bierce

Kahahawai starts the third set.

Ames is having another good hitting night. She hasn't shown much in the way of blocking, but I'll take 6 kills to 1 error in 10 swings any day.

23-20 Texas after Ames kill. Timeout Auburn

Zimmerman off Halter's chest/face. Singletary through the block. 21-17.

Wenaas just got her first kill, and it was an impressive one. 20. 16.

Wenaas without a kill so far. Blocked 18-15. Ames on the slide. 19-15. Binney serving. Wenaas with a ball handling error. 19-16. You could really see the side spin she put on it.

Long rally with Texas getting no good swings. Last set was bizarrely to Wenaas in the back row for a dink. Then Skinner muffs a serve return. Then Ames breaks the string with a middle hit. 16-12

No Swindle or Kahahawai again. I wonder if they just fell out of favor, but Devin had been on a great streak a few weeks ago.

We have 7 blocks to their 1. They are hitting .047. We are hitting .356 after Skinner just hit a crosscourt shot side. 15-10 Texas, Texas timeout.

Skinner 14 of our 27 kills. She has only one hitting error and is hitting .542.

Florida is torching FSU so far. 37-19 with 5:30 left first half. Florida 12/20 fg and 7/12 bta. No foul disparity so far.

So UVa hit 5 straight threes to take a 23-14 lead before finally missing one. UVa moves well on offense, and was getting guys open all over the perimeter, but it seems to lack athleticism. Nova is pretty bad at defense.

Nothing to do with SEC teams, but Virginia-Villanova is on right now. Kyle Neptune is in big trouble at 'Nova for missing the tournament his first two seasons and starting 2-2 this year with a ten point home loss to Pomeroy 160 Columbia and coming off a road loss to Pomeroy 102 St. Joe's. Meanwhile, Ron Sanchez has the interim tag for UVa inheriting the job when Bennett resigned three weeks before the season started. 11-8 Nova right now with 11:29 left in the half. Really unimpressive play so far.

A Division III team that lost to Nicholls by 49.

Auburn climbed into the rankings after it won its first three conference matches, all at home and including a 3-2 win over Kentucky, but it is 1-8 over its last 9 matches. The last time we had a week+ layoff, we resumed with consecutive losses to Missouri and OU, so let's not see a repeat of that. I hate the team website's "previews." They never include information about players' status for the upcoming games or news about why they might have missed previous games. I would really like to know why Swindle and Kahahawai played so little in the last 2 matches.

We won't be 0-5 over a 5 game stretch of games projected to be decided by 4 points or less anymore than we will win all 7 subsequent games we are projected to win by 5 points or less. But yeah, RT is not given the benefit of the doubt. If he was, then donors would have picked up the tab for Toppin. BTW, UTRGV might be a team to watch in the Southland Conference over the next couple of years. Kahil Fennell is a fairly young coach who played and coached in obscurity before helping UT Permian Basin turn around from nowhere to win the Lone Star Conference about 8 years back, and he started rising in the ranks as an assistant--going to Portland State, Louisville, and BYU before getting hired this spring to coach UTRGV. UTRGV has given both Nebraska and Creighton tough games up there and is currently up 7 and shooting ft n the final minute against Charleston Southern in something called the "Greenbrier Tip-Off River Division" being played in West Virginia. I don't expect great things right away, but I think Fennell did a really good job of luring players to Odessa, wasn't to blame for Mack getting fired mid-season in Louisville and the collapse that happened that season and the next. Pope certainly liked him. 86-76 final. Will play tomorrow against the winner of the VMI/Tennessee Tech game. Tennessee Tech is coached by John Pelphrey, a former Arkansas coach, and it gave Georgia a game in the season opener, but Mekhi Cameron hasn't played since, and TT is worse off for it.

BTW, LSU beat KSU in the Octagon of Boo last night, with former Wildcat Cam Carter leading LSU with 20 points.

Followed by winning 8 of the next 9, but every game in both stretches except one is projected to be no more than a 2 possession game.

A lot of good games this weekend, starting with (rankings are according to Pomeroy): 11/15 #10 Alabama @ #12 Purdue Interesting match-up in that Oats likes his offense to play fast and take a lot of threes, while Painter makes his guys work on defense to make possessions drag out and chase people off the arc. Daniel Jacobsen, Purdue's new 7'4" center, is probably out for the year with a fractured tibia he suffered in the first minute of their second game. You hate to see leg injuries on really tall players. You never know if they will properly heal. Purdue being a Matt Painter coached team had another 7 footer ready to come in. Will Berg played well off the bench against Northern Kentucky but he did almost nothing in 16 minutes against Yale, a game that saw Yale close to within 6 in the final 3 minutes. Alabama hasn't impressed anyone in its last two games which were single digit wins at home Arkansas State and McNeese State in games in which Alabama surrendered a big run midway through the second half. #15 tOSU @ #18 A&M About the only thing A&M did well in its season opening loss to UCF was hit offensive glass. About the only thing tOSU did wrong against us was fail to protect defensive glass. Think there might be an emphasis on this facet of the game tonight? tOSU is leading the nation in opponent fg%. A&M shot like crap against UCF, especially in the 14-2 run it gave up at the end of the game. #21 Florida @ #80 FSU Florida State commits more fouls than any other P5 team so far this year. The Seminoles play at a fast pace, but still . . . FSU is now far better than it was in 2022-23, but it doesn't have much experience. FSU has one of the tallest rosters in the country. It will play twin towers most of the game, even though Hamilton lost out to UF for the 7'9" guy (Rioux, who is redshirting), but Deng gives them a perimeter game when he's in. The others need to get the ball near the basket. Former Ole Miss trouble case Malique Ewins starts. Florida hasn't seemed too bothered by the Title IX investigation against Todd Golden. It is an experienced team that goes only 8 deep. It draws a lot of fouls, so this game could be decided by ft disparity. I mean, that disparity might be deserved, but look for it to happen. #72 Georgia @ #88 Georgia Tech I always liked Mike White, and I thought he was unfairly treated at Florida, so I was glad to see him get another P5 job right away, and he has done well at Georgia so far. Crean left an awful mess there. Georgia has 2 players we sought at one point or another--Freshman big man Asa Newell (I sure would have liked to add him), and senior SG Tyrin Lawrence (I wasn't much of a fan). Newell and Godfrey have made Georgia one of the best rebounding teams in the country so far. This is Stoudamire's second season at Georgia Tech, succeeding Josh Pastner, who was a . . . oh, let's be polite . . . questionable hire at the time. Luke O'Brien missed the last game with a minor injury and is expected to play tonight. GT lost by 12 at home to North Florida. Georgia just came off a 13 point home win over UNF. Back later with updates and results and back tomorrow with Saturday's games.

Sorry for the mistake, but I already edited my long post to include a link for the NCAA explanation of NET rankings, and I can't edit again. But I want to correct my error. Indiana State did not make the tournament last year, but that was probably because it had a 1-4 record in q1, and was 0-2 against teams in the NET top 45, losing by a combined 34 points. I was calling them a fraud all through February and March. Played well in the NIT though.

No, it doesn't work like that. NET rankings are now calculated in a fashion very similar to Pomeroy by comparing output per possession against expected output per possession against that particular opponent. There will be minor deviations between their formulas for calculating how strong a particular opponent is, but the gist of it is that no team gains in the ranking unless it beats the other team more emphatically than a similarly ranked team would beat it. So what Texas gains in the rankings even if it beats MVSU by 70 tomorrow won't be worth the waste of a game. Missouri, a mid 60s team, rose to 55 by winning by 72. ISU dropped from 6 to 10 by winning by only 39. Now the level of MVSU is established by combining those numbers, a team in the mid 20s would need to win by 60 or more to avoid a negative effect. https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-men/article/2022-12-05/college-basketballs-net-rankings-explained And this puts pressure on the coaches to play at max efficiency instead of working with players who need pt either individually or in combinations. You can't really afford to jiggle line-ups in these games. You are better off playing against good to decent competition to get your troops ready for the real teams it will face later in the season. While the committee looks at each teams' quad record when selecting and seeding the field, it largely ignores q4 wins. q1 losses are bad, but they won't entirely disqualify a team from the tournament. Indiana State, Mississippi State, Northwestern, and Florida Atlantic each had a q4 loss but received an at large bid. FAU had two such losses, but they were in a home loss to a 175ish team and a road loss to a 250ish team. Texas was closely scrutinized by a lot of people late in the season because it was still under .500 in q1-3 games. A couple more q3 wins instead of wins over the worst in the q4 would have ended that discussion in a hurry, and we would not have been in the position of needing that road win over Tech to make us feel safe about our chances. I have no problem with scheduling a laugher or two, but we have way too many such games this season. We play 3 of the worst 7 teams in the country, 6 of the worst 22, and 7 teams ranked 300+ in Pomeroy. That cheats the fans or meaningful competition to enjoy,and it cheats the players and the coaches of meaningful competition to use to improve the team. And throw in an occasional true road game. There are plenty of decent teams in the state that would love to schedule 2 for 1s against us, like SFA, Sam Houston State, UT-Arlington, UTEP, etc. We don't get much in the way of extra exposure by playing Texas State in San Marcos, but why not do that once a decade? Playing Rice annually makes sense. It will have some lulls but is usually 200-230 range, and we can even schedule games in Houston against it. And now we have a bunch of former conference opponents we could schedule home and home against. There is so much more we can do with our non-conference schedule than a couple of neutral site games against tournament bound teams. Alabama has played at least 2 road or semi-road games in non-conference in each of the last 3 seasons with a couple of semi-home and a ton of neutral site games on top of those. We needn't go that all out in scheduling non-conference, but we should do a lot better.

Our next opponent, Mississippi Valley State, is 364th in 364 teams in Pomeroy, and it just lost tonight to a so-so Missouri team 111-39. Seriously, CDC, why schedule this kind of crap?

Serious proposals: Football conferences are separated from conference alignment in other sports. Having non-revenue sports fly thousands of miles for conference match-ups is f'ing stupid. Conferences are limited to no more than 10 teams and are required to play round robin format. Tongue in cheek proposal: Offensive players remove their heads before taking the field to eliminate risk of targeting calls, I mean injuries.

You also stood praised for calling your shot in the GT-Miami game.

Not true. The only guarantee is that the five highest ranked conference champions will get bids. One can reasonably expect the Big 12 champ to be ranked higher than the MWC or AAC or Sunbelt champ in most seasons, but there could be a season in which that doesn't happen. https://www.si.com/college-football/big-ten-sec-take-next-step-toward-control-over-college-football