good fit

IF going to the NCAA is the only thing that matters in college basketball (and to many fans, it seems like that must be true), then get your school in the lowest-ranked conference you can find. Then you can go to the NCAA every year. IF being in a prestige conference is all that matters, then do that, but you might never go to postseason if you are perpetually outclassed. Neither of those things is true for me.

I think the SBC is a very good fit for us. Should UNO drop athletics and Denver leaves the conference, I don't know how that will affect us, not having football, but we shall see. For now, I like where we are.

Offseason

It is a long six months from the end of the tournaments to the time when the preseason magazines come out. I try to keep up with recruiting and general NCAA info. And I study a lot of stat sheets of different teams. You can learn a lot about the game just by doing that.

points and coaches

Coaches and point guards are the two factors that often make a team better than it is, i.e., they can make the sum of the parts be greater than the whole. We have seen Shields do that in the past. Here is hoping Bozeman is that sort of a point guard.

Perfect practice

My old music teacher used to tell me, “Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. If you repeat the same mistake, you are only reinforcing your errors.”

Good practice habits make good teams. Good coaches enforce good practice habits.

Big money, low-life

Of all the things in sports that I despise, I suppose taunting by bandwagon-jumpers is at the top of the list. Fans of big-money programs that jeer at players from smaller schools, who are playing their hearts out and doing the best they can. Only truly low-life individuals would do that. There are a lot of them out there.

Neighbour

So we signed Will Neighbour. How good is he? How good can he be? Can he be that player that helps us move up a step? Time will tell. Certainly his signing gives us the tallest lineup I can recall.

slower pace

One of the Pac-10 players gave this logical reason for why so many coaches have their teams play a more deliberate place, despite the fact that many fans (who are into entertainment, not good basketball) prefer run-and-gun. The slower the pace, the lower the fatigue factor. Presumably you start your best five players, and the slower the pace the bigger the percentage of the minutes your best players can be on the floor.

We need a break

This will be a down year for Little Rock. The question is, "How down is 'down'?" Past down years were losing seasons. We just had one of our highest win totals ever. Good job. Now the task it to make sure the down side isn't too far down. We do not need to have a losing season next year. That will be a tough task with all we are losing. Maybe, maybe, or incoming players are as good as we hope they are. We need a break.

focus and concentration

Sustained focus and concentration are such a big part of basketball (and hockey and soccer). In baseball and football the action is strictly segmented. You act, and then you get a break to clear your mind and get focused once again. The batter steps out of the box and sets his mind. In basketball there is much less chance to do that, and a lot of bad things happen because players take mental “break” while the action is going on.

Preseason picks next year

I would not expect us to be picked any higher than 5th, maybe even lower than that.

Basketball traditions? Sure!

In this era when basketball “fans” only follow the sport during the NCAA tournament and get all their information from ESPN, here are a few facts that might have escaped them. Basketball traditions? Sure – but you might not have thought of them in that regard.

Dartmouth has been to the finals of the NCAA twice – 1942 and 1944.
San Fransisco has two NCAA titles and went to the Final Four three consecutive years in the 1950’s.
Before the NCAA tournament, these teams has multiple national championships (as determined by the Helms Foundation): Columbia, Yale, Chicago, Penn.
Wyoming won the Helms title in 1934 and the tournament in 1943.
Navy was undefeated in 1913.

Cali-who-pari?

Who cares, one way or the other!

Cardinals

Some readers have asked me to post about the Cardinals on this blog. We'll see. I frankly have not followed them much the last couple of years. I am so disgusted with the mega-money and the steroids that I have about given up on major league baseball.