Norm Peterson

Yeah. There's a big difference -- some people forget or don't understand -- between where a guy is now and where he could be down the line. Yvan could be a HS senior right now. Heck, there are probably plenty of HS juniors roughly his age. And if he was a HS junior or senior right now, he'd probably be getting tons of recruiting attention from traditional powers. But, as a college freshman, you can see a lot more of where his growth needs to come from and where he needs to develop. And pointing it out doesn't nullify any of that about how good he'd look if he was a senior in HS somewhere.

Twelve Big Ten teams in the Kenpom top 40. But John Rothstein says the Big East is clearly the best conference in the country. Whatevs.

You're welcome. I apologize for my occasional inefficient use of government resources. You didn't always get the most bang for your buck when I was on guard duty.

Excellent choice on Breaker Morant. Excellent. Love that movie. Nobody has mentioned "Midway" yet. "Platoon." "We Were Soldiers." "Hurt Locker." "American Sniper." "Heartbreak Ridge." Back when I was in the Army, we loved quoting "Heartbreak Ridge": "This is the AK-47 assault rifle. It's the preferred weapon of our enemy. It makes a distinctive sound when fired at you." Boy wasn't that the truth.

Valiant comeback. (Compare with the home loss to Rutgers, for instance.) Dug too deep of a hole. This is one we can definitely learn from and grow from. It's tough to win on the road in the Big Ten conference. Just ask Purdue. And Iowa.

That would not be a bad thing at all.

There's an important distinction here for Charlie besides getting his school paid for (for a semester.) It also means he gets some of the other advantages reserved for scholarship players. For instance, I believe walk-ons don't get the full training table treatment that scholarship athletes get. So … food. Which is a big deal to some of us.

I totally agree he's young. I'm just pointing out an area where I think he needs to improve the most. And it's finishing around the rim. Depending on what he works on and how the coaches work with him, he could significantly improve his finishing numbers literally overnight. Yet this season. A lot of it is technique issues. Again, just look at the difference between the way Kevin Cross was finishing against Iowa and the way Yvan was getting stuffed. Go up strong like Kevin and he's going to start flushing some of those dishes.

I'm going to argue with you here and say that if you look at the "how Yvan scores" chart from that tweet I posted, Yvan is best when he posts up. But he's gawdawful on putbacks, basket cuts, and as the roll man. Those are shots not converted within 3 feet of the basket. Review the Iowa highlights vid I posted. Kevin is getting those dishes from Cam Mack and throwing them down. Yvan is getting stuffed at the rim. Leslee Smith could finish. Yvan is not finishing. He needs to learn how. And I think a big part of it is that he needs to attack the rim with gusto. Use his shoulders to create space to get the shot off. And make quick decisions down low.

@hhcmatt it's not the post-up PPG that I was concerned about. It's his overall (it looks to me like it's an overall) finish percentage that I found worrisome. Also, from the "how Yvan scores" chart, it looks to me like he's actually MOST effective when he posts up.

And then he did Kevin Cross for comparison's sake:

The nice Michigan fan did an Yvan chart for me:

The range of finishing percents is 41 to 79. The mean is 65. I found a standard deviation calculator on-line and it says the standard deviation is 9.7 and, if I understand how this works, that puts Yvan roughly 2 1/2 standard deviations from the mean. He is > 1 standard deviation worse than the next worst finisher. Not saying this to call Yvan out, although it sort of does that. But it's something we all can see and have seen, and it's something he really REALLY has to work on. He got pulled at the end of the Iowa game because Kevin was finishing plays and getting buckets that Yvan was getting stuffed on. Yvan absolutely MUST become a better weapon on the offensive end.

Maybe someone smart like @HuskerActuary could plot a bell curve of the finishing percentage of each of these Big Ten Bigs and let us know how many standard deviations from the mean Yvan is. (You don't need a graph to figure it out; there's a formula; but a graph helps visualize it.)

This hurts my eyes: