tcp

tied up and we're not playing all that well. so that's good, right?

"first time these teams have seen each other this year..." well....no.

has a road team won in the NIT yet?

lol kind of a toasty take after just one quarter, dontcha think?

Anyone else expected a bit more oomph outta these guys?

PSU getting spanked by Temple at home. PSU playing sluggish.

HuskerVengeance Tour 2018 begins tonight. Having fun watching the PSU/Temple crew struggle with the new rules. Sigh.

I give up with this medieval process.

that still leaves the issue of why we drew a 5 seed in the NIT, which I think was the primary question. If Ras is right, it's kinda hard to justify, but someone apparently did it.

if you're getting scores from Fox, everything says OT because they didn't adjust their scoring system for quarters. Just an FYI. I was pretty weirded out initially by how many teams were in OT, until I saw one with a 44 pt lead in 4 OT....heh heh. Asheville laying some wood to the Trojans right now. That looked like a very sad team the other day.

""many of our fans" was not a euphemism for "you". So please don't assume I mean other words than the ones that I actually typed.

yeah, this season, a road win at Alabama much tougher. They really are a good basketball team. This is the inverse of the problem we complain about with people not watching B1G games. A lot of our fans aren't watching many of theirs, either. Except Royal. He watches everyone!

then Miles' concern is well placed. The program really deserves a good answer on this, considering some schools might be making some serious changes to the way they approach schedules and such. this stuff has to be totally above board right now.

"sure, coach! well, we hate you. we hate you and we hope you die! you good now?"

well at least the women's road wins over ranked teams counted for something. barely. amazing job by williams this season.

I can't imagine the committee dissing someone with a coach of the year nomination. that would kind of be above-and-beyond-the-call-of-douchery, even for the NCAA.

Interesting. I would be surprised then that a school would have the autonomy to turn down a home game if the NCAA's revenues were directly impacted by that decision. Curious.

good points, student. Most of us agree with the proposition that the committees search for the "perfect formula" has probably led them astray. And that's not including the NCAAs voracious expansion of what constitutes a D1 program in the first place, which is playing no small role in these fiascos. That conf programs that traditionally do well year in and year out were down this year is, as well, a function of some pretty rotten luck on the schedule-ometer. But I still think we need to look at playing a balanced schedule anyway--playing *every* team twice--just to be on the safe side of rpi. After all, the worst that can happen is that you add some more tough game (or some easier ones) at the expense of some non conference games. My preference would be to tweak the conference measurements that serve as the rpi base to require far fewer samples if possible. We're in a 14 team league. We could play an entire season within the conference itself, with about 4-5 warm up games. Of course, the rise of the superconference is also part of the problem. These weren't discussions in the recent past when about 10 teams was the max of most conferences. I guess I'm meandering around to the point where I think the NCAA has to have a "come to Jesus" moment rethinking the core philosophy of how they want basketball to be played at the div 1 level and then structuring the championship system around that. Limit conference sizes, reduce the number of div 1 conferences, that sort of thing. And most importantly, stop trying to get the "perfect" bracket. Just admit that there's always going to be quality programs that deserve to be there but won't due to the arbitrary nature of the invitational system. Maybe even just say "screw it, let's cancel a few non-conference games and make a national tourney and seed *everybody*. 2-3 games gets the field down to traditional size, and every school would have a crack at it.

Seemed like we were in the NIT every year for about two plus decades, tho, didn't it?

Yeah, but part of me likes that they weren't only calculating on the basis of cash receipts. There's a charm there somewhere, isn't there?

I thought about that yesterday. I figured it could go both ways. Losing on your home court and getting a postseason rematch with the team that did it--exhibition or no--can motivate a team that otherwise didn't have much to play for. In other words, this grudge can go both ways. The NITs always weird because you just don't know how teams that were pimped as bubbles for as long as we were (and MSU, too) feel at the end of an exhausting grind, only to find out that all the heart they'd been poring into their last two months was pointless. Dean Smith's exemplary sermon on competitiveness notwithstanding, these kids are mortals, and its easy to check out mentally after this kind of layoff. So I think your scenario is one possibility. But I think it's easily as likely that our own guys, having played so little the last few weeks at the tail end of a brutal season with one massive kick in the nads to end it,, might be more into getting to the beaches in Biloxi instead. I'm hoping you call this one right, Scott. I just wouldn't put cash on it...;)

the women are really screwed. they're probably going to the Mongolia Invitational as a 423rd seed.

seriously, royal, that committee owes you reparations for what you had to endure.

i can understand why we didn't make it. that's fine, all things considered (but I am not fine with barely making the NIT field. that's a hose). But this USC case is pretty egregious. This is one of the worst handjobs I've seen the committee perform, but that could also be my memory. All we can do is just be fans of our team and cheer them on, and hope like hell that when they sleep at night and dream, they all dream of ripping out every black heart of every person on every NCAA committee of all time and eating it in front of a boys choir. Okay, maybe not that many hearts, because that would be a really long dream...but still..... Get 'em next year. Hard.

screw all this crap! let's just frigging play Duke at Cameron once a week for two months and wrap up a guaranteed 4 seed!----Sincerely, Blutto Blutarsky.