bierce

Kelly denies having cut off contact. I guess he has been sitting at Brooks's bedside with Lennay Kekua

13th in the country. 8th in the conference.

Colorado State (76) @ New Mexico (46) NM with a chance to pretty much wrap up at least a tie for the conference title by winning the next 5 games (this one, breathers against Air Force and Wyoming, and home against Utah State). It will still have to go to Boise State and SDSU, but it has already beaten them in Albuquerque by double digits. Richard Pitino is starting to receive attention for the P5 spots opening up. Hard to believe, but he's still only 42, and I think most ADs will understand Minnesota has been at a severe disadvantage in recruiting for decades, so they probably won't hold his lack of success there against him. I still think if Dan Monson could do it all over again, he would have stayed at Gonzaga. Wake Forest (68) @ Stanford (72) Wake Forest is positioned to get the benefit of the doubt despite a terrible NET ranking by finishing in the top 4 in the ACC, much the way UVa did last year, and it has a very good OOC win over Michigan on a neutral(ish) floor, much like UVa over Florida last year. Of course, UVa proved to be totally undeserving by losing a play-in game by 25. Nebraska (50) @ UDub (93) Nebraska with a chance to make it three in a row, heading into a pair of home games against tournament bound tOSU and Maryland.

Most interesting OOC game to me is Oregon (36) @ Michigan (17). Oregon had the great series in Vegas in which it beat A&M, SDSU, and Alabama, but it is on a terrible three game stretch with losses @ Minnesota, @ UCLA (by36!), and home against Nebraska. Remaining games against top 25 teams are all on the road (tonight, @ MSU, and @ Wisconsin). It should still be a safe bet to make the field, but it probably already pissed away its chance for a high seed. Cincy (53) @ UCF (63) Pretty much do or die for both at this point. Conceivably, any team can go on a 8 game winning streak, but that's about what these teams would have to do if they lose tonight. Louisville (29) @ BC (roughly 200 or so) A game that can't move the needle up but could move it down for Louisville, which was last seen losing at Georgia Tech, which stings less today since GT won @ Clemson last night. Even so, that loss knocked Louisville down to 7 seed range, and it has no q1 games left on its schedule, so climbing much higher will be next to impossible short of winning out. A pair of losses in the remaining games will hurt as much as the combined strength of wins. WVU (38) @ TCU (76) WVU finally announced DeVries will have surgery and miss the rest of the year. It won @ Cincy to get the ship righted over the weekend with a kind of cheap q1 win. the other four q1 wins were anything but cheap (Gonzaga, Arizona on a neutral floor, @ KU, and home against ISU). SMU (40) @ VT (163) Still not a believer. SMU's best showing against a likely tournament team was a 4 point loss at home to Mississippi State. Its other three games against tournament teams resulted in 3 losses by a combined 67 points, and UNC is hardly a lock to make the tournament, and losses to Duke and Louisville were at home by 52 points.

Boise State, Utah State, Xavier, Drake, and VCU won last night, btw. VCU by something like 40. The biggest game of course is our game against Arky. Win that and we're probably starting to get a lot of votes for a 7 seed or better. We already have a few. But what we do in the following 3 games will have a lot more to say about our eventual seed. Or even if we make the tournament. Lose all three, and we're no longer sitting pretty. Other SEC games Missouri @ Tennessee Tennessee has both Zeigler and Milicic back. Missouri has won 6 of its last 7, including road wins over Florida and Mississippi State, and it averaged 82.5 points in those 6 wins. And to think we held it to 53 in Missouri's only loss in that stretch. If Missouri can win here, it would be perfectly set up to earn a double bye. It's remaining games against the top third of the conference will be at home, and it has only bubble teams remaining on the road. LSU @ Georgia (32) Georgia looked great about three weeks ago after beating UK and OU by double digits in consecutive home games. Lose tonight and fall out of the matrix with the second really tough stretch coming up (MSU, @ A&M, Missouri, @ Auburn, Florida, @ Texas). That looks like a 1-5 stretch to me.

Watching the end of Clemson-GT. Maybe. It's in the 3rd OT. Clemson had saved a timeout just for this moment. Down three with 3.5 seconds left, it could throw an inbound pass beyond midcourt and immediately call timeout. Now the whole playbook is open. Can inbound to anyone who can take a shot. Well done.Of course, they missed, but it was still a good coaching job in those last seconds. But it was a terrible game by Clemson. GT came into the game NET 130, so this was a q3 loss for Clemson, and GT should have won this by a lot more, but it shot 50% from the line and had guards inexplicably lose balance twice in the OTs while setting up to shoot. Clemson has two wins over top 50 teams, an OT win @ Pitt and a 4 point home win over Kentucky, which lost mightily again tonight. OU lost by 28, so it lost whatever it had gained by torching Vandy. Vandy lost by 11. Mississippi put 98 on Kentucky to win by 14. That is one terrible defensive team coming to town in 11 days. Iowa and Indiana lost. Twin forks.

I wonder when the day will come that an NFL kicker's kid gets offered as an EDGE.

I hate it when I divide by 8 instead of by 7. Iowa lost the 7 q1 games by an average of 14.4 points.

I wasn't trying to knock Goff, and I wasn't trying to knock Ewers, either. It's just what GMs saw this year. They can sometimes be a reactive bunch, and draft prognosticators even more so.

Gee, I wonder if Kiper probably thinks NFL GMs just saw the recent playoff results. Teams that made it to the conference championship games had mobile qbs (Mahomes, Allen, Hurts, Daniels). The one seemingly great team that failed to win a playoff game had Goff. The next most disappointing team in the playoffs had Darnold. VY entered the NFL 15 years too early.

Oh, I know. That was an obvious move by Patterson to try to justify the firing.

Look at her the way Beard did through the lens of being in his mid 40s and goofy looking.

Barnes's unfortunate comment about not being obsessed with titles didn't do him any favors. I think it was poorly phrased, but it was much more poorly received.

Purdue (10) @ Iowa (64) Iowa has 3 problems. It is 0-7 in q1 games. It has lost those games by an average of 12.6 points. It lost a q3 game at home to Minnesota. Eight q1 games remaining starting tonight. Indiana (65) @ Wisconsin (17) Cue Bob in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . La Salle (182) @ VCU (42) If VCU sweeps Dayton and beats George Mason but loses in the A-10 tournament, I think I can see it getting an at large bid. If it loses a game like this tonight, then I probably can't. Drake (52) @ Murray State (165) See comment about VCU above, but substitute Bradley and No. Iowa for Dayton and George Mason. This is also a redemption game for Drake. Its q4 loss was at home to Murray State. Utah State (38) @ Wyoming (169) Utah State has a very strong OOC record and is probably deserving of a better ranking, but it was last seen losing at home by 19 to New Mexico. Georgetown (84) @ Xavier (52) Xavier is in a really tough spot. While it it 5-6 in one of the three strongest conferences, it is just 1-7 in q1 games, and 8 of its nine remaining games are against the bottom 6 teams in the conference. The other is a home game against Creighton, and if Creighton doesn't improve, that will mean Xavier has only one q1 game left (@ Villanova) while playing 9 more times in the Big East. Some conferences are loaded all the way to the bottom. The Big East is not. Boise State (49) @ UNLV (105) If Boise State, New Mexico, Utah State, and San Diego State can beat the rest of the MWC, that will make the job of the committee easy. Put them all in, provided they each win a game or two against each other. Boise State is 0-3 against the other three, so it better not lose to the rest of the conference while waiting for the rematches.

Let's start with tonight in the SEC Vandy (43) @ Florida (5) Vandy is coming off a loss that was so bad that most of the bracketoids who had it 8 going into the weekend dropped it to a play-in game. But those were outlier brackets. They tend to be over-reactive to single games. Even so, Vandy needs to do something at this point to avoid falling out completely, but it has played progressively worse on the road with each game (+8 @ LSU, -9 @ Missouri, -16 @ Alabama, -30 @ OU). Vandy now enters the most murderous part of its schedule--8 straight games against teams currently projected to make the tournament and an average Pomeroy ranking of 15. Florida is probably pretty mad about being pasted in Knoxville by a Zeigler-less Tennesssee team. OU (37) @ Auburn (1) Well, beating a mediocre team by a bajillion at home is one thing. Beating the top team in the country on the road is quite another. Kentucky (19) @ Mississippi (23) High powered offense against stingy defense. Kentucky lost to Arky because it couldn't make Arky miss from the arc. Mississippi lost to Auburn because it got its brains beat in on the boards as usual. Fortunately for Beard, Kentucky is not a strong offensive rebounding team. Then again, Mississippi State, Missouri, and Texas aren't particularly good at it and they combined for 15 offensive rebounds against Mississippi. But what Mississippi gives up in rebounding, it regains in turnover margin, and Kentucky is terrible at that.

I didn't blame Barnes one bit for telling Patterson what he could do with demands about the coaching staff. No AD has any business telling the head coach which assistants to hire. Fire for cause? Sure. Veto guys with checkered pasts? Ok. But the coach is in charge of the staff and the team, not the AD.

If I was a star tennis player, I would jump at the chance to play for a coach who won that school's only natty in a season in which he replaced the original head coach mid-season, and maybe it's best if I not go into the reasons for the firing.

Barnes benefited from the opening of the Cooley Pavilion, which was at the time hands down the best practice and training facility in college basketball. His recruiting classes 2003 through 2008 were a testament to that, but other schools caught up. At that point, his plateau, which was an extraordinarily high plateau (5 second weekends in 7 years) became his undoing because he couldn't keep it up once he didn't have the big recruiting advantage. I always liked Coach Barnes. The writing was on the wall when he lost to Chaminade. The plug was pulled a couple of years later when the Myles Turner team lost in the first round. Seven years without a second weekend and 4 years over which he was -2 in conference play. Given that such a record would have given cause to give him a raise 20 years earlier, that might not have been entirely fair, but the administration clearly believed Barnes was not going to get Texas beyond a second tier team in the conference and a rare participant in the second weekend, and it believed we could do better. Well, we haven't so far, but I'm not sure the administration was wrong at the time. Of course, since then Smart proved to be a total bust because he decided to completely reinvent himself as a coach, and we saw how badly that went. Beard had to bring a toxic mess of a hot chick with him because he was a pushing 50 year old teenager with a fat wallet. And Terry gets little support. I don't begrudge Barnes any of the success he has had at Tennessee, but when his biggest supposed fault here was playing below seed in the tournament, has he escaped that? This is his 10th season at Tennessee. He's made 6 tournaments. He's lost to a lower seeded team 5 times and never beaten a higher seed. I think the tournament is a crap shoot, and it is the worst measure of the strength of a program, but Barnes is little, if anything, at Tennessee to change his legend.

Affect it, maybe, but drive it? I'm not so sure about that. He's 76. He hasn't made the tournament since 2021. Time to hang it up.

16 point loss at home to a NET 134 team. That's the sort of loss that knocks a team off the radar screen. Pitt is 1-6 in q1 and now has a q3 loss. Only 3 q1 games remaining are road games against UNC which it barely beat in Pitt, SMU who no one really believes to be a credible tournament contender, and Louisville which was last seen blowing a big lead against Georgia Tech.

This isn't game related, but I thought I'd mention that Leonard Hamilton announced he will retire. Very good coach with a long, distinguished career who never got the full credit he deserved.

58-39 UVa with 8:35 to go. I bet fans in Charlottesville feel cheated about never getting to see the team play this fast at hom. e. Pitt was on the 10/11 line. If this game finishes with this kind of margin, it will drop out of the matrix

I won't start a new thread until tomorrow, but there is one bubble impacting game tonight--UVa at Pitt (35). UVa up 52-37 with 10:12, Pitt shooting a pair of ft. Pitt's first foul in the second half was whistled with 11:39 to go.

You have to go all the way back to 1982 to find a season in which Texas did not play at least one game out side of the state before November. In 1982 we played no games outside of the state. We had Arky at home, OU in Dallas, non-conference games against Utah and Missouri in Austin, and we played in the Sun Bowl .

I'm not quite but almost surprised that we haven't had a schedule like that at least once in the last 24 seasons, since we always play OU in Dallas, and we were in a conference that had a fairly high percentage of teams in the same state before the last year. But I only found 3 or 4 seasons in which we had a single game outside of the state before November. No shutouts.