mul21

I’ll give him a pass on this year. Between all the transfers out and back in this team never jelled and was a mishmash of parts that didn’t fit together. I feel like Goode missing half the season really affected their ability to build a successful offense. Add in Clark leaving and he did a pretty decent job of making chicken salad out of chicken horsefeathers. I’ll be a lot more skeptical if there are a bunch of transfers this offseason.

On script so far. I hate them. They can jettison Mayer to the Moon right now, if I were Underwood I'd bury him on the bench. Yeah, the absolute garbage 3s have been driving me nuts for a month. This is the dumbest Illinois team since the heyday of the John Groce era.

On script so far. I hate them.

For me, it's the certainty with which he speaks on the 180 opposite viewpoints from people who get paid to do this for a living and the follow up dismissiveness when someone questions his thought process. Plus the weird flow of the writing.

I Suzukid my right oblique last week lifting. Can confirm it sucks. A lot.

He's been placed on indefinite suspension for now. I suspect he'll never umpire another college game again.

I was coming to post the same thing. Not sure I’ve ever seen one that intentionally awful.

If the Illini who showed up for 20 minutes vs. Purdue or 20 minutes vs. Northwestern could somehow appear for most of the game vs. Penn State, they'll roll over the Nittany Lions. Of course, that has not happened all season, no real reason to think it'll happen Thursday. It'll be interesting to see how Underwood tries to limit Pickett. I noticed towards the end of the game at Penn State Pickett had trouble shooting over Melendez with his long arms. I'd try going at Pickett with Melendez and Rogers, I'd also try going after him on the offensive end, take him inside, post him, he's only 6'2'', try to get him foul trouble. I'd avoid putting Rogers on him. They got burned on a couple threes against Purdue the other night because he was sagging off his guy too much and got screened out of an opportunity to challenge an open three because he was just sloppy about his positioning. A couple of those early and Pickett gets hot and it'll be the last matchup all over again.

There was some wonky stuff called on both sides, though none more blatant than that goaltend. I'm sure you can point to several " if that didn't happen then..." calls in a double OT game. That is true, but the problem is it wasn't just one goaltend. There was the blatant basket interference not called on Dickinson, and then an incorrect goaltend called on Hawkins. Within a short period, that was a 4 point swing just on missed goaltending calls alone. In general though, college officiating seems really bad. Refs anticipate or hunt for calls at certain times, them completely ignore them at other times. The charge on Shannon at the very beginning of the game was clearly not a charge, but that ref was just waiting to call it. Then later in the game there was a really weak moving screen called on Michigan that might have been a foul by the letter of the rules but isn't called 90% of the time. And don't get me started on the flop rule - That just needs to go entirely because it is nearly impossible to get right. Yeah, they aren't going to get everything right, but they sure do get a lot wrong. I hate that flop rule so much. It has led to soooooo much more contact in the post in particular because defensive guys are afraid to get called for a flop if they go down when a guy like Dickinson jabs an elbow in their chest. He finally got called for it late in the game last night and I thought Juwan Howard was going to cry when it happened, never mind that he had gotten away with a similar move at least a half dozen times before that and not been called. I 100% agree on the poor officiating and I think it's definitely been worse this year than in recent history. I thought Illinois got the worst of it last night but they were certainly beneficiaries of some bad calls too. There were at least 2 pretty obvious out of bounds calls that went against UI when it should have been their ball on top of the 2 bad goal tend issues. I'm not sure what you do to make it better though. These guys are part timers who work across multiple conferences and don't have any real oversight in any organized fashion.

Every board has its running jokes, please explain this one to the new guy. You're probably going to have to provide pillow gifts and a nacho cheese dispenser to get to the bottom of this one. For real, though, I'll leave it to someone with much better writing and summarization skills than I have to tell the tale. He's just another one of us weirdos who was just a little too weird and was sent packing for his transgressions.

The inconsistency is infuriating. See my comment above about freshman guards.

How the hell did that happen in the 80s?? The early to mid 80s were an offensive feast in the NBA. That Nuggets team averaged 123 a game and I remember going to a Bulls game when Jordan was out with his broken ankle and there was some sort of giveaway if they got to 120 pts.

They sent out a notice a couple weeks ago that they were dropping it.

Freshman guards man. Same problem Illinois is having. Tired legs, bad decisions, amped up pressure are all having a huge effect on those guys. The biggest thing I've notice in particular is Epps from Illinois can't get a 3 to drop to save his life at this point and he shot very well early in the season.

And here's the disconnect. I called the Orlovsky argument bad, and you're looking for "what it's supposed to prove" when I say that. There's no deeper meaning. There's no hidden agenda. It wasn't supposed to prove anything other than the bad argument was bad. "Fields might still be really good despite falling to no. 11 because NFL teams often misevaluate QBs in the draft" is a perfectly fine argument and I agree with it My biggest problem with your he dropped to 11th or whatever is that the current MVP of the league was the 10th pick in the draft and was the 3rd QB taken that year so that's as equally a nebulous and unscientific argument as you're criticizing other people for making. My argument for Fields is that he's shown potential and he has 2 years of development/improvement/knowledge under his belt that you'd be throwing away. I don't think I've seen any indication that any of the guys available this year are considered to be can't miss and/or better prospects than Fields was. I'm no scout but I'll believe the guys who are.

That was the only portion of the game where they were whistle happy. It was a must win for IU. Being at home, and the difference between a win or loss being 3rd place in the conference vs like 9th place. Next 2 are at Michigan St and Purdue so also a potential 4 game losing streak if they lost today. Sounds like Xavier Johnson is coming back before the month is over. And Race looks like he's close to 100% for the first time since his knee injury. Hopefully they can make a run in March. Amazing that they've been able to stay afloat with no true PG. Yeah, that game was called entirely differently the last 7-8 minutes than it was the rest of the way. Just wildly inconsistent and frustrating to watch. Can't ask for a better look to tie the game in the final seconds for Illinois but Melendez has been ice cold since December unfortunately.

That was my biggest beef really. That flag was soooooo late. It was ticky tack anyway, but the late flag made it even worse in my view. Also, it's clear none of you know any KC fans. They're incredibly obnoxious and STL keeps getting more of them since it's a Missouri team and the Rams aren't here anymore. Barf. I was rooting for Philly solely for that reason because KC is super fun to watch.

Was it really all that much continuity? I think the only guys who were on both 3 peat teams were Jordan and Pippen. You had completely different rosters other than those 2.

The Mervis take is something all right.

Ciara or whatever her name is?

Cards and Brewers at 8 and 9 respectively, stupid Dodgers ranked first. Im really surprised the Orioles didn’t sweep all major publications’ farm rankings for the unanimous best farm. Cleveland 2 and Orioles 3.

Law with the Cubs at 10: Cards and Brewers at 8 and 9 respectively, stupid Dodgers ranked first.

Does the cap bump change the Bears off season math at all or was that already figured in to what everyone was projecting?