is tougher mentally than we realize. They are a bunch of short cats that are fighting through getting their shots rejected all the time and getting sand kicked in their faces. But they are 11-2. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. They are not dead yet. And they are getting a little stronger all the time. They just started our really weak.
2.) Can Magister Ludi find a way to play the glass bead game with a bunch of athletic trey pullers and no standing height inside that can dominate?
Answer: If anyone can, Self can. And the UNLV game showed that Self is defying conventional wisdom yet again. Simplicity? We don't need no stinking simplicity. He threw everything in the playbook plus the kitchen sink into the offense vs. UNLV. Most sets, most action, most tempo variation, most trey triggering, frankly overwhelming complexity. He even told them to stop blocking out and just go get the ball on rebounds. Big change and for the better. Opponents are going to have more to prepare for against KU than any of them will ever have to prepare for against any other team. Self is going to make the opponents think and beat them while they are thinking.
3.) Can anyone on this team become a beast at any position the way TRob became one at the 4?
Answer: Oubre. If his knee holds up, he will make us forget Wiggins. The guy is hyper-kinetic. Best hand on a 3 I can recall. I was down on him early, and he may not be able to get polished this season, but if the knee holds up, he can wreck opponents like no one I've seen since Kidd-Gilchrist.
Perry is the weak link, only in the sense that he NEEDs The Big Red Dog to play like the Big Red Megillah. And Cliff is slowly starting to play more forcefully.
But the key is the three.
Self has to keep increasing the treys to 25+ to beat any really good teams.
I just don't know if he will.
All the morphing is part of the glass bead game, but without taking waaaaaay more treys than the opponents, this team will never be able to cope with a bad shooting half from outside. If Self ever stops shooting treys in a game without a good cushion, then this team is dead in the water, morphing or not.
My mantra is:
SHOOT THE THREE AND TRANSITION WHEN YOU CAN.
KU is sized like a mid major, but it has elite talent.
Gotta play like a mid major with that elite talent.
Do that and the team can get hot and win a title early, or get hot and win a title late.
Don't play like a mid major and its curtains.
Way to bring it, Lulu
Also, do you think Saiz would say having 10 OAD/TADs at Nike-UK and 9 OAD/TAD's at Nike-Duke but only 3 OAD/TADs at adidas KU matters?
@wrwlumpy @globaljaybird et al,
Tangent Warning: I've been reading a ton of Civil War stuff for something I am working on and ran into a few different sources asserting that Abraham Lincoln was a life long user of pot. Supposedly smoked it in a conventional tobacco pipe. Can anyone confirm this, or not? I don't find references in any mainstream histories of Abe, so I am still skeptical. But he did suffer acute depression and pot has reputedly been used by depressives throughout history. Maybe I should ask Willie. :-)
No, actually I specify Stumpy with gross accuracy.
You and I certainly agree on Weber. I like the idea of comic relief. Better than thorn.
But we'll have to part company on Stumpy. And there's no reason to belabor it here and spoil the calm between us. You sound like you've looked at a lot of detail about Stumpy. So have I. You interpret it one way. I interpret it sharply differently.
We grossly disagree on Stumpy.
And that's okay.
I have a slightly different take on why Self and other coaches shorten the bench.
I think whenever the competition gets tough enough, coaches go with their 6,or 7 best guys, because that's the only chance they have against another team that is forced into putting its 6, or seven best guys on the floor, too.
In short, its quality of competition that drives coaches to use only the best quality players they have.
Imagine putting Hunter Mickelson, or Landen Lucas, on the floor against two top 15 big man draft choices either the first or the second half. It doesn't make any difference how much PT you give them the rest of the season. They haven't a prayer of getting you a W come March.
You shorten your bench, whenever you meet a really top team and aim to beat them. Self had no intention of trying to beat UK the first game, so he played quite a few guys to see what they might do against top talent. It helps him judge which guys he should invest in.
But whenever Self, or any other coach comes up against a team with talent as good or better that they seriously want to try to beat, then the bench gets shortened, because there are only a few guys on any roster that can play at the highest level.
Remember that Cal shortened his bench once this season already.
And he played with only 6 legitimate players to win the 2012 ring.
When you play the best, you've got to play your best.
What exactly is BG's injury? Has it been reported?
What will Scott do if Self turns'em loose to shoot 25 treys?!
Say it ain't so, lump. Say the Red Headed Stranger ain't a Failor Graduate! Say he ain't a Bear!!!
Did Willie get a degree in accounting? No, probably not. Horticulture? Maybe? :-)
Say, what do you make of Miami switching to adidas? Is it any more complicated than just that adidas outbid Nike, when adidas offered $33M, or whatever?
Why would adidas pay $33M to be in Miami? Is it the petro clothing market in Miami? Or something else?
I started to, but then I got derailed. It didn't occur to me to question the veracity of the source until just now. Wouldn't it just be like wrong way types to put out misinformation? My hunch on this story is to wait awhile and see if other outfits confirm it, and if Pitino stands behind the quotes.
Interesting about Saiz. Do you think Saiz understands the trouble Self has appeared to have been having signing OAD/TADs in the numbers UK, Duke, and UNC have been, since Self's '08 ring team, or especially the last couple years?
Do you recall how Self couldn't even get one for awhile, unless one considered Brandon Rush one. And when Self finally got one--Xavier--it was only after Memphis imploded in Cal's wake and Xavier defaulted to KU? And then he only got Josh Selby when Pearl and UTenn imploded. And the he got an OAD/TAD type in Ben Mac, but never several at a time, like the other coaches seemed to be getting. :-)
What a world!
P.S.: Am I forgetting any OAD/TAD laden recruiting classes prior to Wiggins, Embiid and Selden?
Watch out! Chancellor Starr might come out of independent prosecutor retirement and spend unprecedented amounts of tax payer dollars to connect you to a you know what. :-)
Yes, thanks. Did you notice Pitino's willingness to be quoted yet again on the subject? And wasn't his quote fascinating. He reputedly said something like the NCAA doesn't see anything wrong with this and if the NCAA doesn't see any wrong with it then he doesn't. Very interesting way of putting it. I wonder if the quote were from a reliable reporting source? I didn't recognize it. Did you?
Thanks for the assist. A acquaintance of mine that follows Arizona said they had six OAD/TADs on roster this year and had signed more already this year. I would tend to trust your count.
One thing though: mcd's are often not the best criterion of OAD/TAD talent. Many foreign players are probably not Mcd's and I recall Zona has a Euro footer rotating that could be drafted. I don't think Svi was a McD.
That's why I don't talk about mcd's anymore--just OAD/TADs.
And regardless, doesn't it seem odd that Stumpy fresh out of mid major Xavier could equal Self and Pitino and be ramping up to pass them? How exactly does that work? Maybe I am missing something?
On a serious note, I was fascinated to learn from you that Marshall turned down the UCLA job. If I recall correctly, UCLA was an adidas school under Ben Fouland. If the UCLAN are still adidas, I will put this factoid in my hopper of factoids supporting a hypothesis about adidas programs possibly facing an increasing struggle to hire coaches, because of what Pitino called the smaller pool of recruits available to adidas schools and coaches.
I mean think about it.
Sean Miller, an uncharismatic type with just some success at mid major Xavier, takes a Nike-UA job and instantly is up to his eye balls in OAD/TADs, where as future Hall of Famers and historically very strong pre-OAD recruiters Bill Self and Rick Pitino--Self with one ring and Pitino with two rings--are sweating bullets just to get 3-4 OAD/TADs. I mean its mind boggling what an advantage it is to recruit for certain Nike schools, like UK, Duke, UNC, and UA. I mean, KSU is apparently not an easy Nike school to recruit to, but some Nike schools are. Holy Cow!!!
Based on what you said, adidas UCLA got turned down by Marshall and had to take sloppy seconds with Alford. Who would have ever thunk UCLA would have to take second choice after offering a mid major coach? Incredible situation facing college basketball.
No inside scoop on any change in Weber's status as KSU's head coach.
Just satirizing both Head Coaches a bit.
But KSU is 7-7. And the trend appears down from his first season to this. So, as I have jokingly referred to him from the beginning, as a tip of the hat (and good natured thumb of the nose) for his mock burial of Self, I will continue to call him, tongue in cheek, Interim KSU Head Coach Bruce Weber. :-)
The part that I really liked about the joke was combining two opposing coaches that have felt to me like thorns in the side of Self and KU. How often do you get a twofer like that in a joke?
Ah, comedy, it is so fun to think about and analyse.
Let me expand on this.
It was a joke combining two coaches--one that mock buried Self at Illinois and built down Illinois, then showed signs of building down KSU--and one that appeared to taunt Self and KU last season regarding not scheduling WSU, and this season, when his team seems not quite so good, has not appeared to taunt KU and Self similarly.
It makes me laugh again as I recount it. Somethings are just funny.
I found genuine comic irony in the what-if idea of Marshall taking the opportunity to exploit Weber's current misfortune by applying for Weber's job before he was even being talked about being fired for building down another program. :-)
But, to reiterate, no, inside scoop. It was all entirely a tongue-in-cheek piece of satire of two guys, that from this KU fan's perspective, are fun to satirize. For what its worth, technically speaking, I tried to fine tune it short of a lampoon.
Hopefully, an opportunity will arise to do a burlesque about them both, too, but, as I said, twofers like this just don't come along very often.
Rock Chalk, and thanks for asking.
The correlation between summer team Shoe brand and school shoe brand is significant, but not 1 to 1.
See these USA Today stories.
http://usatodayhss.com/2014/basketball-recruits-shoe-contracts-nike-adidas ↗
Looking at Shoe Brands and recruiting asymmetries in D1 feels like astronomers and physicists looking at the Milky Way Galaxy and saying something is missing. There aren't enough stars here to form the gravity needed to hold this thing together. The stars are part of it, but there has got to be something more.
The astronomers and physicists finally figured out there was a black hole at the center holding our Milky Way together.
What might be the black hole at the center of D1 recruiting?
Pitino speaks of a reduced recruiting pool open to adidas coaches vis a vis Nike coaches, something the data seems to suggest.
But this does not explain the imperfect correlation either.
Hurt feelings and greener pastures and coach sizzle explain some of it. Relationships can sour and persons can change loyalties easily. But this does not seem to explain how much lack of correlation there is.
The only hint I have right now is the voice of 100 in my ear writing about World Wide Wes once upon a time.
Cal and some others interviewed in the USA Today stories seem to put some care into the wording of their answers that suggest shoe brand is not driving things. And Nike officials declined to answer questions. Some parents said they were in control of their children's recruiting.
But no one is saying that nothing else is involved, and not a parent, player, coach or reporter, mentioned a word about agents or agent runners.
Hmmmmm.
Maybe, but Adidas-INDIANA will be a very tough hire. I suspect they know Crean is not the problem, like KU probably knows Self is not the problem. They will probably keep Crean, who showed he could build a clean winner before the valve got tightened.
Few coaches will want sign with an adidas school, unless the school contracts not to fire the coach for the shoe driven recruiting constraint that Rick Pitino has described, as a reduced pool of prospects.
Marshall might take the job to get out of Wichita, but as a southerner I suspect he would have a very tough time recruiting in the Big Ten without a Nike deal. Maybe he could concentrate on grits country in southern Indiana. 😄
The Knight mafia always lurks there and could be desperate enough to take the job.
Call it the NCAA SUMMER LEAGUE.
Each D1 school can have its own.
Assist coaches get head coaching experience. Play In university arenas.
Prepare players for college campus life and learn to run the same stuff the D1 players learn.
Get taught proper nutrition and training.
Televise it to pay for it.
Gregg Marshall really wants to play KU, he indicates. Now may be his chance.
Weber has built down KSU FASTER than expected.
A Gregg Marshall motion play from WSU to KSU would let Marshall play Self twice each year! Maybe a third time in the B12 tourney!
If you're feeling froggie, Gregg, jump!
Howling!
Love us some muse.
It seems a lock. He goes to the school where he can be happiest from being platooned the most.
That would be UK, Duke, or UA.
They give the best platooning, right?
Nice stroke.
No one talks about how K is keeping 9 happy.
Or how Stumpy is keeping 8 happy.
Happy persons are usually happy about something.
What makes players not getting to play so happy?
Sorry I have forgotten it. Thanks for letting me know. If you know where it might be let me know. Thanks.
No. But his is a fun name.
Good stroke.
The test comes on the road when the first 6 treys don't fall. If you won't shoot the next 6 relying on the trey then you have not yet got the commitment.
25 treys minimum.
35-45 better.
71 best.
The key though is 5-8 more than the opponent...minimum.
Welcome back.
@approxinfinity, this thread was for you. You got the old coot a little juiced. I didn't know how it might come out, but this was it.
Thinking of one thing is easy.
Thinking of two things simultaneously is hard.
Thinking of three or more things simultaneously separates the men from the boys.
Damn, it feels good to be alive sometimes.
Thanks.
P.S.: I kind of feel like Self did this one just to show all the amateurs: see? I can really hurt you bad if I want to. I can do this morphing bothness shizz in my sleep, dudes. And you want to know what? Next game you never know. We might ONLY run the weave. Or I might take you through the looking glass by another order of magnitude. I am playing the glass bead game here. Shut up and watch. You might learn something.
I razzed Coach Self on the live blog for not raining, dare I say, micro bursting, treys soon enough. But it doesn't matter what I say, because I'm a damned fan and he's a flipping professional coaching genius. Call him Coach Proteus. He doesn't get there to the W the way everyone else might want him to, but damned if he doesn't get there 11 times out of 13, before the conference. And going into this weirdest of all seasons, I would have given anyone a big wet kiss for ensuring me we would be 11-2 right now. Heck, I would have Frenched. :-)
Yes, the UNLV game suggests Self keeps adapting to situations and confounding all of us by some times embracing some or part of what we think he should and taking off in other directions simultaneously. He is the king of both after all.
Self just does play the game on a much higher level than the rest of us, and apparently than most of the other coaches.
Dunphy saw through him, but then that's why he schedules Fran. Magister Ludi needs someone that can expose him.
And thats why he schedules Cal. He knows Cal could never beat him even up on talent, but he knows Cal will never have the same amount of talent Self has. Cal will always have more. And Magister Ludi at the ripe occasionally boring point of middle age, needs the challenge and stimulation of getting his ass handed to him like a pith helmet on his rug once early each season to remind him that he is still not good enough to beat 10 OAD/TADs with three. That give Coach Proteus the get better incentive he needs to drive himself through the looking glass of bothness basketball that is his raison d'etre.
When you coach against him it must seem like you are getting into a game with a pillar of granite that then turns into an amoeba at the most unexpected moments.
This team increasingly reminds me of a science fiction hybrid of a transformer robot and some kind of liquid metal morphing thing.
The team morphed today from running the exact stuff the '08 team ran, to running stuff the team had run previously, to running Fred Hoiberg's offense, to running stuff out of Ben Mac's season, to just running up and down the floor playing grab, to running order breaks to going through periods of just gunning treys every time down the floor to pulling it in tight and doing nothing but driving to the basket the last 3 minutes.
Now I ask you, @REHawk , what other coach and team in America this year, or in the past for that matter, has ever had a team play so many different ways in one game? It is an insane litany of ways to play, in an era when everyone is saying you have to reduce the playbook to See Dick Dribble Drive, or the first ten pages of Self's magnum Hi-Lo opus playbook. And I am just talking about offensive sets and actions and transition. Not defense. God only knows what he was going on at that end. It as all I could do to keep track of the offense. I do plead the mercy of the court for I was encountering some technical difficulties on the net today.
If Self creates a team that can consistently morph through this many kinds of sets and actions and ways of playing--like a flipping burglar working through his various lock picks until he finds the right pick that opens the lock--then anything is possible with this team, even as short as it is.
I wanted to be negative about this win during the game, but the minute Magister Ludi's beads stopped moving, I was flabbergasted at what he had pulled off. It was like the one hit wonders suddenly playing the best of Beethoven. Not that they played particularly well, but that they could pull that many sets off at all was just flipping incredible for the youngest bunch of tin horns Self has ever put in crimson and blue silks and said, "Trust me, guys, this morphing shiz is going to work. You'll see."
I actually thought Self himself got overwhelmed with how many things they were trying. At some point it felt almost like the team took off on him the way LB's team took off from him in the 1988 championship game--where the players kind of left the program awhile, and he just said, okay, let's try that too since its working.
I was kind of critical of Self waiting so long to try to rain the threes the way I have been advocating, but the point is that he blew a team out finally that should have been very tough for this team to blow out.
And that is always the deal with Self.
In the end you are never entirely sure how the hell he did what he did.
I only know that he walked through the looking glass on morphing offensively today.
We have now been some place we have never been with Bill Self before.
It felt bad on the way but it felt good down the stretch.
Its how he is.
Its what he does.
Its all he does.
And he will never ever stop until he finds another ring.
The Coachinator.
Bill Self.
:-)
Lots. And I do not recall what percent are Nike and what percent are adidas. It would be interesting to see if the proportion were at all similar to proportions of schools, coaches and major summer league teams. or sharply different.