UC 77, South Dakota 46

I thought South Dakota was a D2 school, but I guess they made the jump to D1 this year, as part of the Great West conference. You can call them D1, I guess, but they are probably about as close to D2 as you can get. Either way, Cincy has to play the games on the schedule, and it looks like they did about as much as you could ask tonight.

According to the formula for estimating possesions in a game, the Cats had about 65 possessions in the game. They scored 77 points, so that's like 1.18 points per possession. For some context, last year the NCAA average efficiency (points per 100 poss.) was 102. The number one team, IUPUI, was at 118. Cincinnati had a very efficient offensive game vs. South Dakota, but obviously we must consider the competition.

South Dakota had 69 possessions and they scored 46 points. That's .67 points per possession or 67 per 100 possessions, depending on how you want to look at it (it's the same thing, of course). That's also ... pretty bad. Again, for some context, the leader in defensive efficiency last year was Kansas at 83. So, we'll have the best offense and defense in the nation ... if we keep playing Great West teams : )

Some other random notes:

• Yancy Gates had quite a debut: 16 pts, 11 reb, 3 blks, 7-11 from the field. What's more impressive is that he only played 20 minutes. So that's 32 points, 22 rebounds, and 6 blocks per 40. Yeah, not a bad start.

• Also a nice start for Mike Williams, having not played in two years. He had 8 points and 9 boards in 26 minutes.

• Junior transfer Steve Toyloy had a good, under-the-radar-type game: 8 points, 7 rebounds in just 16 minutes.

Okay, I'm runnin' out of bullet points here. It was a nice game all around. Quick turn around Tuesday against Texas Southern, who brings back all five of their starters ... though, they went 7-25 last year.

Hey, I should keep this thing goin'

Hey, folks ... sorry for not posting in such a long time. I thought about just shutting this thing down, but I saw that Mr. Koch linked to me (thanks, Bill!), and that encouraged me to give it another shot. Going forward, the content here will remain mostly UC hoops, but I'll 'cover' college ball in general (I especially enjoy tracking some smaller D1 schools) and even the NBA on occasion.

If you happen to be new around these parts, please feel free to comment on any posts. It'd be great if we could get some intelligent discussion going ... God knows I'm not going to provide it by myself : )

Anyway, I like to try to look at things from a statistical perspective. I'm surely not going to provide much insight from a scouting standpoint, and I think the stats can be pretty interesting. I've been following sabermetrics (that's what they call this stuff in baseball) for a good 4-5 years, but I'm pretty new to the basketball stuff -- so we'll be learning together, if we learn anything.

Thanks for stopping by. I'm a bit more busy than I have been in the past, but I hope I can do a better job of following the Bearcats this year. I'll try to have a little recap up of the game vs. South Dakota either tonight or tomorrow night.

Retiring numbers

Bill Koch writes that only three UC basketball men's basketball players have had their numbers retired.

A mini-debate in the comments centered around whether or not Cincy should retire more numbers and how those players (and their accompanying numbers) should be selected. A couple people said, essentially, take out the subjective aspect -- make it be a requirement that the player had won a national player of the year award.

I say ... hmm, that is basing it completely on something subjective -- the selection of the national player of the year is certainly subjective. Now, you kind of take it out of the universities hands, so there will be no controversy there, but this method would not exactly take the subjectivity out of the process.

Furthermore, who's to say that's a good 'method' anyway. Aren't three years as a top ten player better than one year as the best player and two or three relatively insignificant ones. I don't know for sure, but I'd certainly say so.

Unless you create some sort of detailed, uber-stat, there is always going to be subjectivity in something like this (and you could even argue it'd still exist, even if you did that). Personally, I'd put together a committee of past players, writers, etc. to have some type of vote to determine the numbers that would be retired. Heck, have some type of internet vote for the fans. Nobody knows a team's players like its fans, collectively.

CBI? ... News to me

More games, huh?

Looks like Cincy isn't done yet (yeah, I'm a little late with the news). Frankly, I didn't know about this tourney (the College Basketball Invitational) and figured the Bearcats were finished for the year. According to Koch, they'll now face Bradley in the first round of the CBI.

Personally, I'm excited that there are more games, and we'll see what happens here.

But I wanted to take a moment to address a couple of larger issues. I'm not a controversial person by nature (at least at this point) and since nobody reads this anyway, I doubt my thoughts on these issues will be deemed controversial. Anyway ...

The negative approach

The general negativity from a large portion of fans is quite hard to believe. I guess, maybe it's understandable, but it goes beyond simply be frustrated with the season. It is like some people will make a negative comment on any issue that comes up (in the few blogs/forums that I read). Sure, any fans who post their thoughts on the 'net are "super fans" and probably not that representative of Bearcat fans as a whole, but it seems like there are quite a lot of them with negarive views.

Anyway, is there any reason to be particularly upset with getting an invite to this little tournament? It's more games to watch (maybe; if they're on tv), it's another game for the seniors, another game for the younger guys, perhaps there's a chance for some recognition, etc. etc. Where's the bad stuff? Sure, it's no big deal, really. It's not the NCAA tournament, but who's making it out to be that? Better than nothin', I say. Either way, to each their own ...

What's that about wins and losses?

The other thing that I think is interesting is that many fans cannot seem to look past win-loss record. Sure, it's important; nobody would deny that. But a win and a loss is on such a cut and dry scale. Imagine this: Cincy loses to #1 ranked, oh let's say Duke, 65-61. Marquette loses to #255 ranked Longwood by 20. That's all the info you have on both teams. Are they equal because they're both 0-1? Not if I have anything to say about it. Now over the course of the season, things like that are supposes to balance out and W/L record will become pretty telling, right? Well, sure, to a degree. But record by itself serves little purpose. I mean, just take a mid-major variety ball club. They could easily go 25-5 and not be ranked all year (and righlty so). North Carolina does that and they're a top team. That brings us to the novel concept of ...

Strength of schedule. Pomeroy has UC's SOS at 21st in the nation. That's second best in the Big East and, well, 21st overall out of some 300+ teams. Now it's 13-18 against much better than average competition. Pomeroy then has UC ranked 100th overall. Nah, it isn't great, but it's a lot better than you'd expect from a 13-18 record, and a lot of that is due to that tough schedule.

So is there awkwardness with UC getting into this tourney? I don't see it. Bradley and their much more respectable 17-15 mark are ranked 85th by Pomeroy's measure, just 15 spots better than Cincy. Brown, another CBI team, is ranked a whopping 148th in the country, but of course their 19-9 record makes them look, well, pretty damn good. They played in the Ivy League, folks.

A bad 30 point game?

This is turning into a longer post than I planned and, quite frankly, I'm having fun with it. I was meaning to post this the other night but I didn't get around to it. Anyway, is it possible to score 30 points in a 40 minute game and have a bad night offensively (I'm only considering shooting here; not passing, ball control, defense, etc.)? The quick answer would probably be no, not really. But did you see Deonta Vaughn the other night vs. Pitt? Outside of being electrifying at times, he had a pretty rough night. He scored 30 in 39 minutes, but he shot an ugly 8-25 from the field.

Let's pretend Vaughn took every Bearcat shot that night (all 54) and got to the line as much as he did, relative to his field goal attempts. That gets us:

from the field: 17.28-54
from 2: 6.48-21.6
from 3: 10.8-32.4
from the line: 19.5-26

Total points = ~65

I'm all over the place here. If you can't follow what I did there, you're in good company, as I can't either. I think I did it right, though, and the point is: Vaughn barely increased UC's point total, relative to how his teammates performed (Cincy actually scored 64 points). Of course, this is an oversimplified "analysis," as players don't take all of their team's shots. if they did, they'd be blanketed more than Deonta was, and they'd shoot an even worse.

I'll go a step further and say that part of the reason Vaughn had to shoot so much was because he was the only player that could consistently get open. Yeah, the rest of the team shot 45% compared to Deonta's 32%, but if they only shot when they were open and they didn't get open often, what was he supposed to do? Now, I'm not saying that's what happened; I'm merely throwing it out there as something to chew on.

Men of Bradley

So we've got this game with Bradley coming up. Who are these guys? They're 5-11 vs teams in Pomeroy's top 115. That means they're like 12-4 vs. teams outside of the top 115. So they beat up on bad teams ... but who doesn't? Plus, the 115 number was just an arbitrary selection by me (it's close to Cincinnati's ranking).

They play to about 70 possesions a game compared to Cincy's 65, so the game might be a battle of conflicting interests, at least in terms of pace. They're also real dangerous from 3 with 5 guys who've made at least 20 on the year.

We'll see you around.

Well, that's that

I think the loss to Pittsburgh is a pretty good example of what happens when you have one, and only one, real scoring threat. Vaughn is awesome, but if he's the only guy that's going to score, the defense is going to play him tighter and tighter. And I think that's what happened, especially late. Sure, he got on fire there, and that was pretty special. But then the d tightened up even more and then you've got trouble ... and that led to an ugly overall shooting night for Deonta (8-25 from the floor), despite some late magic. If someone could have buried a couple of 3's there or they could have got something going inside, then Vaughn gets freed up a little bit and maybe shoots better down the stretch. As it was, Pitt was all over him and he struggled getting off solid shots. It's a lot of game theory, really, I think. They need more weapons next year and I hope they'll have them.

As for the season in general, it was a disappointing finish, but -- as I've said before -- I think they outperformed expectations by a good bit. I understand there are already two factions in the Cincy online world (and as I follow more teams via the net, I find that is more often than not the case). I am not really on either side of the hate/love Mick Cronin debate. Frankly, I don't follow things closely enough, or know enough about basketball, to be really entrenched on one side or the other. Hopefully I can fall somewhere in between and try to offer a somewhat "objective" take, although I try to be an optimistic person in general.

And that takes me to this final note: the future of this blog. It isn't going anywhere (well, I might change the domain name in the future, but we'll see), as there's no reason for that. I'd certainly like to update it more next season and even in this offseason. Currently, I'm writing for a couple of baseball blogs and I maintain another, smaller web site. I have made a 88 cents overall in close to a year of blogging on the net (although making money is certainly not a priority, or even a goal at this point), I go to college, and I try to do some non-internet related things every once in a while. You'd be surprised at how much time I have left over, but a lot of it goes to baseball, a sport I know a bit better. Either way, I'm going to update this blog occasionally over the next few weeks with my thoughts on the tournaments, college sports in general, and possibly a few UC offseason things. I'm not particularly impressed with my first go around with this blog, and I bet you're not either. Hopefully, if I keep things up for a while, I'll improve and we'll create a nice little community here.

It's go time!

Well, I don't know about you (all one of you : ), but I am excited about the game tonight vs. Pitt at MSG. The way I look at, who cares about the last 5 games? Who cares about the loss to UCONN, or for that matter, every other game this season? It all comes down to one game ... and then, of course, one game tomorrow ... and one game until we win this Big East tourney. Of course, that's easy for me to say. I'm not on the team and I haven't played a competitive sport in years. Can you just wipe out a 45 point loss and a disappointing 5 game losing streak? I'm not sure, but why not? If the final goal of a National Championship -- and I'll assume that's the ultimate goal -- is still in reach, then why not give it all you've got and see what happens? Sure, a championship of National or Big East variety is a stretch to say the least, but there's really no reason to not go all out for it, despite the odds.

Anyway, it has been a nice run. Yeah, I've caught up on some of the online reaction on the finish -- as much as I can stomach, which is not much. What did everyone expect? I mean, while I say the "final goal" is an NCAA championship that is more of a dream than anything. For the most part, this team outperformed expectations, perhaps even destroyed them. It's human nature, I suppose, to allow the recent games to put the season into a negative light ... but there's time to right that ship and turn things around, if you if think this was somehow a disappointing season.

Pomeroy (for some reason, can't hyperlink: http://www.kenpom.com/conf.php?y=2008&c=BE&t=p) has Pittsburgh as the 30th best team in the country and UC at 100. But let's not forget we beat this club back in January and we only lost by six in Pitt. With no real home court advantage, the oddsmakers have Pitt as a 9 point favorite. Seems a bit high to me -- did I mention anything about weighting recent performance too much?

Anyway, there would be no better way to finish off the season than with an exciting run in New York. Let's get this thing started tonight. With nothing to lose myself, I'll make some "bold" predictions.

Cincy -- 83
Pitt -- 81

Vaughn buries two late threes and racks up, let's say ... 41 on the night.

Rough loss

Hey, I'm still here. As you can see, I haven't posted much of late. I'm not sure that will change, but we'll see.

Anyway, this loss to Depaul was a frustrating one. I listed to the last 10 minutes or so on the internet radio feed after tracking the score on espn. Seems like they simply didn't shoot well down the stretch and made too many big turnovers. Still, I thought they had a real chance down 2 with Depaul still being in the one and one. I just can't see how you foul Burns there and then foul him again after he missed the free throw. Make him give the ball up. The announcers were saying he was the only good free throw shooter on the court for Depaul. In his career, he's hit 78% of his free throws. I'm not sure who exactly was on the court, but Green and Walker are just slightly over 70% for their careers and the rest of the team is worse. Sure, it's only percentage points, but it may have made a difference.

Of course, if they rebounded Burns' first miss, it may not have mattered.

UC takes on West Virginia, Huggins

Cincinnati looks solid early here -- West Virginia looks awful, at least offensively. Anyway, it's 29-21 with 2:32 to go in the first half. Really, it's frustrating to just have an 8 point lead as WV has shot just 24% and UC has hit 50% of their shots. It's the fouls -- some ticky take ones -- that are keeping WV in the game. The shots are going to start falling most likely, so Cincinnati has to keep it coming here ... but what an impressive start. I'll update this a few times ... if you happen to stop by, make a comment n the game if you'd like (it will appear instantly ; ).

UPDATE: 43-29 UC with 11:42 to play. Just unbelievable here. They were 13.5 point underdogs. We've just caught West Virginia on an off night shooting-wise (with some great defense) and played really well. Still, this is a critical point in the game. Don't want to get tentative and let them creep back in it. Go for the knockout right here.

UPDATE: Well, yeah, that's what I'm talking about! 7-0 run since I last posted like a minute ago.

UPDATE: Well, folks, that's a great win. But you don't need me to tell you that. I don't know how often a 13-14 point underdog beats a team by 23, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's pretty rare. I think it's getting pretty clear that this team is dangerous ... Marquette should be fun on Saturday.

Cracking the top 25?

First a miniature rant. I'm not really sure what the point of the top 25 is in NCAA D1 basketball. I haven't paid attention to it for years. I mean, what is it, the aggregate opinion of a group of writers ... what's the point? When it comes down to tournament time, you're going to have to go past the top 25 anyway, so it doesn't really serve much of a purpose there. And why stop at 25? What's the difference between #25 and #26. I just don't see the point. I'm sure it's largely made to create excitement, but it just seems pointless to put too much stock into it.

Anyway, I read a post over at Bill Koch's blog on Cincy receiving a couple of votes for the top 25. Now, I don't care about "being ranked," but the natural question does come up: where should UC be ranked out of all 341 division 1 teams? Well, even if we wanted to use the writer's or coach's poll, we can't, as it doesn't cover every team. So, instead, we'll go to Pomeroy's ratings, RPI, and Jeff Sagarin's ratings.

Pomeroy: 105
RPI: 96
Sagarin: 109

Quickly average those and you get 103. So, by the numbers, UC is somewhere around the 100th best team in basketball. Or, at least, that's where they should be ranked based on their performance so far against their schedule. Anybody voting them up near 25 is either overestimating their early performance or great at identifying good basketball teams before they're good. That being said, Cincinnati has played extremely well of late and their recent play should probably be weighted more heavily. With a couple more big wins, they could definitely start to merit some consideration for that prestigious top 25. But I think that Bill (or anyone else) is pretty justified in his belief that they're not a "top 25 team" (not that anyone cares what i think).

Downing Pitt

I'm late with the recap for this one. Since I didn't see or hear it, I don't have much to add anyway. Glancing through the box score, it looks like UC made a conscious effort to dial in the 3's a little bit. They only shot 8 and saw their field foal percentage rise to almost 47% because of it. They shot a little better than Pittsburgh, they got to the line more (and converted at a higher rate), and they held their own on the glass. Basically, they played a little better game and ended up on top by 3. Another fantastic win over a very good team.

UCONN coming up next as it doesn't get any easier.