I want to believe.
--Fox Mulder
jaybate 1.0
10346 posts
Good points, but we did get 20 points and 16 boards out of our C-4 post man vs. the Stanford Woodies!
Great job on my beloved KC.
Awesome to learn Peter Gunn was a Roo.
Still love the apparently intentional irony and black humor of placing the Federal Reserve building at the opposite end of the WWI Memorial!!! It creates a monumental reminder that WWI and the Fed went hand in glove. Fed started 1913. WWI started 1914.
Huggs apparently has had enough of the new rules and has decided to drag the game back in the sewer, where he likes it.
Did you see the guy that escorted Daxter to the locker room? He looked like a bouncer in a strip joint!
I'm afraid Huggie is backsliding into darkness...again.
It's going to be very ugly.
Good read. Thx.
Aw c'mon you know exactly what I mean. He coached his guys to do what they did and they were good enough to execute the winning strategy.
You don't seriously think the players invent this, do you?
I am so psyched we could have shot 18% from Trey and still have won by one had Travis shot his average at the stripe. It's like Self has schemed a way to win with BAD Trey balling with keeping a good mix between inside FGAs and outside FGAs.
Go Bill go!!!!
It's much more sophisticated than just inside vs. outside. How do we know? Because everyone scores inside and outside and everyone distributes shots variously between inside and outside. So what's going on?
Most teams are playing 3 out 2 in with two strings. Most that play 4-1 do so with two strings.
In strategy, there really is just one school of thought. Shape the battlefield to the advantage of the way of fighting that favors you most and fight the way that favors your most in surprising ways.
Self has figured out that 4 perimeter scoring threats and a committee-post tend statistically to beat 3 perimeter threats and an inside guy forced to play outside plus reliance on a single dominant post.
Self then implements it in surprising ways based on what the opponent wants to do.
He knew Jerod wanted to score through his post, so Self fouled Travis so much that most of his shots missed and he shot two FTs instead of short treys.
Then Self reasoned: I want lots of long and short treys and we can't lose. Jerod sagged and denied KU the paint. Self countered with long treys.
But Self has learned that in a match of 3-2 vs 3-2 offenses, the team scoring inside has the big statistical edge.
So Self goes 4-1 vs 3-2 if he is denied the inside, and statistical tendency favors him so long as his centers have enough fouls to give and are strong enough to deny the short Trey and make them shoot 2-shot fouls.
It's smart!
And it took him a few years to figure it out and adjust the recruiting mix.
It's the thing to do when the apparent big man embargo denies you OAD/5-star bigs and PGs.
Recruit what they give you and scheme to it.
It took awhile to figure how to scheme to it.
He had to get the perimeter scorers that could also board.
He had to big man depth of 4 at one post.
He had to scheme 4-1 against 3-2 teams.
I increasingly think this is the operant logic favoring Small Ball so far. It can and will be countered. But it hunts right now.
This is only superficially about inside vs outside.
It's really about unbalanced line right.
It's about 4 scorers on the perimeter that can shoot the long Trey, or drive the short trey pitted against 3 and a big that can't do either being forced outside.
Team's with a great stretch 4 will be hard to beat this way, but stretch 4s are few and they are even harder to beat in a 3-2 set.
Exactly.
Jarrod not only was a player, he was a twister on wood. He was competitive fury personified and he was unique.
I'm not down on Jarrod. I seriously think he is a fine coach and think he could be a guy that shakes coaching out of its last gen mentality.
Every 20-30 years this has to happen. Things are changing scary fast now again. He needs to get out in front and seize the moment.
I'm not saying he needs to become a mindlessly stylish guy.
But for his health and for his family, he needs to lean up a little. And he has a chance where he is to connect basketball to not a fad, but to an apparently long term direction of our culture toward things tech. Basketball has to connect to that, or become a lovable anachronism like rugby.
Basketball is the people's game.
It has adapted and reflected who each generation was and what America was becoming my entire life.
America needs this. The young need this. The old need it.
Jarrod is a man in the right place at the right time with the right instrument.
If he doesn't break the mold some, he's going to be just another Stanford coach that got too conservative to get it done.
Trump, whether I like him or not, is a signal that the times they are a-changin' 2.0.
The guy just made the obvious moves and the media was so used to how things were and were paid so much to oppose change that they didn't "get" him.
No talking head show on TV gets more than 3 million viewers. Add them all up and they probably reach 30-40 million max and more like 10 mil.
Every time Trump tweeted he had 60 million readers!
The media actually thought that if they went in the tank for Hillary and Podesta and used mil-int psy-ops techniques of news engineering that they could manufacture consent for her the same as they had done most of my life. And they are so stubborn they are continuing the old think.
Hillary and the media kept an election close that probably wouldn't have been if she had not been connected to so much corruption and hidden from direct and virtual contact with voters. She believed too much in the old way.
It was a lot like 1960. Nixon should have won going away, but he ran a 1950s election against a 1960s opponent--JFK.
Change, good or bad-- NEVER comes in a landslide.
Hillary won the popular vote by a slim margin and lost the electoral college by a slim margin. Trump won by the skin of his teeth reputedly with CROSSCHECK to close it out. That's the classic way America changes. Closely.
Trump showed that if you used the same mil-int psy ops techniques Hillary did to connect to 60 million instead of 3 million you could keep it close to the end and find a way to close out.
And Trump is just the start.
The cyber change everyone has been noting for 25 years is finally hitting people and changing not just how they work, but how they "think" now.
And Steve's magic bracelet, or something beyond it is really going to cement this nonlinearly very soon. I can feel it.
All great technological waves do this eventually.
Back to Jarrod: I'm just talking about what could be with one of our beloved Jayhawks out at Stanford. Not dogging him. I see potential in him.
But not everyone can change.
I believe Jarrod could.
Rock Chalk!
Thx for the add. This makes me even more jazzed about Self's strategy. It generated a +15 win even when the opposing team's 54% FT shooter he chose to give 22 FTs shot 19-22!!!
Think about it. If Travis had shot to his FT average, say, 12-22, then KU could have missed 4 more treys and won.
That would have been 4-22 from Trey, or 18% and still a 1 point win!!!!
This dog will hunt!!!
48% will do in a pinch.
And Frank gets it!!!!!!
Maybe Jo Jo has taken over Frank's body for awhile to teach the way to the Psi place!
PHOF^2!
If KU were playing 3-2 against a 3-2 team, you are right.
But what Self has figured out is playing 4-1 with a composite post against 3-2 biases everything in your favor scoring wise even on an off night.
KU won by 15 shooting 54.5% from Trey.
They could have missed 4 more treys and still have won!
That means KU could have shot only 36% from Trey and won.
This is a break through in biasing toward victory!
Hell, even Iba would get a scoring boner about this angle!!!!!
True but what Self left out was that he apparently told his C-4 to keep them on the line.
The other thing Self has figured out is four perimeter scorers outscore three and one inside guy forced to cover outside almost everytime, even on an off night; this is one of his classic strategic break throughs that bias averages in his favor every game.
Giving 12-16 two shot fouls inside and matching 4 shooters vs. 3 on the perimeters means your potential ppp just is biased to be higher even on a cold night.
He is a sly devil.
Sherron was bowl them over physical--a fullback at point guard. Fabulously aggressive. A mad dog part of the time.
Frank is like a leopard.
Frank is in some kind of psi zone. He is moving at something near total efficiency. He is moving effortlessly yet making everyone else seem slow. It's one of the most insanely great stretches of psi play I've seen. Jo Jo White had stretches of this too.
PHOF!!!
Self did something EXTREMELY clever.
He turned the game into a Trey balling vs Free throwing contest.
KU shot treys.
KU enabled Stanford to shoot two shot fee throws off misses.
Self is getting to be kind of scary good. He just devises a new way to win a game and then tries it out.
Opposing coaches are back in undergrad trying to turn a game into FT shooting contest, so the old prof running the grad seminar takes the young coach's strategy and forces them into shooting so many two shot FTs that they can't off set all the 3ptas KU takes.
Jarrod Haase went to grad school tonight.
And he thought Roy had taught him a lot all those years.
Absorb everything Self will share, Jarrod. Your players were drilled and disciplined. You're a good coach. But studying Self can make you better.
Like last season, Bill Self is beating opponents in the post by committee.
Self has schemed the team's scoring to come from outside, but even so KU's Composite center picked up 20 points. Reid Travis scored 9 more points, but our 4 man perimeter killed their three man perimeter in scoring, so once again Self schools an opponent.
And get this: C4 annihilated Travis in post rebounding 16 to 7!!!!!!!!
Are you ready?
Self is a genius!
Don't know diet pills but here's some nascent attempts at nerds breaking good beyond hoodies and the anti surveillance look.
Jarrod is style challenged because of over exposure to Dean's and Roy's love for the Sears double knit powder blue blazer.
He is at the right moment and place to take coaching wear and basketball uniforms into the silicon tech geek age. Every warm up needs a Nano pocket and bud routers. Maybe asymmetric warm up sleeve lengths for Steve's magic bracelet coming to replace the clunky Apple watches. The recruits will love it!!!! Embrace the age Jarrod. You look like a geek trapped in a bad suit. The geeks rule where you are. Embrace it!
Basketball needs a tech nudge from someone other than petroshoeco nobs.
Hell, Bill, if Jarrod hesitates, you lead the way.
Buds for everyone!
Good to know. I'd like for his live blog to take off again.
Good, thoughtful post. Here's my experience.
It has always appeared to me that more flopping episodes involved blacks flopping and I always assumed it was because they comprised such a large percentage of the players, especially the lane drivers..
Of the only two guys I ever recall having perseverated on about flopping, one was PG Smart at OSU and one was that buzz cut little PG at Ohio State about the same years as Smart. One was black and one was white and I recall them only because they both appeared to be unusually annoying on the floor.
I didn't recall any of the other guys you listed as floppers. Not saying they weren't but they didn't stick in my mind. I just don't think about it much, black or white.
I know I learned sharpening my finger nails for scratching, sucker punching when the numbers were on my side, and stiff screening (what we called nutting) from the black guys I played with on the playground. But I was kind of proud of learning those things.
Flopping is something my high school coach taught me and my teammates to do if the refs were calling in the other team's favor. It was supposed to shake the refs out of their comfort zones and give our coach something to bait with. Even if the ref thought we might be faking, when the coach jumped up outraged about us getting hammered it got you a favorable whistle the next trip.
It never seemed a racial thing to me. The two blacks on my high school teams flopped like the Whites when instructed and did it about as successfully.
HOWLING!
It may be easier to win it with 5-o than 4-1.
4-1 is VERY vulnerable to meeting up with a better post man than your post man--one that forces you to change how you like to play.
Great ring teams never have to change how they play in order to win, no matter who they play. They just keep doing what they do. Even Self's teams try keep doing what they do, and only concede to letting the other team set the tempo, until Self is sure his preferred way of playing won't work.
When you play 5-0, as the 63 UCLA team did, it learned how to play any team its way.
Jabbar's UCLA team's were to some extent 4-1 single low post teams, and they were unbeatable till the night in Houston when Jabbar was unhealthy and Elvin Hayes destroyed him. Fortunately it was regular season.
Nova proved recently 4-1 works if you don't come up against a post you can't handle.
KU can win 4-1, but only if it's post committee allows it to play the way it likes against any other center on another team it meets during the Carney, especially if the refs are engineering for KU this year. It could work this year, because aside from the Indiana center, there aren't any dominant centers this season capable hanging 35-40 points in a big game in a peak performance.
But I gotta say, without massive improvement, our center committee looks like an Achilles waiting to pop.
Yup!
How much better would Josh be with a Trey?
How much better would Self be if we knew the truth about his hair?
How much better would Wilt have been had he been able to make 80% of his FTs?
How much better would KU basketball be with more rings?
How much better would BRush have had to have been to get his jersey hung?
How much better would It have to been had we never have had to play Fizzou all those years?
How much better would it be if the Naismith Rules were in the field house where they goddamn well belong?
How much better can it get than game day on Saturday afternoon?
The last game hurt, but....
I have seen so many last games of great players hurt!
Andrew Wiggins hurts me more than Perry's, because of Wiggins Saturn sized ability.
So I try to gauge their whole seasons, or careers, when looking back.
Perry had a great last season.
Imagine what a healthy Selby could have done on a 4 guard 1 center team like the current team!!!
Selby was as great a wasted talent as I can recall among KU players. A potentially great Bordeaux opened before it's time. Really sad it's being guzzled off shore.
His handlers ought to be charged with Crimes Against Basketball!
Anyone that watched what Perry had to go through those first two seasons, WOW!, that makes one pause and say is it really worth it?
But Perry turned out to be one of the toughest, most persevering players I have ever watched developed. And by the end he was one of the most complete college basketball players at KU AND I believe it was Perry finally that convinced Bill Self that iron pyrite could be alchemized into real gold and that 4 out 1 in was something Bill could adapt to.
Bill Self is a sponge about absorbing things and changing his own mind.
But once Self's mind is set, or once Self thinks we are dealing with a basic principle of the game, he is like trying to use granite for modeling clay.
Perry changed Self's mind about 4-1 basketball and about what Perry could do from trey.
I cannot think of another player in Self's tenure that changed Self's mind on an Okie Ball principle.
Perry Ellis changed it twice.
And he introduced Bill Self to a new level of quiet. :smile:
We'll count him.
MISSING OADs FILE
Follow your board rat host, jay bate 1.0, hunt down OAD recruits drafted on potential that disappeared first into the D-League and then into foreign ball, or WORSE!
The strangest OAD case in history--how is he doing in the pros THIS season?
Sometimes it feels like the pizzagate in DC not only involves child sex trafficking, but player trafficking also.
But there is a case to be made that the head hair from Martin to Weber was a sideways move for KSU.
10/90
As Jerry Lee Lewis might have sung...
"A whole lotta developin' goin' on!!!!!!"
Or alternatively...something like Chantilly Lace only it ain't.
*Nylon net trace from the dunk on your face
And a Sony ear bud a-hangin' down
Double dribble and a walk
And too much uh trash talk
Makes the Cheik go down
There ain't nothin' gets a hook
Like a green wood rook
That makes them not act funny
Makes'em take his money
Make him feel real tight, like some injury tights
Like a newb, oh rookie, that's uh what I like*
Yes, this four guard "thang" could continue.
Choir. Singing. To.
As you know my grand strategic constraint is to keep Beatty at all costs to avoid any more massive cash infusions to football until they are showing some tax exempt surplus. Soooooo, if you say Kingsbury Marquis of won't be available, for a year, and Gilbert, from that splinter republic of Texastan, is a strong OC, then I'm on your bandwagon and count me in for some baked beans and ribs with lots uh chilli in the sauce, pardner.
Doing nothing is playing god.
God often appears to do nothing.
@KUSTEVE nailed the unacceptable underlying problem with playing god by choosing to do nothing and letting persons starve or suffer.
I do what I can to help and let god decide what he/she can do to help.
Everything useful or good I have ever done flowed from the wise help of others.
IMHO, the false assumption of the book was leavers and takers. I do not believe there were/are/will be leavers and takers.
There are human beings that both leave and take.
I like humans, despite how they annoy me sometimes with their taking.
I like to help them, when I can.
Being ignored to death is the most prevalent problem I see now, and have noted through out human history.
The time for inaction is when all actions have unacceptable consequences, or when action denies another the freedom needed by another to succeed. I find the former rarely and the latter often.
My mother said: do something and be of good cheer.
I added Lincoln's rule slightly conditioned: whatever you are, so long as it's not hurting people, be a good one.
-I have iced these with:
-See and savor beauty
-Choose toward fun
-Don't settle for lies and illogic
-find the assumptions and see if they make sense
-tell persons you love that you love them at least once a day
-never miss a fitting opportunity to communicate "MUCK FIZZOU!"
KU needs players, so the Charlie Weis rule probably applies.
Never hire a coach that cannot recruit at an elite program to recruit at a non elite program.
But I would condition the Weis rule a bit in this case.
It's a given that neither Strong, nor Helfrich, has a prayer of recruiting top players to KU, because each could not recruit such players to Texas and Oregon.
And they clearly were not such great leaders and thinkers that they could make mediocre players compete with good ones
But KU doesn't just need great players. It needs large quantities of mediocre players to take the next step from awful to mediocre.
So the question is: could either man be expected to bring a large quantity of mediocre talent to KU, as an OC, or DC?
Given each guy wound up signing a lot of mediocre talent to his respective elite school, either guy likely has a pipeline to mediocre talent.
To reiterate, mediocre talent connections corresponds with KU's desired next level.
If I were Beatty, I would ask which guy could yield more mediocre 4 yr recruits right away?
I would lean toward Strong, if he could deliver, because he recruited Texas where our recruiting needs to be continually intensified.
I would move Bowen up to assistant head coach and make sure he actually kept coaching the defensive teams with Strong's schemes.
I wouldn't touch either Helfrich, or Strong, with a ten foot pole as a potential replacement for Beatty.
I'd give Beatty a raise.
My expectation is neither guy could help enough to make him worth hiring, even if either would come.
I am interested in your thoughts about Ishmael and Quinn. I often learn an insight from others grabbed by a book that clears a path for me to access the book.
Yours was a very powerful post in its implications. Thanks for your candor.
My thoughts differ some on the nature of the threat, but I am not yet clear enough in my thoughts to distract anyone from your assessment.
Rock Chalk!
Guys that say players that haven't done it for a season as the 1st option are as good or better than guys who have carried the mail as a 1st option AND now play in the pros kind of make me shake my head.
But I'm cool.
😎
Yes, I read it, but long after it was newsworthy. Some one suggested it to me. The concept amused me, but then it did not resonate deeply as art, or philosophy, so I did not read his other two books. Did it speak to you?
It's just a hypothesis.
And I'm focused most on the idea that American political parties maybe reconfiguring and converging toward a regime similar to Israel's three major parties that now appear center, right and alt right, if you will, without a true left or even center left party reputedly among its three majors. I'm not passing any judgements. Just trying to understand what the heck is actually going on.
Again, what made me think of it this way is the emergence of Trump's advisors and appointees coming out of a foundation rputedly very sympathetic to Likud and Netanyahu, and the emphasis on alt-right perspective, rather than either traditional conservatism, or recent Neo-conservatism either. The right wing view point appears to have triumphed over both conservatism and neoconservatism. That phenomenon, if correctly recognized then begs the question of which wing of the US-Israel political base emblemized by reputedly Self-proclaimed Zionist, George Soros, to support Hillary so strongly? Guessed he must NOT be either Labor Party related, or he would have supported Bernie, and he must not be Likud-leaning, or he would have supported Trump
as Likud appears to lean to. So: that would leave Hillary and her Neocons and neoliberal base aligned with Kadima.
Or so might be the case.
First, let me say it was just a quick thought, not a gem of wisdom resulting from arduous research, okay?
With the caveats above, I noticed somewhere recently that reputed Trump casino-hotel development client and campaign supporter Sheldon Adelson, who reputedly sewed over $20M into Chicago politics a few days before the election is reputedly a Foundation for Defense of Democracy guy and several of Trump's appointees and advisors reputedly track to there, also, and the Foundation reputedly has strong ties to Netanyahu and the Likud Party of Israel.
If that were all true, it might hypothetically, at least partially, explain the extraordinarily bad blood and flight of the Neocons from the Republican Party to ally with their apparently close ideological brethren, the neolibs, already keeping house in the Democratic Party.
That swift realignment has always puzzled me.
Further, I keep recalling how Trump conspicuously admonished Hillary in a debate about Netanyahu of Likud not liking her and Obama's Iran deal.
I had always thought the Neocon/Neolib team pretty much had all of the US-Israel Lobby's interest covered. I'm a political amateur, but that was what I had thought. But it now appears there may have been a schism that paralleled the schism in Israel's two major right-leaning parties--Likud and Kadima.
For those naive as me before I searched for Israel's major parties, Kadima is reputedly a right leaning party that entertains a dual state solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, while Likud is reputedly farther right and favors a single state solution resulting in just Israel. Some Jewish board rats may be able to be more accurate than me, but that is what I understand so far. Finally there is a once left-leaning Labor Party, something like our old New Deal Democratic Party, that has lately moved to center, or even center-right. The Labor Party entertains a two state solution also.
It occurred to me that maybe our Democratic Party currently is polarized by Bernie and his Labor Party equivalent, plus Hillary and her Neocon-neolib base that are sort of equivalent to Kadima. And that maybe Hillary and her base have an agenda in conformity Kadima an many issues, and that Trump and his base have an agenda in conformity with Likud on many issues.
The above might help explain the differing approaches to relationships with, say, Putin, Syria, Iran, China and Japan, and the seemingly shared approaches to many other issues.
And I'm not suggesting any conspiracy here either. As you know I think conspiracies are mostly for suckers, and in cases where they may not be, find conspiracy investigations best left to the proper authorities.
What I am hypothesizing here is that the long term above board intertwining of the political economies of the two countries maybe having the effect causing the locuses of the two nations' political parties to converge into similarity due to similar strategic dynamics. Distilled a bit, American political parties are beginning to recast themselves more closely along the lines of interest because of both countries continually dealing with similar Near East/South Asian game board constraints and dynamics.
This might partially explain a pursuit of recounts and efforts to get the electoral college to contradict voting results by two right leaning USA parties--the Neocon/Neolib Democrats, and the alt-right leaning Trump Republicans.
Remember, once upon a time, Trump and Billary were bosom buddies once.And now Billary and the Bushes are pals.
Something happened. It all seems to hinge on how to deal with Russia/Syria/Iran. They can't seem to agree on that.