throwback

Without Griesel, we needed Indiana to help us a bit. Them making 11 threes and shooting 53% from the field was the opposite of that. Our effort was there, which was nice, as it would've been easy to cash it in after the terrible start. Flush it and hope for a full team Saturday.

Ugh - going to be really, really tough without Griesel.

I saw someone compare him recently to Andre Smith. I was pretty young when Smith was playing, but he may have had a bit more of a mid-range jumper than Walker has? Both of them were/are undersized for the position they're playing, so I see the reason for the comparison. I do remember Smith being incredibly strong, so that portion of the comparison I believe would be spot-on as well. Walker is so strong, defenders rarely can knock him off balance. He finishes through contact incredibly well and doesn't give up rebounding position. Smith was Big 8 player of the year his senior year, so Walker certainly isn't going to duplicate Smith's list of postseason honors. Maybe that alone makes the comparison unfair to a player as great as Smith was, but Walker's game is impressive.

I'm with you - I did not think the return of Walker would make much difference. I was wrong on that one. These guys are settling into their roles nicely as well. Very smart team & very coachable. We didn't see those forced early 3s much today. I counted a couple. (I may have been a little wound up and missed a couple others. ) The guys seemed to stick to their offensive strengths incredibly well today. Our defensive effort was simply on another level. Yes, the blue birds missed some open 3s, but we really had them flustered. Our guys had to move and communicate a ton to make that scramble style D work, committing to burn a lot of energy on that end, and they sold out to make it work. Never in a million years did I see a game like this coming at any point this season against a highly ranked team. Not sure if Fred tweaked something major to get this buy-in from the guys, or if the addition by subtraction by removing a certain assistant who likes to speak on podcasts is the driving factor, but it's really working.

Not in that building. Neither is keeping the coaches inside their boxes. Or off the floor for that matter. (At least the ref had the awareness to go around Greggie on the way back down the floor. Plowing into him might've been a little awkward to decide what to call. Actually, probably would've called a jump ball after meeting with the other refs.) Although I had to laugh when the blue birds were trying to foul on purpose for a possession or two late, and the refs wouldn't call those either.

Possibly, but I think those are the movement / distance trackers that most of the guys wear.

Hopefully, we gave the remainder of the blue birds' opponents the formula for destroying their offensive rhythm. If they finished the year on a 20+ game losing streak, I could get on board with it.

Indy 68 NU 51 3 3s 8 wins

Probably were just waiting for someone to strike up the NU fight song, so they could clap along.

Yes they did - they quit - well, Nembhard threw a few elbows and whined quite a bit. But then he went for a nappy like the rest of the blue birds with a minute to go.

Unreal - Fred coached absolute circles around Greggie today.

&*#@^@#F# 89 NU 63

If they get to 18 or 20 teams, basketball scheduling and maintaining relatively balanced schedule strength becomes pretty easy - play everyone 1x and play your "rival" 2x. That gives you 18 or 20 conf games. For a program like NU, dropping back to 18 conf games would be nice - gives you the option of having a couple of non-con cupcakes while you're building the program vs playing Purdue and USC a 2nd time. However, I don't think TV will allow them to go below 20 conference games. Volleyball can follow a model like basketball - easier to have equally balanced schedules with more teams since they play 20 conf matches now. Football becomes trickier the bigger they go for maintaining balance - you almost have to go to 4 pods with 2 rotating pods in each division - not sure they'll do that though. Seems to be a lot of push for no divisions and random schedules. There's no way to maintain balanced schedules that way, unfortunately, but they can have the big names play more often for TV ratings. Baseball plays just 24 conf games out of 56 total, so they could use more conf games. Competitive balance is really out of whack now when you don't play 1/3 of the conf teams each year and there's no divisions. If they have some warm weather sites (USC, UCLA, etc) they can use in Feb and early March, though, they can get really creative with weekend pods and more conference games and find a far better competitive balance than they have now, something like they did during the Covid year. It's going to be very sport specific. Hopefully competitive balance gets most of the consideration, but TV dollars will definitely play a role.

Maybe a B1G East/B1G West challenge as a replacement for ACC/B1G? I think divisions will depend on sport. Non-revenue sports may primarily play in divisions with cross-over games being rare, almost like non-con games. Save some money on travel. Baseball and softball though, I could see them not using divisions and holding as many conference games early in the year as possible at USC & UCLA (if UCLA finally approves jumping to the B1G, that is). Of course, it all depends on when/if the B1G finishes raiding the Pac-?? and adds Oregon, Washington, et al. Whoever the schedule guru is for the B1G is going to earn his/her cash. It's going to be complex and very sport-specific. And the TV folks may have an idea or two. I'd gue$$ the B1G will li$ten to them.

NU 71 BC 60

Happy for the guys to pick up a win in Orlando - whoever called it the Happiest Place on Earth didn't go 0-3 in a tournament down there, clearly. It certainly looks like a different team with Walker on the floor combined with the overall effort they give. Hope we take care of business Wednesday in a very winnable game and then worry about what's coming later. Stay in the moment.

Yeah, if there's anything NU fans have learned in the past couple of decades, it's that no coaching hire is a sure thing. Unfortunately, we've had tons of life lessons on that one. But I think Trev did as well as he possibly could have with Rhule. Hope he does the same when it's time to make the change in hoops. Trev does have a pretty good track record.

Trev handled this football coaching search like an absolute pro - negotiating to have College Game Day interview Rhule live minutes after they announced it is another genius move. As he did at UNO with hockey, when he finds the person he wants as the coach, he's relentless. I don't know if we'll ever get the whole story on how things went with Rhule over the past couple weeks, but I'd guess it wasn't nearly as smooth as we'll publicly be told it was. Yet, Trev ended up hiring the guy he wanted. If and when he does an NU basketball coaching search, it will be done in the same manner. It's just who Trev is. I don't know that he'll pull one of the top candidates for NU hoops like he did in football, but he also has / had a high success rate at UNO with hiring relatively unknown coaches / coaches from a lower level who've taken their UNO programs to higher levels than they were at previously. Considering the limited resources UNO has for everything outside hockey (and even for hockey when compared to the powerhouses), it's a pretty impressive hit rate.

Good idea. What do we have to lose at this point? Maybe he has already made up his mind and is ready to leave, so he wants to preserve the year. But if it's Fred's choice that's he's redshirting, we might as well try having him out there at this point. My thought going into the season was we would surprise a few teams and win some games because we would shoot it really well. I'd say we had one of our better shooting performances in this game and wasted it with 20 turnovers. Having Walker back helps the offense, and he'll take better care of the ball as he gets back in the flow, so we'll probably still steal a few games. But -- breaking news here -- that's nowhere near good enough in year 4.

There aren't any local reporters on site in Orlando to make a request to speak to him. They just pull quotes from Fred from the postgame radio show. Have to wait until the next home game to make a request to talk to him. And he doesn't have to speak if he doesn't want to. No local reporter is going to burn his/her bridges with the athletic dept to try to dig into an issue like this regarding a player if he doesn't want to talk about it, especially for the basketball program. Hell, no local reporter still has been willing to to dig into Frost's off the field issues, and those were way more obvious. Considering that, there's no way any of them are doing it for a basketball player. I'd guess he may choose to speak after a game about the game at some point, but he'll refuse to specifically address what was going on, other than saying he had a "medical issue." They chose that wording for a reason, after all. I'd guarantee that if he doesn't want to talk about it, the matter is officially over as far as the local media is concerned.

NU 68 FSU 64

Couldn't agree more. 95% of D-1 coaches could've done better the past 3+ years that what we've gotten. He just doesn't have the willingness to grind to ever be successful here. Easily one of the two worst OU teams over the past 10+ years, and we were nowhere near good enough. And we had a million chances. 46 points over the final 36+ minutes. Ugh.

Mem 68 NU 57

Amazing game -hard to believe those two teams played a 7-3 game in the final last season. And full-ride offering that kicker after the game was the biggest no-brainer decision on the planet. His kicks looked like NFL-level kicks last night. Brett Maher was a little jealous of the kid's range.

OU 71 NU 61 2