Yes remember. But that shouldn’t stop schools from courting him or his being among those rumored for jobs. Stanford and Northwestern, for example, would present similar opportunities for her, and need or have needed basketball coaches.
Watch the ref on the Ayo replay. Calmly watches it play out and calls out of bounds. I’m not sure if he glances away right that worst part or if he sees Ayo lose the ball before the rough contact…but just a terrible piece of officiating. Not to mention that the other two guys on the court didn’t blow a whistle either. I don’t know the details of where they would have been focused on the play so maybe someone else can comment - but it shows how the game got away from the refs and MSU was able to muck it up even more.
I also agree with the comment on Izzo’s strategy. Through a combination of talent and dumb luck he’s realized he should play Watts, Langford, Henry, and Brown a ton of minutes, limit Hauser/Hall to certain match-ups, and let his bigs just foul all game. Not looking forward to those games.
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You have to wonder if Loyer not playing has more to do with Izzo tightening up the rotation. If he’s back, will he play?
Yeah, it will be interesting to see how that plays out. Is this Nick Ward 2.0 where Izzo had to be saved from himself? Or is this a combination of him figuring out that Loyer needs to play fewer minutes and Watts more.
Yep! What other system could find a way to rank a 10-10 higher than an 11-7 team in the same conference? 
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The baseline official is clearly focused on the ball, which had been checked away from Ayo. He’s responsible for the baseline so he has to know where the ball is and whether it touches anyone else after it’s checked. The contact also occurs in his primary coverage area. That’s always a crappy situation because now he’s primarily responsible for everything that happens on the play, and he can’t realistically see everything due to the nature of the play. It’s an odd play in that the contact happens well after the ball is checked, as opposed to the normal situation of the play on the ball and the contact happening at basically the same time. As soon as it was checked, he would have focused on it, and it looks like that’s exactly what he did; you can see his focus follow the ball. It’s nice if you can pick up post-check contact in that situation, but it’s often not realistic to see both because the ball ends up away from the point of contact.
He needed one of his partners to pick up the contact. I don’t know why neither of them did. One of the two had to have had a good enough angle to see what happened. Don’t be critical of the baseline guy; be critical of his partners. For someone who saw the game, did they go to the monitor immediately, or did it take the Illinois bench to get them to check it? In any case, this is the beauty of being able to use replay for a play like this. There’s no worse feeling than doing a game, knowing that you missed something bad (can easily happen in a 2-person crew, which is the norm in a lot of high school ball), and having no recourse to get it right.
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Can’t express how cool it is we can get your takes on these things. It’s a great perspective to have. I feel like it’s good to remember that in this specific case the right call was definitely made, even though it took video replay.
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This is great to have your perspective on that and see what the baseline guy is looking at. IIRC, the whistle got them to a media timeout so we don’t really know what happened. They came back from commercial and showed the replay and Sissoko walking out.
Given some of the… questionable…calls earlier and Underwood already being livid (I think the bench was given a warning) it wouldn’t surprise me if they were begging for a review.
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Yes, when they went to the media timeout it appeared to be somehow no foul at all, just out of bounds. Then when we came back they were reviewing it. Although maybe the announcers, not being in the arena, missed the review at first.
I assume it is because of unbalanced schedules. KenPom ranks Oakland’s conference SOS #1 in the Horizon League where as Northern Kentucky is 12th in the conference. This isn’t just the usual top teams have weaker SOS because they can’t play themselves, it’s big differences in who and where teams played in a league that has teams ranging from #60 overall in the country down to #290.
T-rank gives adjusted EMs within conference play and ranks 10-10 Oakland as dead even in conference play with 11-7 Northern Kentucky (also tied with 8-12 UWBG).
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Dunno if anyone was just watching, but Bardo and Sean Morris (?) just created their list of the ten best B1G teams of the decade, and Michigan had three of them. Is this what sparked the discussion of M’s best Beilein teams the other day, or something new?
That’s a very bad list. Just listing teams that made Final Fours basically (with some conference champs added).
Expecting any more nuance from Bardo would be unwise
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I’ll take Michigan’s dominance there.
ESPN forces Dickie V down our throats and then gifts MSU/OSU with Robbie Hummel.
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A+ announcer team for OSU-MSU – Bennetti and Hummell.
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Dear Duane Washington, Jr.,
Izzo didn’t recruit you either.
Love,
me
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OSU starting Jallow over Walker?
Now they call a charge on OSU
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