Big 12 Alley-Oops and Airballs is a weekly article examining what’s hot and what’s not in Big 12 basketball.

Conference play is officially underway, and the Big 12 contender picture is becoming a bit less hazy. We know who is legitimate and we know who won’t be making much of a splash. Then, there are those murky teams, the middle-dwellers who appear to have the talent to skyrocket to the top, but have played poorly enough that you wouldn’t be surprised to see them hang out with Texas Tech the remainder of the season (sorry, Lubbock). The coming weeks will show us whether or not they can mature to make a run in the second half of the season, or if they will fizzle into mediocrity.

Alley-Oops

Robinson Has Been Crushing Lately

• Thomas Robinson: In the last week, Robinson has been putting up some Dwight Howard-esque numbers. When hosting North Dakota, Robinson dropped 30 points while pulling down 21 rebounds and dishing out 4 assists. In the Jayhawks’ conference opener, Robinson kept up his hot start to the new year, dropping 15 points and 14 rebounds. If Robinson keeps this up, he will be the clear favorite for Big 12 Player of the Year.
• Missouri’s Offense: We knew this Tiger team would be able to score, but this well? No way. The Tigers lead the nation in field goal percentage, while ranking second in the nation in points per game. Nobody could have predicted the Tigers would be scoring such numbers at such a great efficiency, especially under a first-year coach. If they keep the potency of their offense up, it won’t matter that they now only have seven scholarship players, due to the departure of Mr. Canada, Kadeem Green.

• Baylor: Recently, there has been a lot of focus on the lack of dominant victories the Bears have earned this season en route to its 14-0 record. However, we see this as an opportunity to point toward the potential the Bears have. We know Baylor has yet to play perfect basketball, but, while playing imperfect basketball, they’ve still managed a 14-0 record and a #5 national ranking. Imagine what will happen when they mesh and play great basketball for 40 minutes a night?

Airballs

• The Sunflower Showdown: In the marquee matchup of the Big 12 conference openers, the Kansas-Kansas State game disappointed everybody. Many pundits focused on whether or not the Wildcats could break their tough streak at Allen Fieldhouse. The answer was quickly and apparently no, but Kansas wasn’t very impressive either in a sloppy 67-49 victory.
• Tyshawn Taylor: The turnover travesty continues for Mr. Taylor, as he gave it away eight more times against Kansas State. Taylor is averaging just one more assist per game than he is turnover, which might be bearable if he were a freshmen, but a senior guard has no business turning the ball over this often.
• Oklahoma: The Sooners had an impressive non-conference record, entering Big 12 play with an 10-2 record. I’ll admit, I was high on the Sooners, expecting them to compete with Missouri in their conference opener. Instead, the Sooners were demolished by Missouri, 87-49, looking like the team we thought they might be while filling out our preseason predictions.

cwilliams (48 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 6th, 2012 at 7:49 am by cwilliams and is filed under big 12, microsites. Tagged: big 12. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.