Weekend Rewind!

The Wacky Pac-10! The #10 team beats the #1 team on the road. Stanford loses its first home conference game to Arizona who all of a sudden decides to play defense like Arizona teams of the past. And then to make things more exciting, USC dominates UCLA (!). At this rate, all Pac-10 teams will end up in the NIT ;-)

Jim Boheim's record is a fraud. Why? Because every year, he plays a very soft OOC schedule, with most of the games at the Carrier Dome against cupcakes or mid-majors. In other words, he is guaranteed a solid 8-10 OOC wins every year. So his "excellent" record has a low RPI! OTOH, you can partially justify the schedule for this season because he is playing a very tough Big East schedule.

Jimmy Dykes is about 500 years behind the current times. This time he said something about "sister at a frat party". This is almost as bad as considering the wife and kids as someone's "valuable possessions". I mean, come on! This is 2006, not 1006!

Beano Cook brought up something that I absolutely agree with during one of his itnerviews on ESPN-News. People in the media have no clue on what an upset really is. #17 Ohio State beating #9 Illinois at Value City arena is not an upset. Just because there is a different of 8 positions in the stupid poll? Come on!

And something for the number crunchers: During games, the stats people show us the Free Throw percentage of a team for the whole season and compare it to how they are doing in today's game. This is not a very accurate picture, since that depends on who has taken the free throws. What would be really useful is a weighted average. This will tell you if players are shooting above, at or below their average. Here is an example: Team X is 90% from the free throw line. During tonight's game, they are 10/18. This looks like they may be struggling from the free throw line. But not so fast! In tonight's game, Player Y (a horrible free throw shooter who rarely shoots free throws) gets fouled a lot, so he brings down the team %. But that does not mean the whole team is struggling from the line!