Weary Boilers?

This article in the J&C gives me great concern. It reminds me of the feeling I get whenever the coaching staff admits they didn't have a plan for something or didn't know what they were going to do if a given situation happened... it just makes my eyebrows go up involuntarily. 

Danny Hope says he's happy for the bye week, as his players are showing "signs of fatigue." Hey, it's hard work kicking Eastern Michigan's ass.  A quote from Hopey:

“Focus in practice, energy in meetings,” the fourth-year coach said Sunday. “I tell one of my good jokes and some of them didn’t get it.”

I, for one, would love to hear some of Danny Hope's good jokes.

But seriously, being focused for a few weeks tires guys out? I mean, yes, I know staying focused over a course of a season is indeed tiring and requires tremendous discipline. But it's just worrisome and odd to make such a statement now. It's almost like Hope feels the need to talk up everything that's ever related to the program. A bye week? It's a good thing for us! We'll rise to the challenge! By lying down and taking a nap!

It only gets better, too.

“They should be tired,” he said. “I think our staff is tired. Everybody works long days and seven days a week. Fatigue set in some but the end result was we scored 50-something points and had 600 yards of offense and shut them down with our first-team defense. They did a good job of sucking it up and pushing themselves but I know they’re all looking forward to the off week.”

I might beg to differ on whether or not they "should" be tired.

Coach was then asked if he has concerns over playing the next nine straight weeks, which is a fair question given what he's just said about fatigue. The answer....seems unclear.

“Traditionally, most football teams struggle recovering from camp. I think we did a better job of managing our football team during camp,” Hope said. “We gave them a little more time off during camp and tried to shorten the practices."

I don't see how this answers the question of if he's concerned about this team being tired over the next 2+ months. 

"I think the way this football team pushes themselves from an effort standpoint, a focus standpoint and we practice hard and when I say we practice hard, they practice hard. We have shortened the agenda but they extend themselves more.”

Oh, please stop talking, Coach.

The Painter Saga: Winners and Losers

We have a ton to talk about over the next few days/weeks, but there are a few people or entities that the Painter-to-Mizzou Drama affected...Let's take a look at them:

Losers
Mike Alden & Mizzou's Athletic Department
Alden's athletic department seemed extremely zealous in its pursuit of Painter...I don't blame them for that. But, they seemed to put all of their eggs in that basket and had a couple internal parts that just talked too much. All of these things helped Painter create leverage and get what he wanted: A more supportive athletic department at Purdue.
Journalism
From Dick Weiss at the New York Daily News, to Bernie Miklasz at the St. Louis Dispatch to the clowns at the Bleacher Report, and on and on, members of the non-traditional and traditional media alike jumped the gun time and time again in an effort to get the scoop. While the STLD was wise enough to erase all record of their foibles, remnants of poor reporting are still scattered across the interwebnet.
Nancy Cross of the JPC
No one would argue that Purdue's Athletic Department needs as much financial support as possible to compete with the elite of the conference and win championships. But, almost everyone who saw her mass e-mail saw its presentation as a major error in judgment. What makes it worse is the fact that under immense pressure from stressed-out and angry donors, Cross sent a half-assed apology e-mail today.

Winners

The Purdue Fanbase
Purdue fans languished on the vine as Matty listened to what Mizzou had to offer. Watching a Purdue alum and damned good coach slip out of the grasp of our Athletic Department would have been a shot to the psyche of all of us. Plus, the program would have surely been rebuilding once again and I seriously doubt that we would have ended up with a coach of Painter's caliber as a replacement...But that's only part of the victory.
Painter may have used his pull to awaken an athletic department that had lost its focus. Losses of players like Brandon Dawson and coaches like Rick Ray might be something we less of as Purdue's recruiting resources and basketball budget increases.

Matt Painter, His Staff & His Team
Painter is a tough guy not to like (as Mizzou fans know). He runs his program well, has an amazing attention to the details and is a good motivator. His assistants are generally as sharp as they come and share his work ethic and hard-nosed attitude. Guys like 'Zo, Rick Ray, Paul Lusk and Jack owens come to mind right away as Purdue-type guys. Keeping talent like this within the program as long as possible is imperative.
Next, if you visit here often, you know about how we feel about the players. Almost every one of them seem to be high-character people...and are just plain likable. Atop that, there's a lot of talent already within the program, and more is on the way. Who knows which players would have transferred or changed their commitment, but be assured the complexion of the team would have been dramatically different.

Buddy "Andrew" Baker
Buddy Baker is the agent to Painter, Martin (and I believe Paul Lusk). I know Painter is a smart guy, but Baker positioned the parts in this drama perfectly and used Missouri's offer as leverage to help his clients get what they wanted and make him a dollar or two along the way. Best of all, we didn't have to hear from him as all negotiations were kept out of the public's eye...But, he made sure the public knew about Missouri's interest in Painter very early in the game.

The Verdict is Still Out...

Morgan Burke & the Administration
We can say what we want about what got Purdue to this place- but what we know is when the chips were down, Purdue gave Painter what the market demands of a coach like him. In the future, Burke and co. need to be active instead of reactive as to avoid another near-calamity. Painter is tied up for eight years with, what seems to be, a very competitive contract and package. But before the eight years are up, Burke, or whomever is his successor will need to adjust and extend the deal to keep things humming.

If they do what they've promised and stay a step ahead of the competition, this negotiation will prove to be one of their brightest moments.

Detroit: Such a Beautiful Sight.

After seven days away from US soil, I arrived back in the land of the free yesterday. The Delta 777 descended out of the clouds to gray wintry skies in the normally-depressing (for me) city of Detroit. But, cloudy, cold winter skies over the former auto capital of the world were welcomed by me as I knew what I'd soon be able to do- visit the greatest website in all of the land.

In mainland China, I couldn't keep up with BS via twitter, Facebook or on the website. J kept everything running smoothly as he rode solo, but I didn't know it until today. Turns out, the Chinese government does not like the razor-sharp honesty displayed by the BS staff.

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a Chinese citizen who is in prison in the country for protesting human rights violations. But, the headline in the English-speaking paper that I found told a different story, "Most of the World disagrees with Peace Prize Recipient."

After I read the headline, I didn't take a hole bunch of time to investigate the rest of that rag. But, I'm sure they had an American Sports section. If so, some of its sports headlines would have probably read like this:

College basketball

"Without national hero at shooting forward, Boiler wins don't count...season over for Purdue back in September."

Other articles might say, "Spartans' benevolent leader-coach, Izzo doesn't need to put his team on the court, let-alone lead them to victory to keep well-deserved top-10 spot in AP poll." or

"Wildcats crush national power at Rupp as they flirt with top-10. Calipari remains squeaky-clean, nothing to investigate in Lexington."

Pro Football

"Manning lulling divisional opponents into deep sleep by intentionally throwing interceptions at key times."

College Football

"Auburn, like the rest of the SEC, follows NCAA rules and holds high academic standards. Newton's Heisman upholds long standard of high-character recipients."

I missed out on all college basketball with two exceptions. The Iowa v. NIU game and Duke v. Bradley game both were aired live in China with unedited feeds. There was clearly no rhyme or reason behind what made it on the air- One was a BTN feed, the other, an EsPN feed.

And, in spite of commercials in which EsPN International bragged about coverage of many sports, it was generally all-soccer, all the time. Yay for me, the viewer!

Oh yeah, I also couldn't access youtube. Damned shame too. Without good TV, it would have been fun to catch up on videos like this (a little propaganda of our own):

Great job, as usual, Kitchel!

Glad to be back in the states.

John Gasaway Knows Basketball Better Than Coaches

John Gasaway gets to work on his next article.

I happened to be browsing Twitter earlier today and I came across something interesting. And by interesting, I mean "fodder for Purdue fans to get irritated about."

T-Mill from H&R had said on another site that this year's Purdue basketball offense could actually wind up better than last year's. Naturally, simple-minded people took this to mean Travis was saying Purdue is better off without Rob Hummel. That's not really what he was saying and people with brains knew that, but that doesn't include everyone.

Big Ten Geeks said that Travis' comment was the craziest thing they'd heard all month. Then John Gasaway said it was the craziest Big Ten comment.... of the decade. Yes, he actually said that. The mere idea that Purdue might be better offensively this year than last year is the craziest thought....of the decade. Maybe Gasaway thinks of the decade as just having started with 2010 so there haven't been many crazy things said. I don't know.

Anyway, this leads us to a column Gasaway wrote for ESPN last week, cleverly hidden under the "Insider" shield. Fortunately, while we're not rich, our readers are and many of you who pay for ESPN content (and that's a whole other issue) provided us the content of that post, entitled "Purdue Boilermakers aren't a top-10 team." 

The content of that article is as follows:

The nice thing about having two major polls is that we can compare the thinking of college basketball writers (AP poll) with what Division I coaches (ESPN/USA Today) are seeing. So what do we find when we put these two preseason polls side by side? 

We find that the two groups of observers have remarkably similar opinions when it comes to ranking the nation's top teams. Whether you're parked behind a laptop along press row or pacing the floor in the coach's box, you're very likely to think that Duke is the best team in the nation. In fact, as we saw in last week's edition of "Poll Position," the writers and the coaches are in more or less complete agreement when it comes to identifying the top seven teams in the country.

And yet just outside that top seven, there's a team that the coaches and the writers clearly can't agree on: The Purdue Boilermakers, ranked a lofty No. 8 by the coaches, are ranked a more down-to-earth No. 14 by the writers. No other team in either poll's top 25 is the source of so much disagreement in terms of ranking. Who's right?

Sorry, coaches, but I have to side with my fellow writers on this one.

The first thing to understand here is the source of the disagreement: Robbie Hummel. Before Hummel suffered a season-ending knee injury on Oct. 16, Purdue was widely held to be one of the top five teams in the nation. It's safe to say the Boilermakers wouldn't be the cause of this kind of polling divergence if head coach Matt Painter had a healthy Hummel in uniform.

In other words, the disagreement between the polls really comes down to a simple question: How important is Hummel to the Boilers? Unfortunately for Hummel and for fans of Purdue, we have some prior evidence close at hand for answering just this question. Last season Hummel tore the same ACL on Feb. 24 and, in effect, the Boilermakers played their last four conference games without him. (He played 12 minutes in the Minnesota game before his injury occurred.) You may remember Purdue then went on to play one of the ugliest games in recent college basketball history, a 69-42 loss to Minnesota in the Big Ten tournament semifinals. In that game Painter's team scored just 11 points in the first half. 

To their credit, the Boilers recovered from that loss, went on to make the Sweet 16 and even took eventual national champion Duke to the 30th minute of a closely played contest before eventually losing by 13. So I'm going to do Purdue an analytic favor. I'm going to ignore that Big Ten tournament game, which fairly screams "outlier," and instead look at the 250 regular-season possessions they played without Hummel after he injured his knee.

There's something about Robbie

Purdue's offense and defense, with and without Robbie Hummel, on a points-per-possession basis.
(Conference games only, 2009-10)

Purdue	PPP	Opp. PPP
With Hummel	1.08	0.97
Without Hummel	0.97	0.91

By the way, this table comes to us courtesy of an excellent new book that I highly recommend, one that has this to say about these after-Hummel figures:

You could just as well conclude from these numbers that Hummel is the only thing standing between Purdue and true defensive greatness, but for better or worse that's not my read. As I said at the time, I think Painter responded to Hummel's injury last February by more or less declaring the coaching equivalent of martial law. Offensive rebounds, to pick one example, were clearly banned outright by Painter post-Hummel. In effect, Purdue curled up into a tight defensive ball and did their level best to bleach offense out of each succeeding contest entirely.

In terms of our present question -- who's right, the coaches or the writers -- the conclusion I draw is that Painter, even though he's a coach, actually agrees with the writers. He thinks Hummel is really important, so much so that when Hummel is not there, Painter changes his team's whole approach. Who knows, maybe if JaJuan Johnson or E'Twaun Moore went down with an injury, Painter would react the same way. But what we do know is that in the past, Hummel's absence has had a specific and measurable impact.

Any discussion of how important a player is to his team is incomplete without asking the obvious question: Who's going to be getting those minutes instead? In the case of Purdue, the names that Painter brings up as candidates to inherit Hummel's possessions don't exactly strike fear into the hearts of opposing defenses. 

Now, maybe that will change. Maybe one of the young Boilers will seize the moment and become a third scoring threat alongside Johnson and Moore. We are, after all, talking about a conference where a once-unheralded recruit like Northwestern's John Shurna emerged as a legitimate scoring threat after Kevin Coble suffered a season-ending injury last November. Stranger things have happened.

But that is my point: A strange thing like that does need to happen for the coaches to be correct and for Purdue to be considered a top-10 team without Hummel. Until that strange day comes, this writer's completely unbiased advice is to believe what writers are telling you about the Boilermakers.
 ------------------------------------------------

So it's going to take "something strange" happening for Purdue to be a top 10 team? Really? Because they kind of already are. 

I'm not going to give this article the usual BS dissection because, frankly, I don't care that much. If John Gasaway thinks that this year's Purdue team -- with different personnel and the ability to prepare for a full season without Rob -- is no different from the shell-shocked team that lost one of their key guys in mid-February last year and had to adjust on the fly.... well, then he honestly doesn't know the first damn thing about college basketball.

Seriously. Is this clown honestly saying that Matt Painter is so lacking as a coach that a team that was a possible #1 team and widely-agreed national title contender is not even a top ten team any longer because of the loss of one guy?

How many teams in the nation have not one but TWO potential all-Americans who are seniors? Hard to think of any others, right?

As for Gasaway's posit that the thought that Purdue's offense might actually be better this season being the craziest thing he's read all decade, well....all we can say is this, John:

Let's get crazy.

File this under things we're jealous of?

UND fans tell us we hate them because we're jealous of them. On one hand, they're right. Who wouldn't want to have the media fawning over your favorite team even when they don't win. Yeah, that's been happening for the past few seasons or so...but that's not the point of this post.

By the way, I'm not sure that point is something to be jealous of...it's more of a sign of the stupidity of the media, specifically EsPN. They do their best to remind us of their lack of interest in real sports stories and perpetually focus on the pop-culture around sports, not what happens on the field- music video pre-games, anything pertaining to Brett Favre, breaking stories that aren't real, and Notre Dame football. Stuff like that. Anywho.

One of the things I detest about UND is their belief that God actually favors them (Domers, he actually loves BC and Liberty the most, by the way).

So, here's an example of an arrogant Notre Dame fan in the media from a station that I don't care about.

Did you catch that? When given the opportunity to apologize or back off of his asinine joke, he decided to reiterate it because he thought it was correct. Couple points- first off, the official play clock is not that of EsPN. No, the official clock is hardly ever in complete sync with that on the TV screen. Second, and more importantly, this is clearly a poor attempt at humor. Nothing's funnier than heart attacks...am I right? High five, no?

I mean, my Dad had to get a few stints put in a few years ago. Our family just laughed and laughed at the situation! Good times...Dipshit.

Plus, whether or not this guy thinks he's funny, the root of his crappy attempt at comedy is arrogance and a firm belief that the Almighty would punish anyone for beating Notre Dame. Come to think of it, perhaps he's right! UND's administration and coaching staffs the past decade or so have been doing their best to make sure UND loses quite a bit and what's happened to them? Davie's out of coaching, Willingham's out of coaching, Weis went from OC of the World Champs, to a laughing stock at UND, to coaching an offense that's averaging just over 18pts/gm.

So while Brian Kelly takes the high road and doesn't put blame on the clock operators for UND's most-recent loss, he might wanna be careful and get out while the getting's good...because afterall, God just hates it when UND loses!

Damian Johnson Throws Down The Gauntlet

Quite simply, Damian Johnson thinks Purdue isn't as talented as everyone makes them out to be. In fact, he thinks Minny is just as talented. Ready to accuse us again of taking something out of context or "reading into" something? Here's the story and here's the money quote:

"They get pubbed up a lot and I just don't feel ... I feel like we're just as talented as them," he said. "In my opinion, they're a good team, but to me, they're not as talented as people believe."

It's rare that guys say things like this and then almost immediately have the chance to back them up, but tonight is that chance. Minnesota might provide Damian is right. But even if they do, this seems like a dumb thing to say.

Damian, just out of curiosity, have you ever been hit by a train?

(Thanks to multiple readers for pointing this out in multiple mediums.)

Wade Phillips Is Getting His Finger Ready

I love it.

Living here in Texas now, I get to hear the arrogance of fans of teams like the University of Texas, Texas A&M and, of course, the Dallas Cowboys.

When the Cowgirls lost to the Giants last year in the playoffs, I think most of Dallas called out of work the next day. They were literally in a city-wide state of depression. The Super Bowl was rightfully theirs, dammit! And those creeps from the North stole it from them! It was supposed to be the 'boys and the Pack in the NFC title game, just like God, Peter King and Chris Berman wanted it.

Regardless, today there's an article out of Dallas about how Coach Wade Phillips (0-2 in the playoffs with the Cowboys) commented that this is their year and to "Get your ring finger ready."

Now, clearly, this is taken somewhat out of context, as there cannot be any way Phillips is this arrogant and/or stupid. When your team has stumbled as a favorite in the playoffs two years in a row and hasn't won a playoff game since 1996, your best course of action is to be humble.

But anyway, thought I'd share with you how last season went for the Cowboys as they sized up their rings at that time...

Oh, hey, look... there's the Giants celebrating as they won the game over the Cowboys, in Dallas.

Hey, there's Eli Manning and Amani Toomer exiting the field in Dallas victorious over the almighty Cowboys. Hey, did you know that Eli Manning has won a Super Bowl now and Tony Romo hasn't ever even won a single, lonesome playoff game?

Hey, look, there's Eli Manning, Super Bowl MVP for the Super Bowl Champion New York Giants.

Yeah, Dallas, you get your fingers ready. And when they're nice and ready, I'll tell you where you can stick them.