5 point losses to OU and OSU are bitter indicators of off days.
15-20 beatings would be bitter indications of an uncompetitive Team.
We are facing the former.
jaybate 1.0
10346 posts
Remember: KU played as poorly as it could and still. Almost won.
UK is really playing BAD!!!
Even Fizzou can hang with them.
Vick was super TIL mid January, or so.
He is now outside his length of season envelope. Never started this many games. Body saying it over.
And he is being frustrated by Self running so much to Newman.
Vick is both injured and in a funk and struggling with playing through and not being allowed to shoot out of his slump.
He will break out, but he is also fighting inner demons that resurface in bad times.
Agreed. The team is still a shoestring Operation and there will be upsets. A tie is as good as an outright for 14.
We are still tied for first.
Just seeing UK there and not us cheers me up
We need Jess to encode these messages until after the season
Sometimes prayers are answered, other times a lesson is dispensed.
DONT GET THEE DOWN > 15 AND EXPECT THE BUILDING TO BAIL YOU OUT EVERYTIME.
-6
33 to go
Believe
Looks bleak
Fouls to give. Gotta make shots NOW
-8 with 3 and change.
They have 8 fouls and we only have 3!
We could still do this!!
There is always one bad loss to a mediocre team each season!!
But at home???
Oh, the humanity!!
The Hindenhawk!!!
Self haunted by alma mater. Worst case of such haunts ever.
👏
KU playing like the Hindenburg!
Oh, the humanity!!!!
14 looks like 13 today.
Ku tries to phone one in and gets disconnected!
-15
Self gives up.
Let’s Doke see if he can score.
Then has to pull him.
BShark said:
Working theory: Self is throwing the game to show Agbaji he needs tough players.
PHOF
Warning! Warning! Ku down 12
Love these uniforms today. Are they new or same as all season?
Devonte trying more hair today!
KU suffering bunny-osis ie, trouble with your bunnies
Norm Roberts bio euthanasia,,er, rhythmns, look low!
You are already suffering from early onset of acute exposure to Clark DULLogg syndrome. Quick! Take an Espresso now!!!! Before it’s too late!!!
It’s the exact offense and action my high school ran in 1971!!!
With CBS sending Clark DULLogg to miscast today, one must prepare with serial espressos to stay awake for the miscasting and colorlessness.
Vegas oddsmakers are 1 in 5,000,000 that DULLogg will mention Larry Nassar and on going investigation of MSU.
Look out kid/
It’s somethin’ Ya did...
Alas, this was inevitable.
Wish it were someone else, but it had to happen.
And if Ball focused on adidas program players, wow, could that be great for Nike programs, or what?
I am reminded of an old Bob Dylan song which probably he ripped off from someone or other.
"He not busy being born/
Is busy dying."
Let's paraphrase and repurpose this, shall we?
"He not busy shaping the recruiting field/
Is busy being out-recruited."
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."--Sun Tzu
"The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable."--Sun Tzu
"Invincibility lies in the defence; the possibility of victory in the attack."--Sun Tzu
"Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy."--Sun Tzu
"He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks." --Sun Tzu
"The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself."--Sun Tzu ( Phog Allen's philosophy)
Quickness is the essence of the war."--Sun Tzu (John Wooden's philosophy)
"He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces."--Sun Tzu
“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.” --Sun Tzu
“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity” --Sun Tzu (Believe.)
“Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.” --Sun Tzu (this is Bill Self's philosophy)
“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.” --Sun Tzu (the single most under-appreciated maxim of Sun Tzu and what Marine Corp officers mastered during WWII)
“You have to believe in yourself. ” --Sun Tzu (Swagger)
“Thus the expert in battle moves the enemy, and is not moved by him.”--Sun Tzu (the key to Self Defense)
“The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent.” --Sun Tzu (how Self Defense moves enemies)
Show me another coach that seems to grasp and walk the talk of Sun Tzu as much as Bill Self and I will show you another Hall of Fame Coach.
I wrote some about us lucking out and running into a series of cold teams back when the streak was only three.
But...it is not all luck.
Here are the factors I count that enable this to be more than just luck:
1.) Mystique--I agree with you that KU's Self Era Legend is potent. We are old enough to recall UCLA's Mystique. The UCLA mystique beat most teams the last five years of Wooden's national title binge before the game started. There is a similar effect in the Big 12. Teams in the Big 12 understand that if its close at the end, you are likely to lose. Thus, if Self can keep his team under 10 the last ten, KU wins. New coaches fare better against Self for a couple years, because they are not trapped by the mystique yet. They make their players believe they can win and the newcomer coaches usually do win once early before Self figures them out and the mystique does the rest. The mystique means little in the March Carny, where apparent seeding and whistle biases never let the mystique develop. Nevertheless enemies beaten before taking the field shoot less well once they take the field. KEN POM does not measure this at all.
2.) Self Defense--KU plays defense at a different level than most other teams with athletes selected for their ability to play the team defense Self uses. It ALWAYS plays team defense first. It contests EVERY shot. It forces everyone center. Its starts offense from defense. No one plays that is not willing to play team defense for stops from which to start the offense. No one. Self recruits players with character and swagger precisely because they do not lose confidence playing from behind with team defense. These players tend to guard as well from behind, as with leads. They tend to shoot as well from behind, as with leads. Then Self combines these players with these characteristics and physical abilities into a rigorous team defensive philosophy to degrees most other coaches do not do. None of the above shows up in KENPOM's efforts to isolate defensive variables and so KENPOM is not measuring what KU does to lower opponent's 3pts shooting percentages. Teams can and do have good shooting nights against KU from trey, but everything has to go just right for them to transcend the KU team defense. What I notice about KU opponents is that KU sees the same hot trey games from opponents, but Self defense seems to cut back on the middling trey ball nights. Opponents seem to have a lot of their really sub par nights against KU. Why? I can't say for sure. But Self's team defense schemes simply strangle off teams on anything but their run away hot nights. Most teams don't see this kind of defense very often, same as most teams don't see WVU's press. Over a long season, both forms of defense yield great advantages to KU and WVU respectively. They always win more close games than they lose. They tend to win the games they are supposed to win. They even steal some they shot poorly. They still lose the ones when the opponent is firey hot and KU is cold. Team defense is very hard on outside shooting over 40 minutes. Outside shooting efficiency tanks with uncertainty, fatigue, frustration, and too much thinking--all the things KENPOM does not measure--all the things great team defense routinely triggers in an opponent.
3.) Defensive Steering--As noted in the quotes above, Sun Tzu said great defense is about steering an opponent where you want him, rather than reacting and stopping him from trying to do what he wants. To do this effectively, one must mask ones intentions. Self is a master at this. I have played a game over the years of anticipating how Self will defend a particular opponent. I am almost always wrong, except in the broadest of terms. I notice that almost everyone else is too. Steering is VERY hard on all shooting efficiency including 3 point efficiency. It is just a statistical reality that persons shoot lower and higher percentages from different locations on the floor. Wooden measured and quantified this early on. Self apparently decided that shooting in congested areas compounded the problem. Both Wooden's and Self's defenses, different thought they were, were steering defenses intended to funnelI defenders into low percentage shooting areas. Its also hard to shoot well when you are unsure where and when the shot will come. Its just a fact that Self's defensive strategies and tactics are hard to read and recognize and almost impossible to anticipate with specificity for longer than brief periods of games. This seems to impair efficiency shooting by opponents. KenPom does not track defensive steering that I know of.
4.) Adjustment--Even harder to guess than what steering he will start with is how he will "adjust" steering at half time. This shows up game after game, when we see opposing coaches guess completely wrong about the adjustments he will a make. He is sick when it comes to being unpredictable about second half defensive adjustments. And in recent years he has become just as sick in his offensive adjustments at the start of the second half.
Statistics are only when they are measuring the decisive drivers of a phenomenon.
I have not studied KENPOM closely for a few years, but last I checked 4 years back, these factors would not have been being explicitly, and confidently accounted for, or else I flat missed them.
This is the argument for doing what Self is doing.
It is sound strategy. I would do it, too.
And like all sound strategies triggered by short-handedness, it has serious risks.
No matter what Self tries to do, no matter what approach he takes, it will be extremely high risk, BECAUSE HE LACKS MANPOWER THIS SEASON.
This is what Self told every one recently. Fans have to understand that we don't have the strength of roster we used to have, where we can pull away from teams. My words, not Self's.
Self is playing for a 14th straight conference title and letting the March Madness take care of itself for now.
NOTHING is being saved, except AMPs.
AMPs are being distributed as usual. AMPs are being used to guaranty tough home wins and on the road only when there is no option. Note: no amp in Norman, because we were already in the lead and a loss would leave us there. AMPs only for MUST wins. Same old same old that delivered us the previous 13 consecutive conference titles. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
But the team is sailing up the slot of a Solomons Campaign against arguably deeper teams and its only chance is to leverage its superior starting five (its air superiority) to the MAXIMUM.
Any starter (and effective 40% trey shooter) that can walk and carry a rifle starts and plays as close to 40 as fouling and matchups permits NOW, not in March.
The starters are his best shooters, best ball handlers, his best rebounders and best defenders.
Self is betting everything on his starters NOW.
And Self is betting that among his starters, Devonte, because of they recent cybernetics @Blown already outlined above) is the least likely to benefit significantly from rest.
Devonte probably couldn't carry the team for two halves now with less than a month of rest. At least that's what Self wants the opponents to think. Maybe Devonte has one 40 minute effort left in him. Who knows. But its pretty clear that the man who is betting it all on 14 every spin of the wheel (i.e. ever game) thinks he cannot ride Devonte the way he did early in the season. The rest of the perimeter has to step into breech and be rammed into the chamber and fire, and fire for effect starting NOW.
Devonte Graham is now a Cyberballer. He is a dehydration prone injury-augmented by E-Stim wire and bailing wire point guard that takes some shots early before the meds and hydro therapies wear off; then works at driving into bodies Ibad ball 2.0) and hoping to get FTs from the standing position with no concern for low FG percentage plummets. His teammates are supposed to carry the second halves.
By playing Devonte 40 minutes, he buys each of the other 4 starters maybe a 2-3 minute breather by Marcus Garrett on the front ends of 2 in 3 sets. On the back ends of 2 in 3 sets? They get no rest at all, if they can possibly get by without it .
Self is NOT worrying about Trae and PR.
Self is worrying about squeezing every last ounce of juice out of his starters to try to win the 14th consecutive title.
14 Consecutive titles are all that matter now.
Those that doubt this are living in a iDream world created by the Deep State and 7 high tech nerds.
Self grew up analog.
Titles are real things to him.
14 would put him at the top the heap in this category in the history of the greatest analog game ever invented.
The recruiting Deep State made sure he would NEVER challenge Wooden's string of National Championships.
Not. Going. To. Happen.
Wooden's only real successor was marginalized, so the phony in Durham could go out XTREME cheap-shotting in style.
Anyone one with a thimble of sense and honesty knows this after watching what Self has done with the table scraps left by the posers at Duke, UNC, UK and which ever other pretender school has been temporarily fed players Self should have gotten at the 1 and 5.
Self is playing for the only record that was available for him too play for.
And even this consecutive conference title thing has been put in great jeopardy by the recruiting Deep State.
But that's how life is sometimes.
TCPTB (the corrupted powers that be) rarely play fair.
Read the flipping memo.
And Go, Bill, go!!!!!!!
Lead shrinkage is interesting, but does not explain resting him a few minutes with a lead.
Self is famous for building leads and spending them.
No reason not to spend some resting Devonte.
My assumption too, till I recalled the big minutes he played Tyrel Reed, when Tyrel went operable.
Great stat check. Thx for bringing it.
Great reporting. Thanks! Keep it coming!!!
approxinfinity said:
Self is the anti gipetto. He wants to make Devonte wooden.
PHOF
Why is Self not resting D Graham, when he could?
And why all the 40 minute man stuff lately?
Hypothesis: Devonte went operable 3-4 games ago and won’t heal the rest of the way. His scoring efficiency won’t return. The idea is to play Devonte 40 mpg to give other perimeter players a little rest, instead of having to back up Devonte.
Imagine the tragic absurdity of getting brain damage playing for a program as awful as KU.
I cannot even find the words for it.
Rock Chalk...uh...Rock Chalk...um...
....when he can find the word to finish a sentence.
Read Brett Farve on football, kids and concussions.
http://m.sfgate.com/news/article/When-Brett-Favre-sees-little-kids-playing-12544106.php ↗
WAPO via SF Gate
Look for a 20/10 outing from Doke also.
Devonte and Vick will play normally productive games, too.
Do not become too disillusioned to keep watching the Hawks, when Trae’s beating time arrives in Lawrence.
He will seem to become one less thing about the game to watch.
But that’s ok!
😀
Like paintings, movies need a person to be at the right time of one’s life to receive their emotional truths, not just kinetic impacts.
I watched Sam Fuller’s THE BIG RED ONE when it came out in my late 20s/early 30s and disliked it and Mark Hamill.
But when I watched at 60, I decided it was one of the best war movies ever made. Every scene drips with the emotional truth of a man looking back on the major formative drama of his life.
Until I knew the feeling of looking back to youth and trying to make sense of what I had experienced, I could not get the full impact of the truth Fuller had wrung from himself and expressed on strips of film.
He knew he was the end of that wwii generation, and of those movies to have been made by those that really knew what it felt like, and of the medium of analog celluloid cinema. He knew TV was just the start of a new era.
The Big Red One is a good war movie, but it is a monument to the end of the analog age. It is like a modern Beowulf marking the end of one age, and the start of another unknown age he knew he, Fuller, would not be a part of.
It was one of those rarities that happens.
But as a war movie, only, I had seen others I found better when I was 30. At 30, war movies greatness were about new levels of reality in kinetic action and understanding my father’s war experience; that was what I could make mine then. And THE BIG RED ONE did not satisfy me on those levels.
But at 60, it hit me between the eyes, as a man trying to make sense of what I had lived through; this I could make mine, and on that level the movie came for me to have greatness.
I put this out there not to help you see in the Big Red One what I see, but rather to encourage you to give yourself and all supposedly great films you find not so great, a second chance later, sometimes 30 years later. It only takes an hour, or two, and once in a while you are moved to your core, not because you missed it the first time, but because you are now aware of what it explores.
My idea of a great death would be to appreciate one last great movie for the first time, because I’m on the cusp of dying and can finally know what the movie explored. Maybe THE SHOOTIST by John Wayne will work that way for me some day.
Rock Chalk!
Sharing that movie with anyone is a privilege. Glad you liked it. It inspired Roger Ebert to write a famous criticism of it in which he said the characters dueled by smoking at each other, or something vaguely like that!! 😀
BShark said:
jaybate 1.0 said:
Shaka should be fired for his record with Bamba.
Truth. Could you imagine if we had Bamba?
I think about it all the time.
This happens again and again with the teams KU plays.
👍
Shaka should be fired for his record with Bamba.
TTech and Beard are for real.
Don’t have strong feeling but go with Tech based on coaching.
As of January 31st, KU is in first and OU is in second with OU and WVU having to win in AFH to change it.
KU 7-2
OU 6-3
I am at peace and I bet so is Bill.
Nothing Self did, or failed to do, would have cost his team a game, if Devonte, Vick and Doke had not flamed out. Even average games from ONE of them would have iced victory. He and the team know this.
The job now is to prepare defence that moves Trae and does not follow Trae.
Trae’s father betrayed the secret to beating Trae. He wants to play outside and shoot 30 footers. He does not want to guard and fit in a scheme. That is his Achilles heel. Make him guard, recognize, and play inside the stripe.
No dedicated long baller ever beat a team inside.
Thus the continuing elaboration of the multiple defenses, so that he cannot free wheel and so that he will not know when and how Self will steer him where he likes.
Self was right not to go all out in Norman.
He could afford the road loss.
Better to prepare the defenses for return in AFH to guaranty a W and just try to steal one in Norman.
All did not ride on victory—to play otherwise risked later games when amps were necessary.
As well to be in first place by 1 with three horrible performances in the past, than by 2 with those performances to come.
I would not trade places with OU right now, would you?