Well, a lot to get caught up on. Not thrilled about all of it\u2026<\/p>\n
I spent the better part of 11 hours on the couch watching the big conference title games Saturday. Literally. I know I got up to eat dinner. Obviously a few restroom runs. Maybe I ran out to get the mail? Those were momentary breaks, though, and I spent the better part of noon-to\u201311 PM with my ass firmly planted in the same spot.<\/p>\n
Arizona State hammering Iowa State was a surprise. That seemed like a very even game to me on paper going in. I\u2019m not sure ASU is a team you would want to play if you were Texas or Clemson. They have some magic to them, like a six seed that goes on a deep run in March. It would somehow be appropriate if ASU raced through the playoff and pulled off the massive upset to win, since college football is now much more like college basketball. At least in the postseason. Also a reminder that Kansas took the lead on ASU with 2:04 left and gave up the winning score with 16 seconds remaining in October. Gah\u2026<\/p>\n
Georgia pulling the mild upset and knocking off Texas wasn\u2019t a huge surprise. The game was in Atlanta and Kirby Smart clearly has Texas\u2019 number. However, Texas not being able to get the win despite the Bulldogs playing with a backup quarterback for a half is concerning if you\u2019re a Longhorns fan. The good news for Texas is they wouldn\u2019t have to play Georgia for a third time until the national championship game. And with Carson Beck\u2019s health in question, I wouldn\u2019t put big money on the Dawgs getting there.<\/p>\n
The nightcap was the Big 10 game, with a sprinkle of the ACC game late. I really thought Oregon would smack Penn State around. PSU is great against everyone except the elite teams, and the Ducks are elite, sooooo\u2026 Early on it looked like that would be the case. But props to PSU for fighting back and making it a game. The Ducks still look like the best team in the country. Which, of course, means nothing now.<\/p>\n
Seeing Clemson was up big early I totally forgot about the ACC game. I did switch over to see SMU tie it then Clemson kick that huge-ass field goal to clinch their spot in the playoff.<\/p>\n
As for the playoff itself, I don\u2019t have huge problems with how it worked out. I found it interesting that Saturday evening, as Clemson seemed poised to steal a spot, every announcer I heard suggested that was good for Alabama. Which I 1000% did not understand. I guess they assumed SMU would get completely bounced? So I was super glad that Bama was the team that Clemson pushed out of the final bracket. Not that I like Clemson, but at least they earned their way in and didn\u2019t get destroyed by the 13th place school in their conference.<\/p>\n
IU having to go to South Bend was super predictable. All year I\u2019ve been hoping it would be some southern team that had to go into South Bend and deal with cold and maybe snow in the first round. Instead it\u2019s another team from the same state. Not very imaginative, CFP committee!<\/p>\n
I have a hard time seeing any of the road teams getting a win in round one, although IU might have the best chance.<\/p>\n
Assuming chalk holds in the first round, we get an Ohio State – Oregon rematch. Their first meeting seems like a long time ago, and OSU damn near won in Eugene. Now they seem a little Team Turmoil-ish so the gap feels wider than it probably is. Penn State – Boise State is super intriguing, mostly because we don\u2019t know much about BSU. Other than they also played Oregon close early in the season.<\/p>\n
It feels like the champion comes out of the top half of the bracket, meaning either Oregon, Texas, or Ohio State. If you tell me Beck is 100% healthy, Georgia is as good as anyone. Even if he somehow, miraculously heals, I still don\u2019t trust him. I doubt UGa fans do, either.<\/p>\n
Now we get two weeks of discussions about how the format and method of picking teams should be tweaked for next year. I\u2019m already exhausted.<\/p>\n
Speaking of exhausted, this may have been the worst regular season week in recent KU basketball history.<\/p>\n
Going to Creighton and losing by 13, in a game that wasn\u2019t that close, was bad enough. Worse was that half the Bluejays were sick or playing at less than 100% because of injury. Insult to injury is that Pops Isaacs, who dropped 27 on KU, was declared out for the season three days later. Apparently he scored so many points he re-aggravated an injury he had surgery for over the summer and now has to have a second surgery.<\/p>\n
Then a whole level of worseness worse than that was basically not showing up Sunday in Columbia and losing to Missouri. Well, I guess we made a run and got a 20-point deficit down to two late, but that came long after I bailed on the game and spent the lovely afternoon outside doing a final round of fall yard work. Let me tell you, ripping a bunch of shit out of the ground by hand does wonders for eliminating anger and angst caused by sports!<\/p>\n
What was super concerning to me about both these games was that KU seemed disinterested, slow, unsure of themselves, and soft. Both Creighton and Mizzou were engaged, hustled, confident, and tough. If there was a loose ball in either game, there was about a 5% chance KU was getting it. The offense seems disjointed. The defense half-assed and tentative. The guys brought in to solve KU\u2019s shooting woes suddenly can\u2019t hit anything. Hunter Dickinson seems like a different, worse, player than a year ago.<\/p>\n
Now, this is the same team that beat North Carolina, Michigan State, and Duke. Which seems amazing at the moment. There was a lot of anger in the various threads I\u2019m in after Sunday\u2019s game, calling out coaches and players. In the NIL era, there\u2019s way less benefit of the doubt for players we know are making six figures.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a part of me that wonders\/hopes that maybe some horrible virus ripped through the team last week, and that explains how lifeless they looked. A friend suggested perhaps they were worn out after an intense slate of games in November.<\/p>\n
Still, you can\u2019t get up for the Missouri game, something is wrong with you. Maybe it\u2019s too many transfers who don\u2019t understand the meaning of that game. But Mizzou has a bunch of transfers, too, and they seemed engaged. Of course, two of their transfers are KC kids so they were well aware of the history wrapped up when those schools get together. Bill Self needs to get Christian Braun on the phone to explain the rivalry next year.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m going to assume playing time is going to change in the coming weeks. There will be more focus on the 5\u20136\u20137 guys who put in effort and do what Bill Self wants them to do and less emphasis on playing nine or ten each night. Again, NIL era. You\u2019re getting paid to play. If you can\u2019t perform, you don\u2019t deserve the opportunity.<\/p>\n
I wonder if there will also be tweaks to the offense. Dickinson needs to stay in the low post, or at least start there. Having him roam the perimeter to set screens then post when there are 10 seconds left on the shot clock is not working and bogs everything down. Especially since he can\u2019t attack the rim after setting a screen because he\u2019s so big and slow. Play inside out, which focuses on his strengths: low post scoring and passing. He in particular has taken a lot of heat from the fans. Mostly justified as he\u2019s not playing as well as he did this time last year. But the team is kind of built around him and his skills, so might as well go all-in with the HD experience, flaws and all.<\/p>\n
KU should be fine. The shooters are too good to keep shooting this poorly. The new guys who get minutes will continue to get acclimated and some wrinkles will be smoothed out. Self will figure out a way to hide weakness and play to strengths.<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t make the aftertaste of the past week any less bitter, though.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve lost five of their last six. Their defense is truly atrocious. The only positives are that Tyrese Haliburton has shown signs of life, although he was not great last night, and Johnny Furphy has been getting minutes and playing relatively well.<\/p>\n
One game last week, Tuesday night against BD, which entered the game 1\u20135. We were missing two varsity starters due to injury. Over the course of the game we lost another starter who got hurt. We had three girls in foul trouble. At one point we had two JV girls and another one who is basically the last girl on the regular varsity bench playing at the same time. In the fourth quarter. Of a close game. Things were dicey. Had L been healthy, she probably would have been on the court a lot.<\/p>\n
We were down one at the half, built a seven-point lead, then gave it all back and trailed by one going into the fourth quarter. That period was back-and-forth, but we had the ball, tied, with 16 seconds left and inbounding under our own basket. Despite having two timeouts, we didn\u2019t get the ball in. Naturally BD went down and scored with 1.6 seconds left. A lot of dumbness.<\/p>\n
I chose to look at the positive: despite three major injuries and foul issues, we scored 60 points. Last year we only scored 60 points twice, one of those in a double overtime game. If we could just tighten a few things up on both offense and defense, this team could be really solid. The loss dropped us to 3\u20135.<\/p>\n
JV won by 20, which was cool.<\/p>\n
This week is a tough one. Three games. No idea how many of our injured girls will be available. We play a decent 4A team, a 3A Catholic rival with a better record but who is 40-ish spots below us in the computer rankings, and the undefeated #6 2A team that beat us last year.<\/p>\n
So KU is a mess, the Pacers are a bigger mess, and L is injured watching her teammates from the sidelines. Not the most fun week of basketball in our house.<\/p>\n
KU fans got an early Christmas present when Wisconsin hired offensive co-ordinator Jeff Grimes. I don\u2019t think all the problems with this year\u2019s offense were on him – I mentioned often that Jalon Daniels still appeared to be injured early in the year – but it took him way too long to figure out how to mesh with a team that returned almost everyone on offense. He also made a number of bizarre calls. No one was sad to see him leave.<\/p>\n
Jim Zebrowski takes over as new OC. He coached under Andy Kotelnicki. He was also the acting OC in the bowl game last year, when KU was unstoppable. I approve.<\/p>\n
Defensive coordinator Brian Borland also retired, to the surprise of few. He had been rumored to be close to calling it quits for a couple years. Not sure if that meant he was half-assing it and helps explain some of KU\u2019s defensive issues, but it will be good to get someone new blood in charge. Lance Leipold also stayed in-house here, elevating D.K. McDonald. I don\u2019t know much about McDonald, so not sure what to think.<\/p>\n
There was a lot of chatter about Texas A&M co-DC Jordan Peterson being a target. Peterson had coached at KU for four years and was responsible for recruiting several of KU\u2019s best players, including DJ Warner, the highest rated recruit in school history who announced he was entering the portal last week. McDonald got the job so quickly I don\u2019t know if that meant overtures were made to Peterson and he declined, or Leipold was just more comfortable going with McDonald.<\/p>\n
Both new coordinators will need to hit the portal hard to fill a lot of holes left by graduating seniors.<\/p>\n
And in news that received decidedly mixed reaction, Daniels announced that he would return for his final year of eligibility. Two years ago he was the savior of the program. Now a lot of people would rather roll with a freshman next year. Most of that is because Daniels has never had a full, healthy season at KU. There\u2019s not much reason to expect he will be healthy for 12 games next year. Aside from health concerns, maybe having Zebrowski in charge of the offense will be better for JD\u2019s game.<\/p>\n
I was excited about Isaiah Marshall potentially starting next year. Now I\u2019m hoping he is patient enough to get a few spot starts in \u201925 when JD is hurt and then be ready to take over as a sophomore in \u201926.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, a lot to get caught up on. Not thrilled about all of it\u2026 College Football I spent the better part of 11 hours on the couch watching the big conference title games Saturday. Literally. I know I got up to eat dinner. Obviously a few restroom runs. Maybe I ran out to get the mail? Those were momentary breaks, though, and I spent the better part of noon-to\u201311 PM with my ass firmly planted in the same spot. Arizona State hammering Iowa State was a surprise. That seemed like a very even game to me on paper going in. I\u2019m not sure ASU is a team you would want to play if you were Texas or Clemson. They have some magic to them, like a six seed that goes on a deep run in March. It would somehow be appropriate if ASU raced through the playoff and pulled off the massive upset to win, since college football is now much more like college basketball. At least in the postseason. Also a reminder that Kansas took the lead on ASU with 2:04 left and gave up the winning score with 16 seconds remaining in October. Gah\u2026 Georgia pulling the mild upset and knocking off Texas wasn\u2019t a huge surprise. The game was in Atlanta and Kirby Smart clearly has Texas\u2019 number. However, Texas not being able to get the win despite the Bulldogs playing with a backup quarterback for a half is concerning if you\u2019re a Longhorns fan. The good news for Texas is they wouldn\u2019t have to play Georgia for a third time until the national championship game. And with Carson Beck\u2019s health in question, I wouldn\u2019t put big money on the Dawgs getting there. The nightcap was the Big 10 game, with a sprinkle of the ACC game late. I really thought Oregon would smack Penn State around. PSU is great against everyone except the elite teams, and the Ducks are elite, sooooo\u2026 Early on it looked like that would be the case. But props to PSU for fighting back and making it a game. The Ducks still look like the best team in the country. Which, of course, means nothing now. Seeing Clemson was up big early I totally forgot about the ACC game. I did switch over to see SMU tie it then Clemson kick that huge-ass field goal to clinch their spot in the playoff. As for the playoff itself, I don\u2019t have huge problems with how it worked out. I found it interesting that Saturday evening, as Clemson seemed poised to steal a spot, every announcer I heard suggested that was good for Alabama. Which I 1000% did not understand. I guess they assumed SMU would get completely bounced? So I was super glad that Bama was the team that Clemson pushed out of the final bracket. Not that I like Clemson, but at least they earned their way in and didn\u2019t get destroyed by the 13th place school in their conference. IU having to go to South Bend was super predictable. All year I\u2019ve been hoping it would be some southern team that had to go into South Bend and deal with cold and maybe snow in the first round. Instead it\u2019s another team from the same state. Not very imaginative, CFP committee! I have a hard time seeing any of the road teams getting a win in round one, although IU might have the best chance. Assuming chalk holds in the first round, we get an Ohio State – Oregon rematch. Their first meeting seems like a long time ago, and OSU damn near won in Eugene. Now they seem a little Team Turmoil-ish so the gap feels wider than it probably is. Penn State – Boise State is super intriguing, mostly because we don\u2019t know much about BSU. Other than they also played Oregon close early in the season. It feels like the champion comes out of the top half of the bracket, meaning either Oregon, Texas, or Ohio State. If you tell me Beck is 100% healthy, Georgia is as good as anyone. Even if he somehow, miraculously heals, I still don\u2019t trust him. I doubt UGa fans do, either. Now we get two weeks of discussions about how the format and method of picking teams should be tweaked for next year. I\u2019m already exhausted. KU Hoops Speaking of exhausted, this may have been the worst regular season week in recent KU basketball history. Going to Creighton and losing by 13, in a game that wasn\u2019t that close, was bad enough. Worse was that half the Bluejays were sick or playing at less than 100% because of injury. Insult to injury is that Pops Isaacs, who dropped 27 on KU, was declared out for the season three days later. Apparently he scored so many points he re-aggravated an injury he had surgery for over the summer and now has to have a second surgery. Then a whole level of worseness worse than that was basically not showing up Sunday in Columbia and losing to Missouri. Well, I guess we made a run and got a 20-point deficit down to two late, but that came long after I bailed on the game and spent the lovely afternoon outside doing a final round of fall yard work. Let me tell you, ripping a bunch of shit out of the ground by hand does wonders for eliminating anger and angst caused by sports! What was super concerning to me about both these games was that KU seemed disinterested, slow, unsure of themselves, and soft. Both Creighton and Mizzou were engaged, hustled, confident, and tough. If there was a loose ball in either game, there was about a 5% chance KU was getting it. The offense seems disjointed. The defense half-assed and tentative. The guys brought in to solve KU\u2019s shooting woes suddenly can\u2019t hit anything. Hunter Dickinson seems like a different, worse, player than a year ago. Now, this is the same team that beat North Carolina, Michigan State, and Duke. Which seems amazing at the moment. There was a lot of anger in the various threads I\u2019m in after Sunday\u2019s game, calling out coaches and players. In the NIL era, there\u2019s way less benefit of the doubt for players we know are making six figures. There\u2019s a part of me that wonders\/hopes that maybe some horrible virus ripped through the team last week, and that explains how lifeless they looked. A friend suggested perhaps they were worn out after an intense slate of games in November. Still, you can\u2019t get up for the Missouri game, something is wrong with you. Maybe it\u2019s too many transfers who don\u2019t understand the meaning of that game. But Mizzou has a bunch of transfers, too, and they seemed engaged. Of course, two of their transfers are KC kids so they were well aware of the history wrapped up when those schools get together. Bill Self needs to get Christian Braun on the phone to explain the rivalry next year. I\u2019m going to assume playing time is going to change in the coming weeks. There will be more focus on the 5\u20136\u20137 guys who put in effort and do what Bill Self wants them to do and less emphasis on playing nine or ten each night. Again, NIL era. You\u2019re getting paid to play. If you can\u2019t perform, you don\u2019t deserve the opportunity. I wonder if there will also be tweaks to the offense. Dickinson needs to stay in the low post, or at least start there. Having him roam the perimeter to set screens then post when there are 10 seconds left on the shot clock is not working and bogs everything down. Especially since he can\u2019t attack the rim after setting a screen because he\u2019s so big and slow. Play inside out, which focuses on his strengths: low post scoring and passing. He in particular has taken a lot of heat from the fans. Mostly justified as he\u2019s not playing as well as he did this time last year. But the team is kind of built around him and his skills, so might as well go all-in with the HD experience, flaws and all. KU should be fine. The shooters are too good to keep shooting this poorly. The new guys who get minutes will continue to get acclimated and some wrinkles will be smoothed out. Self will figure out a way to hide weakness and play to strengths. That doesn\u2019t make the aftertaste of the past week any less bitter, though. Pacers They\u2019ve lost five of their last six. Their defense is truly atrocious. The only positives are that Tyrese Haliburton has shown signs of life, although he was not great last night, and Johnny Furphy has been getting minutes and playing relatively well. HS Hoops One game last week, Tuesday night against BD, which entered the game 1\u20135. We were missing two varsity starters due to injury. Over the course of the game we lost another starter who got hurt. We had three girls in foul trouble. At one point we had two JV girls and another one who is basically the last girl on the regular varsity bench playing at the same time. In the fourth quarter. Of a close game. Things were dicey. Had L been healthy, she probably would have been on the court a lot. We were down one at the half, built a seven-point lead, then gave it all back and trailed by one going into the fourth quarter. That period was back-and-forth, but we had the ball, tied, with 16 seconds left and inbounding under our own basket. Despite having two timeouts, we didn\u2019t get the ball in. Naturally BD went down and scored with 1.6 seconds left. A lot of dumbness. I chose to look at the positive: despite three major injuries and foul issues, we scored 60 points. Last year we only scored 60 points twice, one of those in a double overtime game. If we could just tighten a few things up on both offense and defense, this team could be really solid. The loss dropped us to 3\u20135. JV won by 20, which was cool. This week is a tough one. Three games. No idea how many of our injured girls will be available. We play a decent 4A team, a 3A Catholic rival with a better record but who is 40-ish spots below us in the computer rankings, and the undefeated #6 2A team that beat us last year. So KU is a mess, the Pacers are a bigger mess, and L is injured watching her teammates from the sidelines. Not the most fun week of basketball in our house. KU Football KU fans got an early Christmas present when Wisconsin hired offensive co-ordinator Jeff Grimes. I don\u2019t think all the problems with this year\u2019s offense were on him – I mentioned often that Jalon Daniels still appeared to be injured early in the year – but it took him way too long to figure out how to mesh with a team that returned almost everyone on offense. He also made a number of bizarre calls. No one was sad to see him leave. Jim Zebrowski takes over as new OC. He coached under Andy Kotelnicki. He was also the acting OC in the bowl game last year, when KU was unstoppable. I approve. Defensive coordinator Brian Borland also retired, to the surprise of few. He had been rumored to be close to calling it quits for a couple years. Not sure if that meant he was half-assing it and helps explain some of KU\u2019s defensive issues, but it will be good to get someone new blood in charge. Lance Leipold also stayed in-house here, elevating D.K. McDonald. I don\u2019t know much about McDonald, so not sure what to think. There was a lot of chatter about Texas A&M co-DC Jordan Peterson being a target. Peterson had coached at KU for four…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31,52,67,13,41,58],"class_list":["post-15934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-basketball","tag-college-sports","tag-football","tag-high-school-sports","tag-indiana-pacers","tag-kansas-jayhawks"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15934"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15936,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15934\/revisions\/15936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}