ladyhusker

Good Lord. Brownell is one of the good guys in the business too...when the NCAA-court case dust settles (if anything ever comes of it), he'll be one of the ones still holding onto his job, I think, and coaches with NCAA tournament experience who aren't implicated in all this may be a little harder to come by. But sure, can the best thing that's happened to your program in a while... (oddly, I feel like I could make the same argument here.) Can anyone more tech-competent than I am cut down Kent's GOT IT! from that? I used to have that as my notification whenever I got a text and kind of miss it but my old file was a few phones ago.

This could be the first time I actually agree with you on something...but here it is. GREAT kid, and natural God-given talent like I haven't seen in a Nebraska uniform, but wayyyyyy too passive on the court. I notice people on here saying they want him to be "more selfish"; I'd counter that I'd prefer he just be less passive (which doesn't necessarily mean he takes more shots, but does mean he's more decisive and aggressive with whatever he does, instead of looking like he's not sure he means to do whatever he's doing). The problem, as I would armchair-psychology this one, isn't that he "doesn't know how good he is" (TM the Big Ten Network)...it's that he almost relies too much on his athleticism but doesn't have the motor to match it. He may very well have the physical ability to play in the NBA, but unless something changes, I don't think he's shown that he has the actual drive to play there. Contrast his mental game with Glynn Watson's. Glynn plays hard, every minute on the floor. He may not put up flashy numbers every game, and he'll have mental hiccups like any player, but you have no doubt he's going all-out every time down the floor. He's not timid with the ball in his hands. He's decisive, and I don't recall a time I've ever seen the deer-in-the-headlights look on him, but particularly not so far this year. Put a mentality like that in Isaiah Roby's body and we'd wonder WTH he's doing at Nebraska. Instead, he's like a trumpet player in a jazz band who's incredibly talented but afraid to play the solos. He's got this year to develop at least, and maybe his mental game gets there. I hope it does, both for his sake and the team's. But at the moment, I'd have to agree that the results haven't matched the hype -- or the ability.

He also appears to buy his pants at Forever 21. I don't understand the trend of adult men wearing jeans apparently meant for 14-year-old girls, but it continues nonetheless. Glad we won. Not sure we would have in years past. Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

Palmer clearly hooked right before the goaltend call. Refs missed an easy one there. Also, not sure if this announcer hears himself...Palmer gets a deuce, Tech likes it rough with the bumping and grinding, earlier he said something about Copeland getting a hooker that rimmed around...phrasing, man! Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

Clearly we are not losing because of the officiating. But that doesn't change that it's absolutely piss poor. If I never see Brian O'Connor call one of our games again, I won't be sad. Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

Glynn wearing their defenders like a fur coat but sure, let's call all the fouls in the paint... Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

Yup. Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

Aaaaaand back to the deportes we go. Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

I figured out how to change it over to English but kinda nervous to do it since we've been playing so well en espanol. Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

Un bloc enorme de Isaiah Roby...I don't know a ton of Spanish but got that one pretty well. Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

I had both feeds at first and now it's entirely in Spanish. Anyone else? This is bizarre. Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

Would someone like to remind these commentators that they can talk about the actual game being played and not the benefits of Shot Tracker... even if they aren't forcing us to watch their video game nonsense, they're talking about it. DO NOT WANT Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

At least they started showing the actual game instead of forcing us to watch dots run around a CGI floor? I could not be less interested in shot tracker. Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

Not to stir the pot, but it's referenced upthread here that at least one recruit has committed elsewhere precisely because of the contract extension situation. If one kid actually said it, my guess would be that he's not completely on an island in his line of thinking. I honestly don't follow football recruiting so I would defer to your expertise on that, but I wonder if maybe basketball kids and football kids also think differently? Since (allegedly) it actually HAS cost us a recruit... Maybe it's somewhere in the middle, not as important as the coaches' narrative but still plays a factor...and in that case, I think we're up against enough obstacles in recruiting (especially if we play by the rules -- remember, the FBI stuff is still looming) that it seems unnecessary to decide not to clear one you can actually control. Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

I think this might be an agree-to-disagree thing, but I do think the expected outcome is assumed differently in the two scenarios. A multi-year contract extension assumes good seasons are ahead. A one-year contract extension assumes a poor outcome unless you can prove it wrong. At the risk of getting a little too Eichorst-y, it makes a heck of a difference how you perform when someone thinks you'll succeed vs. when someone thinks you'll fail. Moos and Co. have basically said they expect Miles to fail. How do you go about proving him wrong without turning into Bo Pelini and making it an us-against-them thing? That's a pretty fine line to balance, and while it's possible, I continue to believe that creating the need for it was unnecessary. You can turn your nose up at the "goodwill" stuff, but personally, I think that's a mistake because I think the fact that we're even having this conversation means that it matters.

Here's the thing -- I think 2018-19 is only another do-or-die year because that's what the narrative became after the season. Rewind six-ish weeks. Selection Sunday just happened and we were left out, but Bill Moos had spent the last week calling everyone in his phone to tell them how awesome Nebrasketball is. We're sitting at 22-10, which by most standards (especially in Nebraska) is a good season. We had a double-bye in the Big Ten Tournament, and yes, we lost to Michigan, but so did a couple really good teams, so while that sucks, it's not like we're not in good company. And the NIT may have inexplicably just crapped on us, but it's a team we played once already to start the season and jumped out to a 20-point lead at halftime so a win isn't impossible. Let's say that, at that point, the AD announces that despite what the committee decided, this was a really good season and we believe we're heading the right direction (because dang it, everyone who ever met Bill Moos in a bar once at a Final Four has heard from him this week about how great this team is and why we deserved to be in the tourney), and so with that in mind, we're looking forward to building on this year's success and taking the next step in 2018-19 with Tim Miles, who has received a 2-year extension. Could he still fire Miles if next year goes poorly? Sure. But does it also highlight the good things about this season (I can think of at least 22 of them right off the bat...) and give us a little momentum in the offseason? Yep. Maybe we still lose in Starkville, but maybe everyone isn't so pissed off when they go, knowing that at least their administration thinks they accomplished something. Or maybe we even say this conversation and announcement all happens after Moos and Miles met the first time...probably still works out OK. Instead, we got a whole bunch of silence, a ton of rumors (some of which may or may not be true, but it plants speculation regardless), and now a pall over what could have been a pretty important offseason with a coach who now looks like a lame duck and an AD who looks like he doesn't believe in his coach. All this so he could weigh out whether to fire a guy who just got a school record for conference wins and placed 4th in the Big Ten? Wait on it a year. If we suck, call your coach of choice and offer him a boatload of money then, and we're really no worse for it. If we win, great, we've got a winner. But this do-or-die narrative was cosigned, if not created, by the administration's lack of support and decisive action at the appropriate time. The ultimatum season didn't need to happen. Maybe Shawn Eichorst painted Bill Moos into a corner, but Moos turned around and pooped in it. He (and his staff) had the opportunity to write their own narrative and this is what they chose. I think that's certainly worthy of criticism, because I think all this could have all been avoided with some competent PR, and instead, we're treated to a doom-and-gloom offseason and a pressure cooker inside PBA next year.

To be clear, that's just Miles. That's not the assistants or staff, whose futures are also tied to this, and presumably that was a decent-sized factor in one person deciding that's not a secure enough future and moved on. If we think that won't play a factor in finding a suitable replacement, we're kidding ourselves.

You know, the thing I don't quite understand is the incongruity between what Moos said during the season and what he's now doing afterward. If he was out there stumping for Nebraska to make the dance, it would only make sense to behave as though he believed it was an NCAA-caliber team. If it was an NCAA-caliber team, that means Miles has had two dance-level teams in six years, and in Nebraska that isn't something to sneeze at. If you have a coach who delivers that, you extend him substantially. The fact that he hasn't, is dragging this on, and apparently has kept his coach in the dark on what he's planning, all points to him just paying lip service during the season. If he was campaigning for something he didn't actually even believe himself, why would any committee member (in basketball or any other sport with a subjective committee) take him seriously on anything else down the road? It seems to me like not only is this prolonged decision hurting the basketball program, it hurts Moos' credibility and potentially any other Nebraska sport as well. I know part of it is just how corporate-level sports work, and maybe it's just naive on my part, but I liked to think we were different than that at Nebraska (which was part of why Steve Pedersen and Shawn Eichorst were such poor fits for our culture) and this makes me think Bill Moos, at the core, is no different. Maybe I'm being overdramatic or just melancholy (it's snowing in April, give me a break) but I had hoped for better than this. Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

Surely you mean Carhenge?

Anyone else catch Nick Bahe's conversation with Jake Muhleisen on this topic last week (and subsequent discussion after the interview, including with Kevin Kugler)? I think they were spot-on. Here's the audio from that segment -- honestly, it's worth a listen. Both guys are in the boat that this ongoing NCAA-or-bust mentality isn't healthy for the program, and Jake brought up a great point that it can really screw with how someone coaches when he's constantly in an ultimatum position, especially when it comes to teaching accountability and discipline. With that kind of pressure, the coach gets forced into playing his guys a certain way, where it could be better for the locker room and team in the long run to have the freedom to make tough decisions. In fact, he used a hypothetical with James Palmer, but I'd submit that we've seen it play out already -- recall 2014, with the Deverell Biggs situation. If you put that game in 2018 instead, does Miles feel like he's able to show Biggs the door? I don't think anyone would argue that it wound up being better for the team in the long run, but at the time, it was a gamble with the talent we had available, and it very well could have gone the other way, despite being pretty clearly the right thing to do. Does he have the standing and equity to be able to make the same kind of decision now? Under the current circumstances, I'd say no, and that's to Nebraska's detriment. If you want to cut ties and try another coach, do it. But if you're going to keep him, you have to go all in, because the waffling and ultimatum-style environment isn't good for anyone.

For whatever it's worth, many European leagues cover housing and other living expenses, and the actual cash is somehow tax-free (no idea how that works, just what I've been told). Not saying that it is or isn't worth going over there, and we're obviously not talking vast millions that playing for two years would set him up for life or anything like that... but guys can make a decent living for a few years in one of the better leagues that'd take care of them for another few years after they're done, if they're smart with their money. Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

This also assumes Jacobson is willing to play the 5, which, if I'm remembering correctly, he wasn't, which led to the transfer. It's kind of irrelevant to say he'd be an upgrade at the 5 if he doesn't want to play the 5, isn't it? So if the options are to play at Nebraska behind Copeland (and, if things played out like we had anticipated at the time, Roby, since I don't recall many folks lining him up at the 5 around this time last year -- correct me if I'm wrong on that, though) and spend most of the time on the bench, or transfer to a place with more likely playing time, I understand why he'd make the decision to do that, but also wouldn't fault the coaching staff for recruiting better players at Jacobson's desired position. I think his departure ultimately hurt us more than Morrow's, from the standpoint of doing those little things, but if he was unwilling to play where we needed him, and we had at least one (and, as we thought at the time, probably two) players ahead of him on the depth chart where he wanted to be, I don't really see how things could have gone much differently. No hard feelings there, and like Dean said, I think it probably worked out the best for everyone going the way it did.

I agree it's a big jump, but it's not enough to make up the difference between us and other bubble teams in contention. I guess that's more what I meant, like we'd have a heck of a lot more territory to cover for it to move the needle. I meant more that I agreed with you on Tacko's and Lovett's injuries (and the Big Ten being abnormally bad) being a bigger factor, because the uptick in SOS from beating UCF wasn't going to really make that much of a difference without those other things coming into play.

This is partly right. Had we beaten UCF but lost to WV, we get St. Johns. Our SOS improves from 95 to 81. Had we beaten WV somehow, we get Missouri. Our SOS improves another four points to 77. Better...but not night and day better, and considering how WV was playing at the time and how we were too, that doesn't seem like a super safe bet. But... Let's say we scheduled Western Carolina instead of Delaware State, another low-major (Southern Conference) with a losing record. Only their RPI is 215 instead of 351. That move alone improves our SOS from 95 to 86. Leave that game off entirely and play a D2 instead, and we're at 83 -- comparable to beating UCF and likely winding up with two more losses (not that those matter in the metrics necessarily, but potentially in team confidence heading into that rough stretch). For kicks, if we drop that game AND beat UCF but lose to WV (and so get St. John's again), we're up to 67, and starting to approach an actual bubble team SOS. But that still only gives us one Quad 1 opportunity in WV...UCF and St. John's were not. Personally I think our SOS was hurt more so by Lovett and Tacko getting hurt than by losing to UCF, but it's hard to project that into actual numbers. Had we beaten UCF, that impact becomes even more amplified. The conference really killed us too, but as you pointed out, that's not the norm. But the D2-for-Delaware State swap and subsequent bump in SOS (not to mention RPI) shows how broken this stupid system is.

The more I think about this, the real losers in the whole deal isn't us, and it isn't USC. It's: 1. Low- and mid-majors - both the players and the athletic departments 2. The pay-players crowd The field this year gives teams no reason to try to schedule low- or mid-majors, unless it's the ones who are super good at gaming the RPI system, but that's a gamble. I see the value in not scheduling several weeks of cupcakes, but if games against power opponents are all that matters and you don't know if your conference will be able to deliver those, you need to take your own initiative and schedule as many power opponents in non-conference as possible. That probably comes at the expense of at least a couple buy games against low- and mid-major teams, who rely on those games to fund their athletic department. If they're going to have to compete that much harder for those games, you've basically solidified an entire under-class of teams who now have to be willing to take less money or play on shorter rest or criss-cross the country more, so they can make themselves more attractive to their power conference funding sources. I can't imagine that'll be better for the student-athletes themselves -- which feeds even more into the narrative the pay-players crowd have been talking about (schools/NCAA using the players for money). But the real kicker is that the NCAA can't, on one hand, institute any sort of move to pay players, while on the other, reducing the ability for low- and mid-majors to do that. (Full disclosure: I don't think players should be paid, but can understand the argument, and if I did agree with it, I would be even more livid at the results of this bracket and its implications.) If they had trouble competing with P6 schools before because of money troubles, those are amplified now. If there is to remain one Division 1 "class" of NCAA basketball, the committee has now made it practically impossible to pay players because they just cut the budgets of a good 2/3 of their member institutions. If they go to a system like football, with FCS and FBS, they destroy a lot of what made March Madness so magical. But what they just created is unsustainable for the system as it stands, and makes the the argument for players to be compensated financially a much more uphill battle.