These things cannot be determined, ultimately–least of all by us. And of course, in a court of law, the question of what your intent was when you are demonstrated to have struck someone. . . does not matter. ‘I didn’t mean to break his nose,’ etc. . . .
Interesting situation, because you sometimes do see things take place in the sports arena that could trigger legal proceedings and wonder.
I’m more interested in what the protocols are, whether something like that might or should be assessed by the league office (for all we know it has been); what does it take to trigger an investigation? The B1G has been curiously MIA of late, IMO, including in letting the public know what the criteria are for a championship. At this late juncture, with IL and UM playing tonight, we should know what’s on the line.
Beyond that, it’s my conviction that the league did tolerate quite a bit of bullying from MSU over time; an ugly style of play predominated in the league that–arguably–did not serve it come tourney time. I hope to see someone like Juwan, maybe not overtly, expose Izzo as time passes. Success will, of course, be a part of the recipe!
Time to move on from the Mady Sissoko debate. He got kicked out of the game. He wasn’t suspended. It wasn’t a Michigan game. It is what it is and it sucks that Ayo missed two games. We can skip the conspiracy theories, drawn out debates over intent, and all of the rest.
This is going way off topic. Lets get it back on topic.
Obviously he didn’t know Ayo would be injured and didn’t intend to injure him. With that said, this seems to fall into a wanton disregard for other players category. Maybe not intent to injure, but intent to foul hard in a reckless manner disregarding the potential risk to Ayo. I’ll be pretty upset if MSU tries to bully Michigan and injures someone by playing recklessly
Nebraska is now up to #33 on KenPom in defense. I never would have seen that coming in a million years. They are up to #7 in conference play on defense.
while he is a great offensive coach, he usually has mediocre to bad defenses. His best ever KenPom rating on defense was #55 at Iowa State in 2013/14. He usually has teams that are far better on offense than defense. This year is the opposite, #190 on offense and #33 on defense.
I won’t talk about the Ayo foul specifically, but I think in the podcast there was significant discussion about how MSU regained their mojo by basically just having their bigs get super physical. Effectively “use their fouls” and Dylan actually talked about how Illinois and OSU didn’t seem ready for that. When your strategy on defense is essentially to foul everyone near the rim and hope they all don’t get called and all of the FTs don’t get made…well…let’s just say that I’m not thrilled with ending our regular season against a team leveraging that strategy. The worst thing to happen to Michigan right now wouldn’t be a loss, it would be an injury to a rotation player.
Working in our favor and hopefully discouraging MSU from using such an approach in our games is that all of our players are excellent FT shooters besides Austin Davis. Sending anyone else to the line is likely a recipe for us to go on a run. I also think that a physical strategy like that may work well given what MSU is working with, but it is also a situation that may be harder for young players still learning. I don’t approve of it personally and I’m hoping that’s not what we see later this week.
I admit that when Dylan started talking about how Sparty’s chances of winning 1 of 3 games from Michigan would be greater than minuscule, I said to myself “Well, sure, especially if they spend the first two games injuring Michigan’s top players…”
Interesting. Marion Country (read: Indianapolis) states that indoor arenas would probably peak at 25% capacity for both the B1G and NCAA tournaments. From the Indianapolis Star: "“I do not see the capacity for the Big Ten to go over 25%,” Dr. Virginia Caine, director of Marion County’s health department, said Thursday at a news conference. “And I do not see the NCAA going over 25%. They’re going to be up to 25% capacity but it won’t be higher, no.”
I find this interesting because the BTT is at Lucas Oil and that has 70k capacity. 17.5k tickets per game? I assume the Big Ten would have to sign off on such an arrangement for the tournament if tickets would actually be sold…
Agreed. If they weren’t doing some clever PR and seeing if they could get away with not pissing off a fan base by making it seem like they were picking a side, then they should have done this weeks ago.