- Kids seem to love texting these days. Almost every time I see someone college age or younger they seem to be texting someone on their phone. I am not sure why they have so much to say, but they seem to need to tell somebody something. Of course, most of them realize that there are sometimes where it is not appropriate to be sending texts. Marshall‘s Justin Coleman does not appear to be one of those people as the freshman guard was suspended indefinitely for using his cell phone to text during a loss to Belmont on Sunday. Coleman, who was a top 50 recruit and had an offer to go to Louisville before failing to qualify academically, was averaging 6.2 points and 2.9 rebounds per game on a very solid Marshall team. While using a texting seems like a very minor offense doing so during a game is so idiotic that we have no idea how long Coleman will be suspended for before he is let back on the team.
- Missouri may have improved to 14-0 last night, but their shrinking roster has to be of some concern to their fans as they lost Kadeem Green yesterday when the redshirt freshman announced that he would be transferring. While the Tigers appear to be firing on all cylinders although against an admittedly weak schedule it has to be concerning that they now only have seven scholarship players and only two of those players are taller than 6’6″. We have been impressed by what the Tigers have done so far, but with their lack of size and depth we cannot imagine that their torrid shooting (#1 in the nation in effective field goal percentage at 59.6% at the time this was posted) will keep up and suspect that those shortcomings may rear their ugly head at an inopportune time later in the season.
- Yesterday, we brought you an annual stock report from Seth Davis where he rated teams based on buy, sell, and hold ratings. That was followed up by column from his colleague Luke Winn revising some of the predictions that Winn had made back in October. Winn touches on everything from the surprising/disappointing teams, players living up to or falling short of expectations, and overall conference strength. While it lacks the fancy graphs and volume of advanced statistical analysis we usually see from Winn it is a solid accompaniment to the Davis stock report from the day before.
- Have you ever really hated an opposing player? All of us have had at least one experience where we grew to hate a rival player. However, most of us do not go to the lengths that Iona point guard Scott Machado did growing up. In a profile in The Wall Street Journal, Machado discusses his hatred of Michael Jordan, who tortured Machado’s favorite NBA team the New York Knicks. He grew to despise Jordan so much that Machado, born Michael Scott Machado, told people to stop calling him Michael, Mike, or any variation of it. In addition to that amusing anecdote, the piece also discusses Machado’s growth as a player and how his experience playing for Brazil in the World University Games this past summer helped raise his game to another level.
- One of the ongoing debates in the college basketball world is the place of advanced statistics versus going by what you see on the court. As we have said before in this space, we like to adopt a hybrid approach where we combine the two. Kevin Pelton of Basketball Prospectus appears to feel the same way and explains his thought process Venn diagrams to show the intersection of scouting, individual stats, and plus-minus stats. The first two categories are probably what you would consider traditional scouting categories while the third would presumably fall under the sabermetric category although it is used so frequently and is so basic in its original form that some would almost consider it antiquated. Using various college and NBA examples, Pelton argues that while we should consider all three areas we also need to consider context adjusting for sample size and at times we need to weigh some categories as relatively more or less important than other categories. We think that this something that all but the most ardent traditional or advanced sabermetric practitioner can agree upon.