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It would mine too, but for some strange reason I'm not too concerned about that today :D

Once the games start today, I'm sure that the discussion will turn back to the 2nd round. Can somebody give me a detailed breakdown on UCLA before tonight's game please? Thanks in advance. They guard the heck out of you. They have three strong guards. Two good post defenders. They can struggle at times to score if you can pressure their guards. If you guys shoot the ball well it should be a good game. If DJ White no-shows a half like he did against Gonzaga you could be in real trouble. Thanks-I figured that Calloway should be able to slow Collison down (I think he's our best perimeter defender) and then Wilmont/Ratliff should be able to do a decent job on Afflalo. Are they great on the boards? That's where I could definitely see IU getting in some trouble if they give up a lot of offensive rebounds. IU will definitely have to have Wilmont and Ratliff both shooting the 3 ball well though to win. Well Matta and Mtouh(sp?) are decent rebounders. I think if you guys beat them you will have to really ugly the game up, the bad thing is they tend to play that way some too. Howand's teams guard and get after it. I think you could win this game, but I wouldn't be that way. If you had Gordon on your team now I would like your chances a lot more. I'm not expecting IU to win-I think they have a shot, but I'm not that optimistic about it. I do agree that with Gordon I'd be a lot more hopeful-IU goes in some droughts against opponents with good defenses because they have nobody who can create their own shot off the dribble. Gordon will give us that extra dimension next year (and from what I've heard, White will likely be back to team up with him as well).

I agree but I don't see Cotts being sent down. It would be like the Cubs admitting that the Sox got the better of the trade (although, Aardsma is in jeopardy of not making their team as well)--I heard Paul Sullivan make this point on the radio-- Cotts may be in the bullpen whether we like it or not. Hendry may force Lou's hand on this one. That would sorta go against the grain of everything Lou has been saying during Spring Training. He said he was going to take the best guys with him to Chicago. Cotts is not one of those guys right now. The problem is that he also said that he's not looking at Guzman as a reliever whatsoever-which if Guzman is sent to Iowa just so he can start, Cotts may slide into a bullpen role almost by default as the only long man.

Once the games start today, I'm sure that the discussion will turn back to the 2nd round. Can somebody give me a detailed breakdown on UCLA before tonight's game please? Thanks in advance. They guard the heck out of you. They have three strong guards. Two good post defenders. They can struggle at times to score if you can pressure their guards. If you guys shoot the ball well it should be a good game. If DJ White no-shows a half like he did against Gonzaga you could be in real trouble. Thanks-I figured that Calloway should be able to slow Collison down (I think he's our best perimeter defender) and then Wilmont/Ratliff should be able to do a decent job on Afflalo. Are they great on the boards? That's where I could definitely see IU getting in some trouble if they give up a lot of offensive rebounds. IU will definitely have to have Wilmont and Ratliff both shooting the 3 ball well though to win.

I just checked-Miller faced the entire Diamondbacks starting lineup (all 8 of them) last time out, and the time before that he faced about half the Padres hitters with the rest of them being their major league backups, not their minor leaguers (for example, Walker in for M. Giles).

I would also agree with this-as long as he is behind Theriot on the depth chart, I have no problem with him being the second backup middle infielder. I'm sure there are preferable options out there, but I'm not going to be upset if he's brought back after Detroit releases him. Also remember that the main time that the second backup might even get to pinch-hit is when DeRosa and Theriot are both playing in the field against left-handed pitchers, and Neifi is at least somewhat better against left-handed pitching.

Once the games start today, I'm sure that the discussion will turn back to the 2nd round. Can somebody give me a detailed breakdown on UCLA before tonight's game please? Thanks in advance.

http://www.sportsline.com/columns/story/10058201 Here some more of Doyel's work. He thinks a lot of your coach too. And even if this article is true we still beat IU 2 of 3 times this year. So what does that say about your caoch who was outcoached by ours twice? Yeah, I wouldn't read any of Doyel's columns and put too much into them. He loves to spew hatred to anybody and everything, from most of his columns to his readers in his mailbags. I did hear that his column about Oklahoma is coming from a biased perspective though (some connection with Oklahoma-I think alum)-so when bad things started happening there, he started to spew hate to anybody and everybody that had done wrong to their program. Plus I love people like Bruno. Yes we know there are problems in place at our school. But, what can we do? We can't fire him he has won 80% of his games. Who would take a job where they fired the previous guys who won at that high of a clip? He still has two years left. I think he is in way over his head. Agreed-I think you have to give him at least one more year. If he struggles next year, then with 1 year left is the typical time where you either fire a coach or give him an extension, and you can just fire him then. Sadly he will have done real damage at that point. We need a big recruiting year in here somewhere. 2010 will be it since all hte big Illiniois players are locks for us. Crandle Head, DeAndre McCammey, and Jereme Richmond. Richmond the best player has already verballed to us. The other two have brothers who play or played here. That said I think Weber can X and O us to this point each year, I just hope we don't accept that. I agree he will already have done damage at that point, but like you said there's really nothing you can do right now. I understand completely what you're going through-IU was going through the same thing a couple of years ago. A coach with success early, then strarted getting 2nd place on every big recruit (Villenueva, Humphries, the list goes on and on). When we finally did get a recruit that was great in Josh Smith, he waited until May and then suddenly changed his mind and went to the NBA. The administration couldn't fire him because of the recent success until serious damage had been done to the program. The situations are not quite analogous, but they are very, very close.

http://www.sportsline.com/columns/story/10058201 Here some more of Doyel's work. He thinks a lot of your coach too. And even if this article is true we still beat IU 2 of 3 times this year. So what does that say about your caoch who was outcoached by ours twice? Yeah, I wouldn't read any of Doyel's columns and put too much into them. He loves to spew hatred to anybody and everything, from most of his columns to his readers in his mailbags. I did hear that his column about Oklahoma is coming from a biased perspective though (some connection with Oklahoma-I think alum)-so when bad things started happening there, he started to spew hate to anybody and everybody that had done wrong to their program. Plus I love people like Bruno. Yes we know there are problems in place at our school. But, what can we do? We can't fire him he has won 80% of his games. Who would take a job where they fired the previous guys who won at that high of a clip? He still has two years left. I think he is in way over his head. Agreed-I think you have to give him at least one more year. If he struggles next year, then with 1 year left is the typical time where you either fire a coach or give him an extension, and you can just fire him then.

http://www.sportsline.com/columns/story/10058201 Here some more of Doyel's work. He thinks a lot of your coach too. And even if this article is true we still beat IU 2 of 3 times this year. So what does that say about your caoch who was outcoached by ours twice? Yeah, I wouldn't read any of Doyel's columns and put too much into them. He loves to spew hatred to anybody and everything, from most of his columns to his readers in his mailbags. I did hear that his column about Oklahoma is coming from a biased perspective though (some connection with Oklahoma-I think alum)-so when bad things started happening there, he started to spew hate to anybody and everybody that had done wrong to their program.

Ok-I'm actually surprised an NBA Bill Belicheck type of coach hasn't tried to use that rule to their advantage yet and have a player fake an injury to get a great free throw shooter on the line during a crucial situation.

Injury? I thought maybe so, but then I thought I saw McBride in the game on the next defensive possession-I'm not watching the TV currently though so they may be explaining it right now though-so if they do, I haven't heard it yet. :D

I wouldn't say that quite yet-Guzman had good stuff, and his defense did make it worse for him overall, although he was still very hittable. I think Miller has the lead at this point though, and Guzman has some ground to make up if he wants to take the job.

Wait a minute-if McBride got fouled on a 3 point shot, then how did he shoot the first 2 and then Meachem get to shoot the last one? Did Weber pull a fast one on the officials, or was there something that I missed?

I don't think Guzman established himself as the clear favorite with this outing-but neither do I think is he out of the race yet. Here are the side by side stats of their last start (just for curiosity's sake-it's hard to know for sure whose outing was better when we saw one of the starts and didn't get to see the other one, as we know defense contributed to at least one or two runs of Guzman but we don't know for sure if that was the case for Miller or not): Miller: 4.0 IP, 5 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 2 BB, 5 K, 1 HR allowed Guzman: 3.2 IP, 7 H, 5 R, 5 ER, 1 BB, 0 K, 1 HBP, 0 HR allowed

That's going to be a tough performance to judge. Stuff wise, Guzman looked great. I thought that his stuff looked good a few times last year though when he was getting drilled. The defense could have not let runners move up a couple of times, or could possibly have not allowed a hit or two to go through-but there were a lot of solid hits, and one or two solid outs also (the play Lee made in the 1st for example). I'd say it was about on the same level of Miller's last performance-maybe a little worse, but it's hard to tell for sure without knowing what Miller's stuff was like last time.

At least 1 of the runs was his fault-he gave up 3 straight singles-1 run would at least have scored even if there hadn't been 2 misplays allowing runners to move up.

I don't know what you expected but that is about as bad a line as it gets. Maybe he expected him to be more like these NL East players who got at least 100 AB's: Pete Orr-.253/.277/.344 Todd Pratt-.207/.272/.341 Alfredo Amezaga-.260/.332/.332 Matt Treanor-.229/.328/.318 Reggie Abercrombie-.212/.271/.333 Lastings Milledge-.241/.310/.380 Chris Woodward-.211/.289/.311 Kazuo Matsui-.200/.235/.269 Sal Fasano-.243/.284/.386 Abraham Nunez-.211/.303/.277 Jose Guillen-.216/.276/.398 Robert Fick-.266/.324/.344 Marlon Byrd-.223/.317/.350 Damian Jackson-.198/.295/.371 Royce Clayton-.269/.315/.348 Brian Schneider-.256/.320/.329 Bernie Castro-.227/.286/.291 Remember when everyone on this board, myself included, wanted the Cubs to go after Kaz for our long-term solution at SS. Don't we all look foolish now. Not pursuing Kaz may be the best decision Hendry ever made. To be fair, when I posted those numbers, I was looking at the different team statistics-so Matsui's numbers there are only his time with the Mets. He was very, very good after going to the Rockies last year-so good in fact that it even raised his overall OPS between the two clubs to 679 :D

yeouch the scary thing is-there were 6 position players with more than 100 plate appearances who were actually worse than that, including a player who managed a 389 OPS.

That's a game I'm going to be watching very closely-I think there's a small but reasonable shot at an upset there.

I don't know about that-UNLV-GT looks like it could be close in the second half-UNLV is only up by 5.

I thought they wanted it to be every 4 years in the future, but would push the next one up to the third year (2009) to keep it from butting up against the World Cup of Futbol and Olympic years. 2013, 2017, 2021. It seems you are right-I thought they had originally said 2 (and I can't find anything from when they originally announced it as far as future schedule) but they definitely by the time the first tournament happened had decided on 200 9 and then every 4 years after that.

I think the original schedule was for it to be every 2 years, but they probably have at least pushed this one back a year to consider fully how the first one went and how to make it better.

I definitely think the fact that there were only 2 close games in the last minute out of 16 really hurt the day yesterday. Looking back on the first round last year: You had 8 seed GW beating 9 seed UNC-Wilmington by 3 12 seed Texas A&M upset Syracuse 14 seed Northwestern State beating 3 seed Iowa by 1 10 seed NC State beating 7 seed California 8 seed Kentucky beating 9 seed UAB in a close game by 5 11 seed George Mason beating 6 seed Michigan State 3 seed UNC only beating 14 seed Murray State by 4 2 seed Tennessee needing a last second shot to beat 15 seed Winthrop by 2 12 seed Montana beating 5 seed Nevada 4 seed BC beating 13 seed Pacific in double OT 11 seed Wisconsin-Milwaukee beating 6 seed Oklahoma 7 seed Georgetown beating 10 seed Northern Iowa in a close game by 5 9 seed Bucknell beating 8 seed Arkansas by 4 13 seed Bradley beating 4 seed Kansas 6 seed Indiana needing a 3 pointer with less than 10 seconds to play to beat 11 seed SDSU 3 seed Gonzaga beating 14 seed Xavier by only 4 10 seed Alabama beating 7 seed Marquette So last year in the first round-8 double digit seeds advanced. Also, several top ranked teams received scares, with a 15, two 14s, a 13, an 11 , and a 10 almost advancing. Also, 3 of the 4 8/9 games were quality games. So far this year you have one double digit seed advancing, and 1 good 8/9 game. So today would have to be upsets galore to even get close to last year.

I don't know what you expected but that is about as bad a line as it gets. Maybe he expected him to be more like these NL East players who got at least 100 AB's: Pete Orr-.253/.277/.344 Todd Pratt-.207/.272/.341 Alfredo Amezaga-.260/.332/.332 Matt Treanor-.229/.328/.318 Reggie Abercrombie-.212/.271/.333 Lastings Milledge-.241/.310/.380 Chris Woodward-.211/.289/.311 Kazuo Matsui-.200/.235/.269 Sal Fasano-.243/.284/.386 Abraham Nunez-.211/.303/.277 Jose Guillen-.216/.276/.398 Robert Fick-.266/.324/.344 Marlon Byrd-.223/.317/.350 Damian Jackson-.198/.295/.371 Royce Clayton-.269/.315/.348 Brian Schneider-.256/.320/.329 Bernie Castro-.227/.286/.291 When your 25th man who just made the team because of a hot ST beats the line of 17 position players in one division with similar at-bats, that's probably a little above expectations. Also, it is not nearly the worst line someone can get-there are at least several on there that are much worse, and if the other 5 divisions were looked at I'd bet there were at least 30-40 more around the majors. Now, that doesn't mean Pagan is good-the mere fact that he exceeded expecations with his .700 is enough to make him easily expendable. He wasn't a unique bench player with his line though-just about every major league bench has a couple of players that are around or below that line. Yea, he's the skinnest fat person weighing over 600 pounds. He stinks, his line stinks and there's no getting around it. And to say he wasn't as bad as expected is to say that nothing was expected of him. I'm just saying that when you're saying that it's just as bad of a line as it gets you are implying that he was one of the worst players in the league, when in actuality for a bench player he was probably close to the median. Now you could say that most bench players stink, and I would agree with you-that's why they are bench players. Pagan was not a bad bench option though last year.