throwback

Peek ahead at our soon-to-be-B1G baseball brethren and where they're projected for 2024: UCLA - 2nd in Pac-12, NCAA qualifier USC - 3rd in Pac-12, NCAA qualifier Oregon - 5th in Pac-12, NCAA qualifier Washington - 7th in Pac-12 https://www.ncaa.com/news/baseball/article/2024-02-03/2024-pac-12-baseball-predictions-projected-finishes

Took a peek at the schedule - based off 2023 RPI, which probably doesn't tell us all that much about 2024, but it's at least a start. NCAA changed the Quadrant metrics for 2024, although there's no change to how they calculate RPI: Quad 1: Home games vs. RPI 1-25, neutral site games vs. 1-40, road games vs. 1-60 Quad 2: Home games vs. RPI 26-50, neutral site games vs. 41-80, road games vs. 61-120 Quad 3: Home games vs. RPI 51-100, neutral site games vs. 81-160, road games vs. 121-240 Quad 4: Home games vs. RPI 101+, neutral site games vs. 161+, road games vs. 241+ https://www.ncaa.com/news/baseball/article/2024-01-05/walk-songs-ncaa-tournament-new-selection-process-headline-changes-2024-di-baseball Based on that, here's our Quads based on 2023 final RPI: Q1 Games (3) 2 (N) Tex Tech / Okla 1 (A) K-State Q2 Games (26) 9 (H) Iowa / Indiana / Maryland 17 (A) Grand Canyon / Coll of Char / Wichita St / Kansas / Rutgers / Mich St Q3 Games (9) 4 (H) K-State / Ohio St 5 (A) Creigh / Minn Q4 Games (18) 1 (N) Baylor 14 (H) S Alabama / Nicholls / Omaha / N Dak St / N Mex St / Creigh / Kansas / S Dak St 3 (A) N'western Not sure these new Quad designations help us all that much, but we'll see. Lots of potential Q2 opportunities potentially. Sucks that 2 of our potential 3 Q1 opportunities are in the first weekend when we're going to be feeling our way, but that's life in the B1G. Sounds like Boyd's World will do its projected RPI for 2024 pretty soon, like it did last year, so that should provide a better look into the actual strength of schedule. I'm guessing the predictive analytics will not like NU very much, considering how many high-quality at bats and innings we have to replace from last year.

LOL - quite a different tone from BTN about NU than in 2018. Hope they keep it up.

NU 67 NW 73

Great effort - hell of a comeback. Hope we can build on it Wednesday.

Purdue takes control of the B1G race, 75-69 at Wisky, which missed all of its 3s in the second half. Does this mean NU broke the cheese-eaters? I think so.

NU got outside multiple days this week, which is great. Having the indoor facility is such an advantage, but there's nothing like getting outdoors several times before the 1st game. Even had a chance to scrimmage a bit at Den Hartog late in the week. Not sure we answered our starting pitching questions around consistency during the scrimmages, though. The first weekend in Arlington is going to be a crapshoot on the bump it would appear. This is kind of what I was afraid of coming out of fall. Everything on the pitching staff just sets up so much easier when you have one guy step up and take control of the Friday job. Sets the tone for everyone else. (Well, other than last year when Olson was the dude from the start, but we struggled with depth. Depth won't be an issue with this group I don't think, meaning short leashes are in order.) Figuring out who to use and when could be quite the challenge for Coach Childress that first weekend. Nice to have someone with his experience making the decisions, though. He's gone into a season -- or several of them -- in this kind of situation before, so I'm confident he'll figure it out. It just might not be with the players he thought it would be in October. PS - I'm not a 'fan day' person, but it looked like they had a blast last night with a good crowd.

Got 3 possessions / chances at the go ahead bucket in the final 30 seconds - can't ask for much more than that. The last 2 shots were good looks, all things considered, by your top 2 players. Probably a little unlucky one of those two didn't drop. But if you want to be an NCAA team, you just can't put yourself in that position to be a little unlucky because of the putrid performance the other 39:30 at home against a team like RU. Disastrous loss.

That's a pretty accurate line, all things considered. Wouldn't surprise me to see it move to 10 or 11 by tip off. After the miracle comeback Thursday, we're playing with house money Sunday. Hopefully we play relaxed and just let it rip.

Just going to drop this here ..... I like RPI now.

Ill 77 NU 63

Somebody is feeling left out.

Quick line movement after it came out. Hope the early line swing is wrong.

OWH says today the league is planning on a 30-game conference schedule with divisions - have to say I'm surprised. The only way to pull that off is to send traditional B1G teams to LA/Eugene/Seattle for late Febr and early March weekends. That means the Pac-4 have to spend a lot of time on the road on April and May weekends, just when you want to gain momentum. So with 30 games, you end up playing 10 of your 16 possible opponents versus 8 of 12 now. Divisions become a necessity to have the regular season be an actual test. You have to treat it like having 2 regular season champions. Then top 4 in each division go to Omaha. Will be curious how they split divisions. They might do east-west, but I think they have to split up the Pac-4 to make the schedule work better, so those Pac-4 teams can host conference games early in the year to beat the weather. Maybe they rotate Ore/Wash and USC/UCLA between the divisions every 2 years. West (ish) - Oregon, Wash, NU, Minn, Iowa, NW, Illinois, Indiana, Purdue East (ish) - USC, UCLA, Rutgers, Md, PSU, Ohio St, Mich, Mich St, So maybe NU's 2025 schedule looks like: Feb wk 3 - At UCLA* Feb wk 4 - At non-con series Mar wk 1 - At Oregon** Mar wk 2 - at non-con Mar wk 3 - home non-con Mar wk 4 - vs Minn** Mar wk 5 - at Illinois** Apr wk 1 - vs Wash** Apr wk 2 - vs Purdue** Apr wk 3 - Home non-con Apr wk 4 - at NW** May wk 1 - vs Iowa** May wk 2 - at Indiana** May wk 3 - vs Ohio St* May wk 4 - B1G tourney UCLA's might look like: Feb wk 3 - vs NU* Feb wk 4 - vs Rutg** Mar wk 1 - vs Mich St** Mar wk 2 - home non-con Mar wk 3 - vs Illinois* Mar wk 4 - home non-con Mar wk 5 - at Md** Apr wk 1 - at PSU** Apr wk 2 - home non-con Apr wk 3 - at Michigan** Apr wk 4 - Home non-con May wk 1 - at Washington* May wk 2 - at Ohio St** May wk 3 - vs USC** May wk 4 - B1G tourney Maybe they do something like saying even though NU is playing at UCLA in Feb wk 3, those count as NU 'home' games for conference scheduling to try to make the Pac-4 teams have to travel less later in the year. Then they can say they're giving everyone 5 'home' series and 5 road series, even though it'd actually be 4 and 6 for NU and 6 and 4 for UCLA. Then UCLA wouldn't have to travel as much late in the year - on this schedule, if they did that, maybe they'd get Penn St at home instead of on the road. And NU might end up going to Purdue instead of being at home. Will be interesting to see how they split it up. Going to take some next-level math to fit all the pieces together. They need to do it fairly quickly, as it's always tough to set up non-conference series. By the way, Oregon will be in Arlington for our opening weekend, although we don't play the Ducks. We'll have some common opponents, though.

Peacock was too uppity to stream a 9 vs 16 seed game and B1G+ said "no thanks" too?

I think he's been punished enough - he was on the bench and had to watch that debacle Saturday at Maryland up close and personal.

I know I've mentioned this in past years, but the actual chances of NU ever hosting a regional again are pretty small. I appreciate the coaches throwing that out there as a goal, but to be in the Top 16 playing out of the B1G is almost impossible. You have to win 19+ conference games (emphasis on the plus), dominate the league's regular season race, avoid any early upsets in the B1G tournament, dominate all mid-week games, plus have winning weekends going south out of the gate. It's really, really tough. For a team in the B1G, it almost always takes 40+ wins in the regular season plus a few in the conference tourney. You better have a bunch of MLB draft picks on your team to pull that off. It's not impossible, but you have to be dominant from start to finish to pull it off as a northern school. Since we joined the B1G, there's usually one league team every 2-3 years that has a realistic shot. Those aren't great odds. Having said all that, I think our 2021 team was good enough to host had we played a normal season. So you never know. I believe our schedule is tough enough this year that if we get to 40+, we'd have a chance. Not sure we have several MLB draft picks on the team right now, but maybe some guys become those players. Maybe having B1G teams host more regularly gets a little easier when we add some better teams like UCLA, Oregon, and USC next year, but the league schedule probably will be so jacked up that it won't matter much. I doubt those western schools want any part of playing more than 24 B1G games. They can keep their schedule strength higher playing west coast teams in a non-con series than hosting N'western in a conference series in February.

Not sure we can put too much on weekend 1 ... or 2 for that matter. We will have a ton of new faces in the lineup and on the bump, and asking them to be lights out from the start against those high major southern teams is asking a lot. Grand Canyon in weekend 2 is no slouch either - they really tend to play well against the northern teams that go down there early in the season - and they have a hitter-friendly park. They did lose to Michigan and Mich St early last season, but they went 2-0 vs Ohio State and 1-0 vs Tennessee, too, so we'll see. We certainly will battle on those first two weekends, but if we are over .500 after those first 7 games, I'll be pleasantly surprised. NU feels like a team that may need a few weekends to really get ramped up and to figure out who is ready to actually excel at this level. Hope I'm wrong and they start red hot, but it'd be pretty surprising.

Doesn't sound like our pitching questions were quite sorted out in the individual / small group workouts leading up to the first official practice. We have plenty of arms we like, but finding the right guys for each role -- and figuring out who can be consistent -- has been a challenge leading up to the start of practice -- and that starts with finding the Friday guy. It's too bad we don't have a softer opening weekend to try to work out some roles, but maybe the guys will lock in on the bump when the lights come on. And there's still several key practices to try to work things out. With so many question marks and with so many potentially good arms, the coaches probably will have a pretty short leash on guys, especially the first few weekends.

NU 81 UW 75