Norm Peterson

So, the post a couple of posts earlier, restated in positive terms: This year, we'll have Derrick and Eduardo from the jump. We'll have returning players at basically each spot and if any newcomer joins the starting lineup, they'll have done it by being better than someone already here. We won't have a combined conference/non-conference meat grinder in the opening few weeks of the season. This schedule offers us some chances to catch our breath here and there. We almost certainly won't have a repeat COVID experience, lose a month of practices, and condense half a season into 4 weeks, by which no other team in the conference was nearly as hampered. This is all aside from the fact six returning players will be older and more experienced/developed. It'll be really interesting to see how much difference these things do or don't make. At the end of the day, was sheer talent (or lack thereof) more of a barrier than these other issues? It's probably either going to be celebration or soul searching.

They aren't excuses so much as they are reasons for thinking this season might have a more palatable outcome. Yes, those things were facts. They did happen. The fact they happened was disadvantageous to our results. I don't think those problems are likely to recur. Therefore, if one was looking for reasons to open a six-pack of bright red Kool-Aid ...

Last year, first half of the season: Didn't have Eduardo (Covid) Didn't have Derrick (NCAA suspension) Started the French guy with stone hands by default (apologies to Yvan who is a great kid ... and still a minor) Top 6 players were basically all logging their first minutes in Husker unis. Faced 5 consecutive ranked teams, plus Ga Tech, in a span of less than 4 weeks. 4-8 record. Last year, second half of the season: COVID shutdown for us and basically NO ONE ELSE IN THE CONFERENCE Lost effectively a month of practice (no one else in conference did) Condensed schedule in February to make up for games missed in January, playing 11 games in 3 weeks 3-12 record. OK, enough with the excuses. I don't think anyone was satisfied with that record last year even considering the challenges the team faced. However, those things are all facts that, collectively, probably had some kind of significant effect on our final W/L record last year. And one very nice thing going into this season is that we probably won't have to contend with ANY of those things this year. Except maybe consecutive ranked teams. But not likely in the first half of the season. How much will that improve/affect the outcome? Thoughts?

Legion of Boom. OK, there ya go.

Sounds like he had a pretty solid summer. Saw a box score the other day, and he outscored Traudt in that particular game.

Imagine if Sergej Vucetic had guard skills. And some athleticism.

Line changes. That's my expectation. Not that we will, but that we *could*. If we wanted.

Hooper's Jordan Larson named Olympic Volleyball MVP! Best of the best. Justine Wong-Orantes was named best Libero. WorldofVolley :: OLYMPIC GAMES W: MVP title belongs to Larson - WorldOfVolley

By the way, did you know that, last year, Virginia ranked 347th in the NCAA in tempo? I imagine their fans at the end of games are like "good gawd, just make it end!" Nebraska was 42nd in tempo. Boy, if Nebraska could just find some guys who can shoot the rock, their scoring would explode. Hey, wait, I think Isaac Traudt is just such a person.

I mean, I like Lee as much as the next great, great grandson of a Union soldier, sure, but we kicked his rebel ass, and I just don't see a good reason to talk about the state to which he held allegiance more dearly than this country, or the university which bears the name of that confederate commonwealth, on this forum. And I'll grant you there are good reasons to matriculate at that particular university. (Of course, "matriculate" might be the single-most pretentious verb in the English language, but that's for another day, and thank you for using it.) That school would be especially attractive if you are a young basketball player who likes a defense-oriented system with a slow-it-down, plodding, glacial offensive scheme. If, at the end of his career, Mr. Traudt would like to have recorded more forced shot-clock violations than points scored, then, by all means, he should *matriculate* to the school where offense is an afterthought. But, I suspect a guy who can shoot the ball would actually like to, you know, shoot the ball. And score some points. And that will be a lot more likely in the city that adopted the name of the 16th President than in the state that fled the Union and took Lee with them.

Worse than this?

Proof:

That’s what Norm’s been saying.

Re: the above: I think he says "Hey, we got to get the _uck back to (indistinguishable) to back." And then Kobe Webster responds and he says "No it wasn't, bro." And then he's off camera but you can still hear him going on about whatever it was. Coach on the floor. I half expect to hear him yell "YOU'RE SOFT, ANDERSON. SO FRICKIN SOFT, I CAN'T BELIEVE IT. ANDERSON, I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW SOFT YOU IS." (Doc Sadler reference. If you didn't go to any of his practices, you might not have a frame of reference.)

First of all, I'm really starting to love this kid. Seems to have a great attitude. Puts out effort. Second, can anyone read lips? Anyone make out what he says at about the 16:05 mark in the Maryland game? Shamiel has just plowed into a guy and luckily drew a blocking foul rather than a turnover on a charge. But Derrick ain't happy. He seems to be getting after Kobe Webster. "Hey, we got to get the _uck back (indistinguishable) back up (something)." And then he's off camera and keeps going. You need guys who aren't afraid to hold other players accountable. I like this Walker kid.

Is there like a Creighton sub-forum somewhere on the "other topics we don't care about" board where this can be moved?

Briedenbach broke up with his girlfriend? He dump her or she dump him? Poor guy. #BeenThere

This is pretty much a buffet. Read what you want. If you don't like it, don't finish it. It's all good.

I see there's a new message in the "Huskers in the Pros" thread. I wonder what that's all about.

Yeah, we sucked last year. But think about this: How much difference is there between a guy who's on the PGA tour, and the best golfer out there who isn't quite good enough to get paid to golf? Probably less than you'd think. The guy on tour might be a longer hitter, but might not be. Probably is. Probably hits slightly more fairways. Slightly. And, as a result, slightly more greens in regulation. And when he hits the green, he's probably just a tiny bit closer to the pin with a marginally shorter putt that he's just a little more likely to make. He'll be slightly better at sand saves. Slightly better at getting up and down from off the green. And when you add up all those slightly betters and slightly closers, you're probably looking at maybe a stroke +/- per round difference between a guy who's just not quite good enough to get paid to play golf and a guy who gets paid millions on the PGA tour. Admittedly, I'm grasping at straws looking for reasons to start chugging the Kool-Aid that @kldm64 and some others tell us they've been drinking. And this is kind of what I've hit on. Always seemed like team shooting can be kind of a momentum thing. I remember back when Kimani Ffriend was on the team, and he was a generally atrocious FT shooter. If he got to the line first and missed, it seemed like everyone else on the team would follow suit and even the guys who were solid FT shooters would catch Kimani's brick disease. But then there were those magical nights when Kimani would draw the first foul, go to the line and make them both, and the team seemed like they'd catch fire. Someone could probably do a doctoral dissertation on this phenomenon and whether it exists and, if so, why. Maybe someone already has. But, anecdotally speaking, it looks to me like it does. And, last year, if Yvan was one of the first guys to get fouled, he was almost certain to miss his attempts, and it seemed like that set the tone. We didn't shoot a lot of FTs last year. And we missed way too many of the FTs we shot. We had the 2nd worst percentage in the league and, not surprisingly, the second fewest made FTs. The guys who are likely going to have the ball in their hands this year are going to be better FT shooters on balance. Gone is Yvan with his sub-40% FT shooting accuracy. Yeah, he didn't have a lot of attempts, but our 3 most prolific FT shooters were all under 70%, and two of them, Dalano and Teddy, are no longer with us. We've replaced them with a guy in Alonzo Verge who shot 81% last season and has a knack for getting to the line. Bryce, I'm betting, is also a good FT shooter. And those are guys who will likely have the ball in their hands a lot for us this coming season. Listen, guys: If we move the needle on FT shooting from a bad 64% to just a mediocre 72% -- which I think is an extremely realistic possibility -- that's an additional roughly point-and-a-half per game over last year even if we don't attempt any more FTs than we did a year ago. And that's just the FT shooting. Fairways hit, you might say. Another area -- and I've talked about this before -- is 3pt%. Last year was not good. We were 10th in the league in 3pt% at .333. But, if you took our season player stats from last year and sorted them by 3pt% and drew a line at 33%, you'd notice that everyone below that line is gone except for Derrick Walker who missed his only attempt and doesn't really count. And everyone above that line is back except for Teddy Allen who had other issues (and I totally agree with @basketballjones' assessment a few months back that his game isn't good enough overall to be a hero-ball player on a good team -- addition by subtraction, I hate to say.) That fact ALONE should raise our team 3pt% into the top half of the conference at least. But add to that the fact we've brought in some guys like Bryce and CJ and Keon and even Wilhelm who I expect will come in and give us even more perimeter firepower. I would not be shocked if we're top 6 in the league next year in 3pt% offense. Maybe even top 5. A 2% improvement would have moved us into the top half of the league. A 3% improvement and we'd have been 5th. We made 684 points on 228 made 3s last year. If we boost that by just 2% -- again, extremely doable -- we'd have scored 723 points on 241 made 3s. That's another roughly point-and-a-half per game. Now, we're not only in the fairway, but we're hitting wedge in instead of a 7-iron. Still not quite on tour, though. Turnovers. We were worst in the conference last year with 14.1 turnovers per game. Our turnover margin was 10th, meaning we were at least turning other teams over, too. But every turnover we commit is a shot attempt we don't get to take and, at 42%, which is a) bad, b) our FG% from last year, and c) likely to improve this year, every turnover costs us roughly a point on the scoreboard. Now, you won't eliminate all turnovers. But, to continue the golf analogy, on the PGA tour, they calculate strokes lost or gained against the field for various aspects of play, sand saves, for instance. The median number of turnovers in the Big Ten last year was 11.4. That means we're losing 2.7 shots against the field just from turnovers. And at our very poor effective FG% from last year of 48.9%, that means that each turnover above 11.4 per game was .978 of a point lost against the field (as opposed to gained against the field for each turnover fewer than 11.4 per game.) In other words, at 14.1 turnovers, we lost 2.6 points PER GAME against the field. I don't know what the magic is for cutting down turnovers, but one thing I know for sure is that Shamiel Stevenson won't be plowing into defenders on fast-break opportunities where the likelihood of a bucket scored would be way above average. And, when the ball isn't stopping in one particular person's hands, maybe the team will be more in synch. And clean up some things here and some things there and just get this team to AVERAGE, and all of a sudden, we've gained another couple of points per game against the field. And, you know, now you start to add those things together, simple things, small things, doable things, and we've gained roughly 5 and-a-half ppg against the field. That's points per game. Against the field. Now, does that matter? Because we lost a lot of games by way more than 5.5 points. Well, considering that we scored 70.0 ppg on average and gave up 74.2 ppg on average, for an average scoring margin of -4.2 ppg, finding 5.5 extra ppg would be kind of a big deal. Here's something else to think about: Our opponent's FT% was nearly tops in the league. Some of that has to do with being the team behind in the closing minutes and having to be the team that tries to foul to stop the clock, when opposing teams make sure to get the ball in the hands of their best FT shooters. If you look at league statistics, the good teams tended to have lower opponent FT%. The only good team in the league whose opponents shot well from the line was Michigan. Give us some more games where we're in the lead, or at least close enough that we don't have to foul to stop the clock, and our opponent FT% will probably go down. Just some things to think about. A little here and a little there and it could make for a fairly big W/L swing.

Grand Canyon was amazing. Bryce was otherworldly. But Zion blew me away.

Spent some time in Utah this past November. I don't have a death wish, so Angel's Landing isn't for me, but I'd do The Narrows again.

Had a guy in my Army unit who was accused of rape. Girl stayed overnight at his apartment and had sex with him. Later, she wasn't sure she'd entirely "consented" so she called an ex-boyfriend who told her she'd been raped. She called the police and pressed charges; he was arrested, tried and convicted. He appealed the conviction and the state Supreme Court agreed he hadn't gotten a fair trial. After the case got sent back down, the prosecutors decided to drop the case. It destroyed him financially. Where does he go to get his reputation back? And if you think "well, it's children, not adults blaming each other" I would encourage you to Google "Tanya Craft."

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS. SO MUCH THIS. WITHHOLD ANY JUDGMENT UNTIL AT LEAST SOME DETAILS COME OUT. FALSE ACCUSATIONS HAPPEN ALL THE TIME.

LOL, no. But I could see that being the reaction of some.