Norm Peterson

Per LJS (print edition.) If we don’t get credit for beating Minnesota at full strength, will we get credit for beating PSU when they’re not?

demone, thanks for the reply. IMOO, I find your response here much more constructive than a down vote. But that's just me.

That's not the article I'm talking about.

In fairness, I should add to my above post that I do like the sports writers at both the LJS and the OWH. I have no problem with Sipple or Basnett or McKeon or Chatelain or Barfknecht or any of the rest of them on the sports side. On the news side, however, I'm disappointed more often than not.

Do they? I haven't seen evidence of it. A topical example: A couple of years ago, the LJS printed an article about the Connie Yori situation. At the time, I was just trying to read up about what happened and hadn't formed opinions. The article was incredibly one-sided and really pissed me off, so I went through and fisked the article and pointed out at least half a dozen ways in which their reporting failed to source assertions of fact, quoted a biased source without revealing the bias, printed a source's opinion as though it was fact, etc. etc. etc. I sent it to the writer and copied the editor, and the response I got back was sort of a dismissive "Thanks for the note; this is obviously an issue you feel passionately about" as though I'm the one who's biased. At that point, I hadn't taken sides, but that story made me really try to see things from Yori's point of view because it was clear to me the Urinal Star had thrown in with the AD. That's just one example. I find their reporting generally wanting, and more so their hard news content than their sports content. And I'm a subscriber even!

I didn't upvote this post because I agree with it; I upvoted it because I think it's stupid to clobber a guy with downvotes just for expressing a fairly innocuous, on-topic opinion.

He's not super polished, but does some nice things at 6'9". Was checking the leg hair situation. https://www.ahmirlanglais.com/biography

He's better at post D than Michael Jacobson was.

Just in the last minute, I think we were 0-6. Palmer drew a foul call and went to the line and bricked both. Then we got the offensive rebound and Taylor, I think, went to the line and missed both. And then did we get a 2nd offensive rebound by Roby and he was fouled? I know Roby went to the line next and I was thinking, OK, we got these now. But no. Roby misses both. And I'm thinking thank goodness we're up 11.

I disagree. Isaiah has some of the best post moves on the team.

Yay, so Del State is NOT the worst team in the country! Yay us.

Did someone say beer?

Considering three of the last four were at home and all four were against teams below us in the conference (and all but Maryland below us in rpi at the time) I think we were at least twice as likely to win out as lose out.

Mitch, toss out what the computers tell you and just look at how the Huskers had been playing to that point in the season and answer me this: Can you honesty say with a straight face that, at the point in time when we only had 4 games left in the regular season, you thought the odds of the Huskers winning out in their last 4 games, 3 of which are/were at home and one on the road against a Big Ten bottom dweller (Maryland, @Illinois, Indiana, Penn State), would be less than the odds of losing out? In other words, that it would be more likely we'd lose all of the next four than that we'd win them? Keep in mind, at that point, we were on a 5-game winning streak and had only dropped 3 road games in our last 15 contests since dropping a home game to Kansas by 1 point. Now, to me, a mere human, it seems a lot more likely that we'd win those last 4 games, all against teams below us in league standings, than that we'd lose them. But what do I know?

Quote »" After last season, Boehm said Tim Miles sat down with Tucker Zeleny, who runs analytics for Nebraska sports. In that meeting, Zeleny said a good number of Nebraska’s issues were because of 3-point shooting, both defending the 3 and shooting the 3. Boehm said Miles took that advice to heart and began retooling an offense with higher efficiency 3-point shooting. The Huskers are shooting 35 percent from behind the arc this season. They also rank first in the Big Ten in 3-point field goal defense, holding opponents to 31.5 percent ." Jeez, ya think? Considering we were ranked somewhere in the 300s in both of those categories last year? Doesn't take any genius analytics guy to figure that out. We were (hell, even I was) talking about that a lot since the end of last season.

And talking about how the only real quality wins we had were against Ohio State and Michigan State in the BTT.

Palmer is a 2nd half player. That's been the case all season long. He's quiet in the first half; you hardly notice him. Then, about 10 minutes into the 2nd half, you look up and see he has 15 points and you're like "where the heck did that come from?" Some analyst was quoted somewhere on here recently saying that Palmer is the slowest good slasher he's ever seen. Or something like that. And, I think that's a fair observation. He's not blowing up any land-speed records getting to the hoop. But teams have such a hard time stopping him. He's so good at finding the little gap in the trees to get the ball off and bank it in. I think there's some kind of Einstein's theory of relativity going on in his game. He's launching himself on one trajectory while the defenders are converging and diverging at different rates in different times and different angles and James just seems to have this intuitive feel about when the space-time continuum will open up and the heavens part and there's an unimpeded path for the ball to reach the backboard at an angle where it will find the opening in the rim. And you can't guard him close because he's very adept at drawing the foul. And you can't lay off because he's just good enough of a perimeter shooter to make you pay. And so he gets his points. And as long as he's not the only one scoring, teams have a tough time defending us. When Isaac Copeland is hitting those elbow turnaround Js and Anton Gill is dialed in from long range and Isaiah Roby is forcing the rim protectors to follow him outside the paint, etc. etc., we're just a really tough team to defend. You basically have to outscore us. Except we've been pretty good on the defensive end of late as well. I have confidence that we can and should win all three remaining games. The tough one was Maryland and they already took care of business. Most teams have no answer for James Palmer. And we've been doing a better job defending opposing bigs except for Bruno Fernando. I think there's a pretty good likelihood we win out and head to the BTT and face a Michigan team that won't have as fresh of a set of legs. It's not out of the question that we reach the finals.

Which tells me that the computer-projected odds for each game were off. Because there's no way in hell it was equally likely that we'd lose all 4 remaining games as that we'd win them all. Not when 3 of the 4 were home games and the lone road game is against a team at the bottom of the standings. Not saying that we definitely will win all 4, but even the most casual basketball observer could tell you that it was far more likely we'd win all 4 than lose all 4. So, how is this very sophisticated computer system so clearly off if it doesn't need tweaked? I mean, look at those last 4 games and explain to me how it's more probable that we'd lose them all than win them all.

If he's contagious, keep him the hell away from anyone who knows anyone who plays on the team. Last thing we need is for that crud that's been going around to start taking out our players like Tom Eades' whistle.

Well, there is now a 100% chance that we will NOT lose our last 4 regular season games. I cannot believe that his computer EVER thought that the likelihood of us losing the last 4 was greater than the likelihood that we'd win the last 4. Shows his computer needs tweaked.

Hmmmm. Bruno Fernando. 21 pts, 9 bds, 5 assists. I think I've heard that name before.

That's actually really high praise.

I see La Tech has copied our 1-3-1 defense.

Yeah, North Dakota won their conference last year and has only 8 wins this year. So, you have that working against us. That's one of the things Chatelain says Miles mentioned in an interview last night. But, in addition to teams that failed to be as good as we expected, Miles pointed out that some of our losses were better than they look as were some of our wins. We've previously detailed teams who lost major contributors during or after the game we played against them, and it was a pretty long list. Boston College lost maybe their best player to a season-ending injury during their game against us. St. John's lost certainly their second best player shortly after we played them full strength. Minnesota lost perhaps their best player to ... extenuating circumstances after they played us the first time. UCF lost their 7'6" center in mid season. North Texas lost a really promising freshman in our game, his second. He put up 19 points in his debut. Eastern Illinois lost their starting PG (9 pts, 5 assists) in game #8. And, in fairness to Delaware State, they lost a couple of starters early in the season (one played 7 games, the other 4) and it's hard enough to offset the loss of one starter, let alone two. That seems like a freakish number of teams that have lost significant contributors to season-ending problems early in the season, which undoubtedly affected their overall records and, therefore, our SOS.

OK, I'm calling BS again on Kenny's system here. Back on Jan 22, we were 63rd and projected to only win 19 games on the season. We're now projected to win 22 games but that only bumps us up to #52? Doing better than he expected doesn't seem to have moved the needle very much. Time to tweak his system a bit.