1. We expected last night’s match-up between Oklahoma and Villanova to be one of the more entertaining non-conference games this season. Instead, Oklahoma’s 78-55 victory appears to have sent the two teams headed in opposite directions at least in terms of how they are being perceived. Coming into the season we thought that everybody had Oklahoma on their short list of potential Final Four teams given their combination of talent and experience while Villanova was probably slightly below them. Last night’s blowout will do nothing to open up seats on the Sooner bandwagon, but it has made many question Villanova’s ceiling particularly with their reliance on three-point shooting (and more importantly their inability to hit three-pointers consistently given how many of them they shoot). Having said that we wouldn’t be so quick to bail on the Wildcats particularly given with their best player being a freshman (Jalen Brunson) playing in his first big college game against more experienced opposition.
2. By now all of you are familiar with Jay Bilas and his penchant for trying to pick fights with the NCAA. Still his tweet yesterday that his “sources” had told him that the NCAA was discussing enacting new policies to limit bench celebrations was a little bit much even by his standards. David Worlock quickly squelched those rumors by saying that the NCAA had merely responded to questions regarding rules interpretations of bench celebrations and that those celebrations were not interfering with the games. We are sure that Bilas will try to argue that he was not incorrect (technically the NCAA may have had discussions about it based on the questions), but the overall nature of his tweet and many others like it seem to have devolved into nothing more than trolling the NCAA, which is approaching Bayless/Trump levels at this point. We can’t really fault Bilas for this because he has parlayed this into a very profitable venture that has made him into a media personality despite his livelihood essentially being profiting off the work of the same individuals he says continue to be exploited. The NCAA has plenty of issues that should be fixed so it doesn’t need trolls making up stories like this for their own personal gain.
3. It appears that Chipotle’s E. coli problems may have hit Boston as eight Boston College basketball players appear to be the latest victims of the burrito chain’s ongoing food poisoning issues. According to reports out of Chestnut Hill, the eight players are among 30 Boston College students complaining of symptoms consistent with food poisoning. While many national media outlets will be quick to claim that there is an established link and that the symptoms are directly related to eating at Chipotle, the actual investigation by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health will takes days (more likely weeks). In the mean time, the basketball team will have to figure out if it will be ready for its game tomorrow at Providence. We cannot remember the last time a game was cancelled because of team illness, but this seems like a distinct possibility right now.
4. We don’t talk about high school basketball much here with the exception of a few top recruits, but when a high school hires former Rutgers coach Mike Rice to coach its basketball team we take notice. Rice, who was fired in 2013 after multiple video surfaced of him throwing balls at his players and berating them with slurs, will serve as the interim head coach at The Patrick School in Elizabeth, New Jersey for the month of December while the regular head coach deals with his duties as the principal before presumably returning to coach the team afterwards. We aren’t sure what is so special about this month that it requires the principal’s attention more than other months as it seems more like a nice excuse to give Rice a trial run as its head coach without as much scrutiny as they would see if he was named the head coach without having an interim tag attached. While we feel that Rice deserves another shot, we expect that the practices will be the most closely supervised high school basketball practices in the nation.
5. We are a little late in posting Luke Winn’s Power Rankings, which explains Villanova being ranked over Oklahoma, but as usual it is filled with interesting stats so it’s still well worth linking to despite our tardiness. It’s still early in the season so we are not sure which stats Luke will adopt as his pet projects this year, but our favorite one so far this year is his Transition/Press Matrix that graphs the relationship between how much a team presses and how much of its offense it generates in transition. Technically we think the x- and y-axis should probably be flipped, but it doesn’t really matter in this case as the analysis still holds. If he continues to track this, which seems like more work than the Turnometer, we will be interested to see if these relationships change in conference play where schools will presumably play better competition than what they faced in non-conference play.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2015 at 7:15 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: boston college, jay bilas, mike rice, oklahoma, villanova. 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.