Finally getting it.... :-)
jaybate 1.0
10346 posts
jaybate 1.0's replay...ongoing....
Graham is going to have real problems with guarding ball screen offenses. He is just so light. He slides well, and has long arms, but he cannot fight through.
jaybate 1.0's replay...ongoing....
Greene is still looking like he is playing a game that the other teammates are not really a part of. But man is he athletic. If he can ever get in sync...
Mickelson gets a follow and finally smiles. Mickelson goes with a hook. Totally weird but goes in.
At the other end, Mickelson gets active, but the Self pulls him and gives him no love. Mickelson may be in the toughening box.
Greene is clearly not in sync. He is like Releford and Johnson their sophomore seasons. But that means that at the 2/3s point of the season he will probably get it the way they did.
With 5 to go, Mason cans a trey.
Alexander is a MAN.
But he is crying out for big 5 to play with, which KU lacks.
jaybate 1.0's replay...ongoing....
At 8:30 to go KU's got a big lead, and Self shows Mickelson.
Mickelson's facial expressions and body language do not signal a happy camper. Dark circles. No spring in the legs. Positions well though. And keeps his feet moving. But he apparently knows he's no match for Alexander and it appears to be getting him down.
Withjaybate 1.0's replay...ongoing....
a Time Out, the team looks very methodical. Not many errors for a new group playing together. It is a quiet team taking on the quiet expressions of Selden, Graham, and Ellis.
Svi is playing to a much faster cadence than the rest of the team. If Self wants up tempo, Svi is the guy to get it going.
Svi has a Larry Bird like presence on the floor. Wreaks intensity and focus. Shuffles when he runs. He can alter tempo which ever position he plays.
Brandon Greene on one wing and Svi on the other could be the defense stretch the team needs. With Oubre active at the four and Lucas, or Alexander down low, this line up has real potential.
jaybate 1.0's replay...ongoing....
At 12 to go, KU has Greene in and KU has squirted to 18-5 lead. Ellis and Mason sit. Mickelson is no where.
Svi enters and looks like he is still struggling with time zone differences and culture shock.
jaybate 1.0's replay...ongoing....
with 15 to go Alexander enters. Alexander makes KU look like a D1 team, albeit a small one like Ohio State was with Sullinger.
With Alexander in, the defense pressures the perimeter more.
The high low turns completely 1-3-1 with Alexander in.
jaybate 1.0's replay...ongoing....
Physically, KU looks almost indistinguishable from Washburn, except for generally longer arms.
This is not a fiery KU team at all. Its personality seems very methodical on offense and on defense it is all about guarding the stripe with a leg back always ready to help inside. But they do have the arm length to get in the lanes situationally.
jaybate 1.0's replay...
Defensive pressure looks the same as last season.
Traylor takes a high post miss.
Passing is crisp, but everyone is playing about 2/3s D1 speed.
KU appears to be into a Sampson grows his hair thing.
Team is taking on Selden's temperament--a step slow.
Oubre's entrance brings me energy.
Graham gets in a passing lane and shows why he is playing.
During time out, we see XTREme hair asymmetry on the Jayhawks. Traylor/Oubre/Selden go XTReme Protein, while Mason and Ellis go short.
jaybate's replay ongoing...
Playing high-low.
jaybate 1.0's replay
I missed it tonight, so am now watching the replay on ESPN3 as I type.
Piper now has statistically insignificant hair on his head AND he appears to be losing his eye brows!
Really a teeny starting lineup: Mason, Graham, Selden, Traylor, and Ellis.
Traylor can't control tip.
IMHO Self would probably take 5 OADs and 5 TADs (recycled OADs) on a team in a heart beat and never look back. Call it a 5/5 team.
IMHO Self would probably take 10 OADs, if he could get them. Call it a 10/0 team.
Why?
Because I suspect he believes he can coach circles around Cal. He beat one of Cal's apparent Nike Stacks in '08. Cal had Derek Rose for god's sakes and KU beat them. It took some luck, but Self beat Cal. Turn the talent around and Self probably would have beaten Cal with Cal's team. Next, Self gave Cal's 2012 apparent Nike Stack a run for its money without any Mickey Ds, and he probably believes if he could sign up a 5/5 team he could probably clean Cal's 5/5 team even up. And if Cal signed a 10-0 stack and Self had a 10-o stack Self probably figures he could take him 9 out of 10, or so it appears to me.
Self's problem is only Nike appears to have a big enough high school stable of OADs to stack a 5/5 or 10/0. adidas seems lucky to appear to stack 2-3 OADs on a team.
Self appears comfortable with the ambiguity of the OAD. He appeared to compromise with Xavier, who appeared to protect the merchandize. He appeared to compromise with Wiggins, who appeared to protect the merchandize.
Self appears to adapt year to year and situation to situation.
Last year, he and the coaches were to soft on the players and the team did not play tough enough defense. I suspect it was because he perhaps guessed Wiggins would be playing to protect the merchandize.
This year his OADs appear to be the kind that are willing to be TADs out of the block and appear not to be Number 1, or even Top 3 type choices, even if they play exceptionally well this season, so Self appears to be talking the hard approach again.
If he could somehow sign Wiggins to play next season, I believe he would go soft again.
The apparent extent of his flexibility can be unnerving.
When he only had 6 players and Teahan in 2012, he appeared to sand bag almost every game and appeared to have his team play hard the last ten minutes of games. This season, because he has a bunch of middling talents, but no superstars and no rim protector, according to his assessment, he will probably have the team playing balls to the walls for 40 mpg most games.
Self Ball appears to reflect whatever material he has to work with assuming only two things: m2m defense and high-low offense. And he appears willing to morph the high-low offense into so many different kinds of action depending on what he has to work with that in some ways high-low only means the players line up in the old Carolina passing offense formation that Larry reputedly cribbed from Henry Iba and gave to Dean, because they have to stand somewhere to start.
Self reputedly recruits characters with athleticism, probably because Coach K, Roy, Pitino, and Ratso Izzo don't like such quirky characters and probably don't recruit many of them. Self appears to take what he is given in recruiting just as he appears to in other things.
But trust me: I believe if he could be given 5 OADs and 5 TADS, he would take them in a minute. And he would probably find a way to win with them, just as he found a way to win playing apparently soft last year until Embiid went out with the back injury.
Strange loss.
Mason, Devonte and Svi better play pretty well, because CF will elsewhere.
And when Self brings in the next Top 5-10 point guard this offseason,
Your AWIII take addressed this Conner moment with a surprising connection. You are becoming a master poster with a recognizable style. The best is yet to come.
@brooksmd
Howling!!! :-)
@wissoxfan83
JNew gets the interactive age means information flows in all directions; this is what all journalists are in the process of learning, or being left behind for not learning.
Reporting is now about reporting the inter connectivity of sport. Thus Newell Live is the ultimate organic form of interactive sports journalism, at the core of the Newell Blog. The blog incorporates everything interactivity allows. Live connects it all in the moment of an event. The event including performer, journalists and fans is an interactive phenomenon in real time in Newell Live. He simultaneously reports, moderates, Opines and elicits opinion, links and analysis from fans. It is like all really new things done we. It is pulling so much together so seamlessly on so many levels it is both marvelous and not yet apparent.
JNEW is NEW.
Others are doing it, but he gets it. He keeps adding and subtracting according to the right theme. He is breaking down barriers in non-interactive journalism to forge interactive sports journalism. He (and we) are making this thing up as we go. He doesn't have a map and set of directions he has a compass and a direction and he is mapping as he goes.
What he is doing here is putting on an interactive "moveable feast."
I am just so grateful his colleagues have the generosity of spirit to recognize him for it.
Rock Chalk!
Go, @Jesse-Newell , go!!!
First, thank you for this post! I knew people had to be taking these steps spatially but I did not find them. You did!!!!
Second, what this guy is doing, and even his students, is primitive in where this leads.
The future is mapping emotions in space.
Each spatial dynamic, i.e., event path through space-time has another mappable dimension that is critical to outcomes.
Mind-body state.
Players will soon be able to wear technology that monitors their body chemistry, brain waves, postures, and muscular-emotional patterns applied to achieve given percentages of success in given tasks on a floor. Smart watches, then smart fabric uniforms, then embedded chips will enable this data collection, and overlaying on today's mapped events of play and we will see/understand the musculo-skeletal-emotional states needed to trigger on offense and defense the desirable path events.
We are on the cusp of a nonlinear convergence of mapped realms: mind, body and motion.
The convergence will occur, when software emerges, like from classified military research into fighter pilot dynamics, that enables mapping and simulation and analysis of mind-body-motion paths.
A combination of mind and body states/paths are triggers of motion outcomes.
Knowing where Ray Allen is hot is child's play.
Knowing what mapped path of mind and body coincides with the heat is like laying the wind and ocean current data on a map of oceans. It gives us the forces we need to use to get where we want to go.
Maybe dial back the nitrogen just a hair. :-)
Well, uh, that sure is an interesting handle for picking up peppers. Where did you get that? Williams-Sonoma?
Josh Pastner probably would not have started Wilt, Danny, or Joel.
I wished he would quit.
He is giving little people a bad name.
Next.
Who gets the vig here? :-)
Is Eppy short for epinephrine? :-)
High flipping five.
Low flipping five.
Inbetween flipping five.
I love being vindicated.
But you were the one that put his career posterior on the line and did it the right way.
Believe!
And there is so much more to be done.
The technology keeps calling "NEXT!"
Hold the tournament every year there are three other Jayhawks coaching in D1. Invitational. No one has to bring their team if they don't want to coach against a pal, or former player. The only rule is you cannot have any players enrolled in paper classes.
Frank is on a hot seat that everyone dreams of being on.
It is a dream job, because he is the driver of an elite program in his second season.
The seat is hot, because he is being asked to drive the team in a kind of ball that not one player on this roster has ever played before.
And he gets exactly two exhibition games and one regular season possible upset against UCSB, before he has to drive the team in a race with the basketball equivalent of Formula One Ferrari: UK in Indy.
Self is putting Frank Mason in the same kind of situation Self put Naadir Tharpe in last season, only without a first and third NBA draft choice.
Self is putting a modestly ranked recruit in the cockpit of an college basketball X-plane, as experimental rocket powered planes from the X-1 to the X-15 were called in the early days (1950s) of exploring manned, rocket powered flight.
It was said in those days that the pilots chosen were toughest, steeliest, most daring pilots that ever grabbed a stick. It was said they had to have the right stuff to strap themselves into what amounted to little more than a fuel tank with a rocket engine attached to it that hung from a wing of a strategic bomber and was dropped with the hope the engine would ignite.
They were told to see how high they could fly the sunnuvabitch before the X-plane, or they, lost their ability to go higher.
Each time they lit the candle, they were flying the X-Plane and themselves outside the envelope--beyond what was known--what had been done before.
They sometimes lost control and had to eject.
Failure was part of the flight plan.
Some pilots cracked.
Others, like Chuck Yeager, became maybe the last legends the age of manned exploration would produce, before digitization and remote control and robotics ended the need to find and depend on such men.
These were the last flyers before star voyagers became spam in a can--mostly just along for the ride.
KU basketball entered its X-plane phase last season. It began to experiment with OAD dominated teams. It was a kind of team unprecedented in its youth and number of OADs. It was patched together in a hurry.
Naa flew X-1 last season. It had two unprecedented components--Wigs and Embiid--and a lot pieces cobbled together with bailing wire around them. Naa took it up 35 times landed it successfully 25 times and crashed 10. But for a few go-ups, X-1 could never really push the envelope. It could win a conference title, but it could not really go on an extended burn without malfunctions. Finally, one component--Embiid--failed. And the other running optimally briefly, malfunctioned badly at the end. And Naa? the pressure of the go-ups, of the toughest schedule in 20 years of college basketball, finally got to him. He cracked. He kept flying the X-1, but he lost his nerve--the nerve needed to keep going higher and punching bigger holes higher in the sky. He had the right stuff for awhile, but the go-ups finally got to him.
Frank Mason is scheduled to fly the X-2. The X-2 is a radically altered design that makes use of more fungible components. But it is still loaded with new OADs and the coach is still asking his pilot to go up and punch bigger and higher holes in the sky.
The question is: will Frank crack like Naa did, or will Frank keep flying higher even after occasional flame outs and ejections.
Its about time to find out.
I wonder if they have made much money off "Kivisto Field" yet? :-)
It is perhaps helpful to recall that UNC under Frank McGuire preceded UNC under Dean Smith, Guthrie, Matt and Roy. Put another way, the UNC legacy has hardly always been squeaky clean.
It is also perhaps useful to recall that Big Shoes reputedly got a very early start at UNC with Sonny V, MJ, Dean and Roy at a nexus back in the later part of Dean's career.
What gives me pause is that Roy came from that seemingly complicated UNC culture straight to KU and reputedly divided up the country for recruiting purposes with Dean. If that were actually true, it kind of suggests some possibility of an ethical relativism from that UNC culture that might influence judgement in other areas like academic compliance.
Further as @ParisHawk noted, KU has now had a Chancellor since around 2009 that had an administrative career at UNC possibly overlapping some of the problems at UNC.
But, again, I am having a bit of cognitive dissonance with all of this, because Chancellor BGL has done quite a bit of house cleaning at KU, and Roy has until recently appeared to be one of the most squeaky clean coaches in college basketball--one of the right way guys. And Dean appeared to be one of them, too, from a very far outpost of observation in a time of vastly less access to information, than today. He reputedly put the pieces together at UNC after the troubled McGuire years there, and was a respected pioneer of ACC integration in the 1960s. The man was given a Presidential Medal in honor of his accomplishments, if I recall correctly.
Frankly, the only question I ever had with Dean was that he took a job with Frank McGuire in the first place, only to quickly replace him when McGuire reputedly got tagged with improprieties. Based on what little I have been able to piece together from reading, McGuire was reputedly only a slightly less colorful an actor in the post WWII era of college basketball than Adolph Rupp. And it was not as if Dean would have had no knowledge of McGuire's background, when he took the job as his assistant, since Phog Allen reputedly had for quite a long time been a critic of many eastern coaches and of corruption in eastern basketball during Allen's time. But, at the same time, I have never found anything indicating that Allen ever directly questioned McGuire's integrity, so I am not really sure what to make of McGuire. Maybe someone else that knows/recalls more about Allen's relationship with McGuire will be able to educate us on this.
In any case, I admit I am not sure what to make of Roy right now, either during his UNC tenure, or during his KU tenure, in regards to academic compliance issues. I don't recall any academic compliance issues, or even rumors of any, during his KU years. And an NCAA inquiry reputedly exonerated UNC and Roy in this regard. But then an internal inquiry reputedly triggered by new information reputedly lead to a finding of serious, long term issues. I don't know where this leads next. But I suspect we are likely to find our quite a bit in coming years. I hope what we learn is that Dean and Roy really were "the lepers with the most fingers"--t0 borrow from Robert Towne's "The Two Jakes." But Roy is also possibly near the end of his career and coaches nearing the ends of their careers appear vulnerable to be scapegoated for a multitude of sins that may, or may not, be their doing. Thus, though the internal inquiry certainly seems ominous, it seems possible that many axes of power are coming into serious conflict here and that there remains much more to be heard as it plays out. Universities are reputedly not monolithic organizations when it comes to their politics, and particularly when it comes to their more or less spun off private not-for-profit 501.c3 athletic departments. My recollection over the years has been that there has appeared to be quit a lot of power struggles in universities and athletic departments from time to time. Thus, I for one, will be keeping an eye out for stories and reports about the various axes of power trying to assert themselves at UNC regarding this issue in hopes of more fully grasping what may actually be going on.
So: regardless of which inquiry eventually turns out closer to the truth, I am not yet inclined to exclude entirely the possibility that outside agendas may be at play in the way this event has been unfolding.
I suspect the plot will thicken some, if/when the NCAA re-investigates and re-evaluates this situation in light of what UNC's inquiry has revealed.
But how and to what end is beyond me right now.
Regardless, this appears a troubled and unfortunate passage for college basketball and one KU fans should probably keep an eye on.
There has always appeared a possible problem of conflict of interest with the NCAA investigating its member institutions, due to the NCAA's dual role of managing a significant portion of the revenue generation of NCAA member institutions, while at the same time being tasked with policing rule enforcement on member institutions.
I wonder if the NCAA has neared the threshold (or perhaps has passed the threshold), where the revenues at stake both to it and its member institutions have become so great and so intricately entwined with impacts of rule enforcement that perhaps it is time to take a check and balance approach and separate the revenue management from the enforcement activities fully and permanently, by creating two completely independent bodies for managing these two issues?
The NCAA appears to have its regulatory work cut out for itself in this situation
Charlie Weiss left some mighty small shoes to fill.
It is a fine portrait of the man in the sense of capturing his handsomeness, meticulousness, and thoughtfulness about the game.
What I worry about, however, is that the lighting suggests a man of light grown somber and caught in darkness.
There is not a hint of the impish sparkle that once flashed out of so many pictures of him.
I hope he is okay.
Your post about our Chancellor's career at UNC appears among the most important I have read in quite some time. It should perhaps send a chill through Jayhawk nation--not as guilt by association but as concern about someone in a series of positions of apparent possible oversight. I will always wonder what the reason was that Hemenway appeared to take such a hard line with Roy.
Don't want to fly under false colors, guys. Don't want to judge or criticize either. But I am pro feminist or whatever those that wish to advance women's rights wish to be called. I don't mind if some women don't want to act in a way that seduces me. I figure they have their reasons. I understood it when African Americans decided to change their appearance in ways that seemed not designed to appeal to me. They had their reasons. If people treat each other squarely and fairly, I cut them all the slack they need on appearance for whatever they have been going through. Rock Chalk!
Yeeeessssssss!
@Crimsonorblue22 and @drgnslayr
To remove ghosting try clicking edit and highlight text, then use backspace key or cut command from edit menu, then when the box is empty click submit. Ghosting should disappear. It probably wants to keep the originating post for the thread, because the replies are tied to it.
Yes, the Chucks come in and out of style every 8-10 years it seems.
I even picked up a pair and they are kind of like wearing moccasins out in the forrest. Not much protection against thorns, but they sure do make you feel very in touch with the surfaces and you walk, or run on. One day, I hope the ShoeCoes go back to a much thinner soled and walled shoe that combines the increased feedback of a thin sole and wall with some kind of super duper toughness and bounceyness that protects your feet the way today's up-armored Hummvee's for the feet do. Don't know if they will ever be able to do it, but materials science keeps progressing, so maybe one day it will happen.
It is kind of anomalous how you appear to have started this thread and then deleted your post that started the thread.
What happened?
I can sort of read the post in a kind of ghost image of it, but I cannot link a reply to it, so I am posting my question down here and adding your name with the @ sign.
I insist. In fact, tell the lovely Ms. Wilde that I envision her posing with a wink and a smile over her shoulder in the full body basketball net in one of those sideways poses that reveal everything and nothing. She is in full focus at center court on the Jayhawk standing in the midst of the blurs of ten fast breaking KU players. And take or share credit for the idea. Also, tell her I would have wanted Helmut Newton to do the photo, but like Mistah Kurtz, he dead. So: I will defer to her obviously superb artistic instincts. Also, I am one fan that is getting a huge kick out of where her career is going. Work with every great director she can, then become one and steal from all of them. Also, I saw Jason's "We're the Millers" and finally get what he is doing. I was a little slow on the uptake, but that happens when the years pile on. Rock Chalk!!!
First, I really like your idea of sifting out false heuristics about role of, say, height in basketball.
But in your example of height of guards and its effect, or lack there of on outside shooting of opponents, I might adjust the question just a bit.
Remember, in statistical research, the question determines the answer you get, while compliance with inferential modeling assumptions determines its "useful" accuracy and precision (i.e., confidence it means what it says). So: always spend as much time on structuring the question as needed to avoid accepting an answer that does not really get at the crucial dynamic driving an event.
If you ask: do standing height and opponent shooting percentage correlate, or have a high r^2 and degree of fit between model and data with a tolerable error factor ; that is a very good question that needs just a bit of unpacking.
Independent variables (Xs) in stepwise regression:
standing height
vertical jump
Dependent variables (Ys):
3pt attempts
3pt makes
I would want to run it three ways:
1.) influence of standing height and vertical jump on 3pt attempts;
2.) influence of vertical jump and vertical jump on 3pt makes; and
3.) influence of standing height and vertical jump on 3pt attempts and 3pt makes.
Let the model figure out the rank order of significance of height and jump in reducing attempts and makes.
(No doubt a lot of coaches have had their quantitative geeks do this sort of thing from time to time, but as data sets get increasingly large and accessible, insights to be inferred from them may get more interesting, accurate and precise, or robust if you just want one geek word.)
Being a left hander, I would like to see all these basketball stats indexed for the left handed/right handedness of the players involved. I have always wondered about cognitive and strategic implications of handedness on effectiveness of, say defenders, on shooters, of defensive rebounders on offensive rebounders, on whether a left handed defender is more apt to foul a right handed ball handler, or more apt to foul a right handed ball handler and so on. By cognitive, I mean the left brain dominant (righties), right brain dominant (lefties) contribution to outcomes. Does handedness trigger more fouling, or less fouling versus an opponent with the same handiness, or different handedness? By strategic, I mean does the actual external strength of a strong left hand trigger greater or lesser fouling and scoring against an opponent with a strong left hand, or strong right hand. Not surprisingly, the cognitive and strategic variables would be tough to unpack, but they would be very informative if they could be unpacked. Does handedness matter in basketball? If so, does it matter at the cognitive level, or strategic-spatial level, or both, or neither? Imagine how much knowing these answers empirically might shape who you match up with who and which substitute you bring.
But let me get back to your question.
You would have to be meticulous in your error factor analysis regarding multicollinearity about the variables of standing height and vertical jump, but you could learn a lot in a very fitting analysis that would help you get beyond blind assumptions without resorting to any advanced statistical modeling that would confuse laymen, and cause statisticians to get stochastic hard-ons about the flaws of this or that arcane model.
And of course, if you actually wanted to make decisions to beat people, you would keep all of this a secret and build up some rather elaborate defensive systems modeling to incorporate some of the rudimentary findings of the above.
The future of quantitative modeling (probably already the present in a rudimentary way) will be treating, opposing defenses and offenses as systems in interplay.
There are a several ways of thinking about this stuff.
You can be car/airplane engineer and think of your defense as a design being stressed by an offensive environment in a game space. You conceive of your defense as a machine and analyze its breaking points in the offensive environment in finite element analysis.
You can model it as colliding weather systems in which the collision involves inertial form and motion releasing energy trying to deform to perpetuate motion and the other storm system doing the same in a dance that quickly evolves into nonlinear complexity at the frontiers of contact and but retains more inertial form and motion in an accordion effect as one recedes from the frontiers of contact.
You can model it as an ecology, where neither side is destroying the other, both teams form a kind of dynamic Fuller tensegrity--a mobile, if you will in which inputs in one, or many places, project forces through out the tensegrity, that feed back through the tensegrity (i.e., action pushing the mobile out of static equilibrium and into reactive motion up to a limit after which the correction ripples back through the mobile).
I can assure you @drgnslayr that KenPom's valuable contributions to organizing and probabilistically analyzing college basketball remains in the static infancy of what is quantitatively feasible, were Uncle Sam to decide that basketball were essential to national security and that Rand, MIT and Raytheon ought to get involved. :-)
In fact, you have given me a marvelous idea for a science fiction short story set in the future when killing power in ALL weapons has become so amplified that all weapons, even pocket knives, have become, like nukes, too terrible and globally threatening to use, and so the private oligarchies of the world ask their defense think tanks and militaries to devise an alternative to war that all countries can agree on as a binding means of settling XTReme disputes and of keeping the ordinary peoples of the world scared into compliance with. They decide on a war game called "total basketball." Anyone that does not comply with the outcome triggers global thermonuclear war; this makes the outcomes binding and the commitment to playing to win total. One can do absolutely anything within the Naismith rules of the game to win. Defense budgets spiral into research into how to prepare private oligarchy sponsored teams. Basketball is picked precisely because it is non contact and so the sport most likely to not threaten the operational integrity of deployed systems in the game in unpredictable ways. This minimizes unpredictable accidental system failures that might catapault the world into global thermonuclear/CBW annihilation from participants pulling out of compliance. Genetic engineering, training, diet, shoes made of any material conceivable, clothing the same, invisibility clothing, microwave mind control technology, offensive and defensive systems analyses, cybernetic augmentations, coaches brains augmented/replaced by quantum computing, cyberwarfare measures and counter measures, are all applied in TOTAL BASKETBALL. The budget for the American private oligarchy team is exactly the same as the current Pentagon budget. All current military infrastructure, man power and resources are redirected onto TOTAL BASKETBALL.
Fuggedabout the $6M man. Steve Austin was chump change. We're talking about a team of $6Trillion dollar men.
If we can just survive the asymtotic convergence of primitive instincts with infinite killing power of human weapons.
"Gentlemen...We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic baller. Joe X will be that man. Better than he was before. Longer, stronger, faster."
-adapted to "Total Basketball" from Oscar Goldman's brilliant lead in to "The Six Million Dollar Man."
@Jesse-Newell
I had poor sound, so looking for buds to listen, but stellar hook up journalistically. It's like getting a physicist to blog about CERN top notch!!!!!
Now that I think about it, why not look around and see if there is a quant guy at KU, or a finite element analysis guy in engineering, and interview him about sports QA. What could be the next level of QA?
Box. Outside. Think.
U da man.
Whew! Thought aliens had locked you in a green tractor beam or something. Been awhile since you posted. Get ready. Ichabods approach!
The paper classes appear a symptom of something else--of perhaps an enabling mechanism..
.Following the legacy of shoes and the money, might be one way to research why and how this sort reputed abuse of academics evolved as it reputedly has.
Hypothesis:
Old informal Incentives to bend grading to keep athletes eligible dating to preintegration evolved with integration a need to compensate for poorer schools and educations and cultural biases impacting African American athletes.
In time, emerging Petro shoe and apparel market evolution greatly increased incentives for keeping players eligible and marketing them.
Media-gaming complex marketing and risk management became increasingly significant drivers of eligibility need.
Money laundering--Underworld and black ops--might sky rocket as legitimate gambling spread first to proliferating casinos and then online.
A long term need for structural enabling mechanism to keep guys eligible evolves.
African American studies evolves as one path of academic exploitation, because those misusing such academics could hide behind the exploit as a justifiable informal compensation for slavery, Jim Crow and residual informally instituted racism.
(Note: all of the above post is all hypothetical in nature. I have no insider knowledge the above hypothesis accurately explains the phenomena. It is offered as one possible starting point for researching this reputedly long term issue of reputed inappropriate use of several paths of academics to keep players eligible.)
Thx
Once in awhile, I can still go get a basket. :-)
But mostly I'm in the cheap seats watching and learning.
Before I get my daily dose of @drgnslayr and @HighEliteMajor , I am very confident we will lose ten games, finish second in conference, and finish strong and surprise a few teams in March.
Apre those two, I am pumped and think Wooden is speaking through them and to Self and we are looking at a 30 win season with a bunch of mighty mights.
So: I do what any dry-washing, metamorphosed Kafka anti-hero would do and split the difference and say, "Conference tie for first, 29-7, Elite Elite Eight. :-)
Howling!!!
Howling!!!
Awesome. I hate it when they put you guys too far away from the action at some of these venues.
Writers Boot Camp!
You're rollin' thunder today!
(JNew and KHaskins with burr cuts on top and ink stained digital camouflage fatigues being hustled through paces by R. Lee Ermey in the loge area behind where the media sits at AFH, while the KU team is barfing into buckets down on the field house floor between windsprints. Suddenly Ermey calls the gasping writers in boot camp to fall in and present lap tops. Newell stands at attention with his lap top in present arms position for inspection. Ermey ignores the laptop a moment and gets in Newell's face.)
Ermey: Private Newell, did someone tell you that you and Private Haskins could communicate with civilians?
Newell: No, sergeant, we just do the best we can.
Ermey: Well, your best isn't good enough, Private Newell. @KUSTEVE over here in the digital peanut gallery thinks you aren't putting out enough. He thinks you're tighter than a vestal virgin in a Venice shrink wrap, Private Newell. Are you tighter than a vestal virgin in a Venice shrink wrap, Private Newell.
(Newell hesitates.)
Newell: No, sir, Sergeant. I don't think so.
Ermey: Don't even try to think, Private, because you are not up the challenge. And don't sir me, Private Newell, because I am a Sergeant. I work for my pay. I make journalists out of wet nursing diarists named Sommerset, do you read me Private Newell?
Newell: Yes, Sergeant!
Ermey: @KUSTEVE here thinks you are not giving him enough ocular stimulation, if you catch my drift. He thinks you are not writing one long story every day to keep him reading his virtual rifle with the plasma screen and not oiling his analog gun that wiser men than me have called a one-eyed trouser mouse! Do you catch my drift, Private?
Newell: Sergeant, the private does not quite catch the Sergeant's drift.
(Haskins standing next to Newell snickers. Ermey moves squarely in front of Haskins.)
Ermey: Does Private Tub of Lard have something to say to the Sergeant?
Haskins: No, Sergeant.
Ermey: Wipe that Bushmills Soaked Smile off your ugly face before I take Private Newell's lap top and use it to drive your swollen red nose out the back of your empty Irish head, you got that Private?
Haskins: Yes, Sergeant.
(Ermey moves back in front of Newell.)
Ermey: Did you think I was done with you, Private Live Blog? Don't answer that, because I'm NOT done with you. @KUSTEVE wants ocular stimulation, because his woman is tired of coming home and finding him oiling his gun and leaving nothing left for her to do but read bodice-ripping romance novels. Do you understand me Private Live Blog?
Newell: Yes, I believe I do, Sergeant. Bodice-ripping romance novels.
Ermey: You BELIEVE? BELIEVE? Do I look like the great god in heaven to you standing here in my cleanly pressed shirt, pant and DI hat, Private? Don't answer that. I am your drill instructor, you empty headed imitation of Max Falkenstein! I'm not god, you idiot! God could save you from what you are, but I cannot. I can only remake you into a razor edged typing fanatic hell bent on bringing games alive to board rats sitting at home naked with their love dolls and cans of multi weight motor oil in the twilight of afternoon games you cover for them because they are not influential enough to get good seats. Do you understand me Private Backspace Key? I am not your god, though I may seem like it to you. I am your Sergeant sent here by your Uncle Sam and his United States Writer's Corp to save you from the cliches and writers block and dead line butterflies that soft, civilian writers succumb to like Bruce Weber kneeling before Bill Self at a chicken dinner in Oskaloosa.
And so on. :-)
(Note: all fiction. No malice. Apologies to the marvelous Ermey. Forgot to add that Newell and Haskins rule. This was all in good fun for @KUSTEVE .)