ONE HUNDRED WINS



  • @jayballer54

    You missed the part where I said…Yes, it is a long streak, yes, it is a big accomplishment…

    But don’t expect me to compare it to other great sports streaks. Do you think any coach or player, male or female, would say anything not laudatory about the streak? Not unless he is crazy since it would be the epitome or political incorrectness and a public relation’s nightmare…who needs that. I have stated my case with numbers to prove my view, you think it is a huge accomplishment…we just disagree; can’t we just leave it at that?



  • @JayHawkFanToo I think it is very strange to say that their accomplishment means less because they are so good.

    This is not the same as Olympic Mens’ Basketball, where the US gold medal streak was entirely due to the lack of development of established basketball programs and leagues throughout the world. Nor can it be disregarded as due to systematic chemical cheating, as helped the East Germans dominate Womens’ Swimming in the Olympics of the 60s and 70s.

    Instead, one program has come to dominate a sport that previously had several major programs vying regularly for talent and titles.

    Your stats may well point out why the streak is not particularly interesting to watch, but to deride the success because they are so dominant is simply blind. I don’t like watching NE Patriots win so much, but I can’t say they aren’t as amazing as any team ever.

    I don’t suppose you think KU’s streak is not significant because it has lasted so long so therefore we have beaten all the obviously weak sisters in the Big 12? Okay, you might respond, those have involved close games, and amazing comebacks, etc.

    Bottom line, UConn has the killer instinct and ability we have been lacking to our chagrin, and you ridicule them? Dig down, and I think you will find that it is disinterest rather than lack of admiration driving your disdain. You seem too educated a sports fan to be so dismissive of this feat.



  • @mayjay

    Again, I am not saying is not a great accomplishment, it certainly is. What I am saying is that when you have such a superior team, top 3 draft pics as an example, and you are favored to win every game you play not by just double digits but by 30 or 40 points, it certainly indicates very weak competition and/or a huge talent disparity, wouldn’t you agree? Again 70 games were decided by 30 or more point and only 2 out of 100 by 10 or less. I cannot recall a single game when KU was favored to win by 30 or more points and then lost, do you? or even a single game when KU was favored by 30 points, even against non division I opponents, do you? It just does not happen in men’s basketball because even with programs like UK taking a chunk of top players, they never stick around for 4 years and the pool of talented players is considerably larger than that of talented women players.

    No doubt that UConn has put together an incredible program, has gotten top players and the best coach and has dominated the sport. The net result is that being that much better than the rest makes the wins expected and in a way, they are victims of their own success. KU never had talent that was that much superior to the rest of the League or other opponents, in fact, some of the titles during the current streak were decided on the last game and against equally or more talented competition and with several loses along the way but with enough wins to win the conference title, many of those years playing in the strongest League in the sport.

    I am not saying that you or anyone that believes this is a huge accomplishment is wrong, I am just saying that I see it differently for the reason I stated and I did not ask anyone to agree with me either. I respect your opinion, can you not respect mine in return?



  • @JayHawkFanToo we sure can so - - - - - no need for further comment - - ROCK CHALK ALL DAY LONG BABY



  • @DCHawker

    Easy: no one ever won 100 straight when both were coaching and there is no one that is equal to Summitt coaching today.

    Many drivers could feed into why this logic operates.

    But it is not necessary to itemize these drivers to see that the logic holds and is sound.

    But I will give you one possible example and would only ask you to remember that there are likely MANY drivers causing the logic to operate.

    When Pat Summitt and Gene Auriemma were both coaching, they were splitting most of the best talent. As a result, Summitt did not actually have to stop Auriemma from winning 1o0 straight by beating him in a game. All she had to do was sign a lot of great players, and dilute the talent level that Auriemma had, and Auriemma, or Summit, for that matter, might have been able to win 90, but not 100.

    With Summit retired, and no equal in her stead, and with Auriemma having developed even further recruiting influence because of his on going success, Auriemma gets a larger share of the very best players with the very best physical and psychological qualities required, to win 100 in a row, instead of only 90.

    But there are probably many, many, many other drivers feeding into it. Multifactorial, as they say in math class.

    Here is another one: with Summit gone, Auriemma becomes essentially the only super coach left in the sport, as Wooden became, when so many coaches like Phog Allen, Adolph Rupp, Henry Iba, and Pete Newell, Fred Taylor, and many many other great coaches began to retire and eventually leave Wooden as the ranking elder statesman of coaching by the mid 1960s. Wooden and his Bruins went from being just one of many good teams to gaining the mystique of being invincible, when all the other recognized great coaches had stepped aside and the new guys like Smith had not yet fully established themselves. In short, Summitt left the game and turned a binary star system in to a unitary one and Auriemma quickly took on the mystique of being MORE invincible than he was when Summitt was still their as a countervailing force. So: Auriemma eventually went on a tear in winning 100 straight games that he never did when Summitt was there.

    Hey, here is another possibility! Maybe the women’s game has in recent years seen a rise in refereeing asymmetry that favors the top coaches the EST. Maybe that is what has allowed Auriemma and his lady UConn women to jump from90 to 100 straight wins.

    Whoa! Here is another possibility. What if the number of games played per season has increased from back in the era when Summitt and Auriemma coached at the same time. Maybe there are just literally more games each season, and so, if you’ve got a great team, other things equal, you just win more games sooner.

    And so on.



  • @jaybate-1.0 said:

    @DCHawker

    Easy: no one ever won 100 straight when both were coaching.

    Wow - that is truly an unimpeachable argument for the wholly unsupported assertion that UConn would not have won 100 straight games if Summitt was still alive and coaching Tennessee. The wealth of data and depth of analysis is overwhelming and compelling. I bow in supplication…



  • @DCHawker

    Logic is a female dog to someone like you, and even to me on some occasion.

    Its a fascinating thing that human’s, with such extraordinary logical capacity, so often bridle at logic.

    It hurts a little watching you struggle with this.

    Its like watching a woman in child birth.

    Alas, I can’t do a C-section for you on this.

    You are going to have to labor through it yourself.

    I can be here and tell you to breath though.

    Its so easy once you have dilated your mind enough to allow the logic to operate.

    Contractions are painful though…

    Accepting logic is one of the hardest things for persons, when the logic contradicts their belief.

    It is especially hard when they “think” their belief is not a belief, but reasoning.

    This goes to the very heart of why there is so much lying. As the trendy saying these days goes: it is easier to fool a person that convince a person that they have been fooled. I would add to that epigram that it is doubly difficult when a person has fooled him/her self.

    Such a person tends to resort to the same kind of cranky, frustrated rhetoric that you appear to have used here.

    But I’m cool with apparently cranky, frustrated rhetoric.

    To riff on Ghandi, who said the truth is the truth, I say: the logic is the logic.

    Here is the thing, all you have to do to refute the logic is find a coach and team in women’s basketball that has also won 100 games, while his/her career overlapped with Auriemma’s. Its so obvious. That at least appears to be why you find it so annoying. It is obvious, yet you cannot do it. Grrrrrrr.

    So: you are apparently stuck with the logic that contradicts your apparent belief that you apparently fooled yourself into believing, and in turn you appear to resort to cranky, frustrated rhetoric instead of doing the easy, prudent thing and saying, of course, @jaybate 1.0, I see the logic and that’s that.

    I often wonder after having these sorts of discussions if the real issue didn’t hinge on Board Rat A wanting to be right rather than wanting to get at the crucial insight, versus me who doesn’t care about being right, but rather is most interested in learning the crucial insight. If you had had the logic on your side, well, I would have been delighted and adopted your logic and thanked you for sharing it with me. But for some reason, some folks don’t like to do that.

    But the important thing is KU is very near a record number of conference titles and so may be one day you will explain that to me with sound logic and I will get a chance to show you how appreciative I can be.

    Rock Chalk!



  • @DCHawker

    P.S.: IMHO, no argument is unimpeachable with twisting and distortion of premises and facts and logic. The thing that is great about logic is that even after being twisted and distorted, one simply restates it without the twists and distortions and it just is once again either valid, or not. It just does either explain things or it doesn’t.



  • @jaybate-1.0 said:

    @DCHawker

    Logic is a female dog to someone like you, and even to me on some occasion.

    Its a fascinating thing that human’s, with such extraordinary logical capacity, so often bridle at logic.

    It hurts a little watching you struggle with this.

    Its like watching a woman in child birth.

    Alas, I can’t do a C-section for you on this.

    You are going to have to labor through it yourself.

    I can be here and tell you to breath though.

    Its so easy once you have dilated your mind enough to allow the logic to operate.

    Contractions are painful though…

    Accepting logic is one of the hardest things for persons, when the logic contradicts their belief.

    It is especially hard when they “think” their belief is not a belief, but reasoning.

    This goes to the very heart of why there is so much lying. As the trendy saying these days goes: it is easier to fool a person that convince a person that they have been fooled. I would add to that epigram that it is doubly difficult when a person has fooled him/her self.

    Such a person tends to resort to the same kind of cranky, frustrated rhetoric that you appear to have used here.

    But I’m cool with apparently cranky, frustrated rhetoric.

    To riff on Ghandi, who said the truth is the truth, I say: the logic is the logic.

    Here is the thing, all you have to do to refute the logic is find a coach and team in women’s basketball that has also won 100 games, while his/her career overlapped with Auriemma’s. Its so obvious. That at least appears to be why you find it so annoying. It is obvious, yet you cannot do it. Grrrrrrr.

    So: you are apparently stuck with the logic that contradicts your apparent belief that you apparently fooled yourself into believing, and in turn you appear to resort to cranky, frustrated rhetoric instead of doing the easy, prudent thing and saying, of course, @jaybate 1.0, I see the logic and that’s that.

    I often wonder after having these sorts of discussions if the real issue didn’t hinge on Board Rat A wanting to be right rather than wanting to get at the crucial insight, versus me who doesn’t care about being right, but rather is most interested in learning the crucial insight. If you had had the logic on your side, well, I would have been delighted and adopted your logic and thanked you for sharing it with me. But for some reason, some folks don’t like to do that.

    But the important thing is KU is very near a record number of conference titles and so may be one day you will explain that to me with sound logic and I will get a chance to show you how appreciative I can be.

    Rock Chalk!

    Truly worthy of Aristotle, Cicero and Locke @jaybate1…0

    The @jaybate-1.0 proposition:

    UConn WOULD NOT HAVE won 100 consecutive games if Pat Summitt was still coaching Tennessee

    The proof, the whole proof and nothing but the proof:

    Well, UConn DID NOT win 100 consecutive games while she was coaching Tennessee

    Rep ispa loquitor!!! Brilliant stuff. The logic is unassailable!!!



  • @jaybate-1.0 I was wondering about the talent stacking at UCONN the other day myself. I don’t follow womens ball at all. But it seems that if some team/coach wins that many games in a row, that there is, at very least, a huge gap in coaching abilities between Coach A and all the other coaches in Div 1 womens ball. Also, a mega stacked team, like UCONN appears to be to me would also have a much greater advantage over all the other teams, wouldn’t they have?
    I mean, its like Duke and Kentucky mens teams getting stacks of 10 McD’s players at a time.
    I don’t know if womens ball has a Mickey D’s game or its equivalent. But it sure seems like there is a distinct advantage over there at UConn.



  • @Lulufulu said:

    I mean, its like Duke and Kentucky mens teams getting stacks of 10 McD’s players at a time

    And, imagine if all top 10 McD’s stayed in school for three years, year after year. That’s what Auriemma has going. Not good for the sport.



  • I’m gonna lay down one more thing on this thread. Its probly gonna rub some people the wrong way but this is my truth.

    There is zero chance that Auriemma and UConn could do this in the mens Div 1 league. Zero.

    100 wins in a row is very impressive and all but its against far inferior competition. So its kind of invalidated.

    100 wins is 100 wins but it means less if youre not doing it against the best competition.

    Put the UConn womens team in the Mens ACC or Big 12 or Big 10. Would they go undefeated in 20 games?

    Hell no.

    SO, big deal, they won 100 games against other womens teams and rolled over all of them. Their margin of victory in the vast majority of those games wasn’t even close! Not close at all. That’s not competition. Come on. That’s lame.



  • @jayballer54 If you are referring to the Joe DiMaggio streak, it was 56, not 51.



  • @DanR Totally agree. I don’t think there are any one and done in women’s bball. I do not follow it except to check on the KU team once in awhile, so there may be. But your point is spot on. If Geno is getting 2 or 3 of the top recruits every year, and they stay in school, then that is why the streak happened, and may continue on for some time.



  • @Big-Clyde52

    The WNBA “requires players to be at least 22, to have completed their college eligibility, to have graduated from a four-year college or to be four years removed from high school.”



  • @Big-Clyde52 I was living in Knoxville from 2000-2010. Women’s basketball was bigger than mens during that time period. Pat could land some stud players, but she never tried to stack all the elite talent like Geno does now.



  • @DanR Oh, she tried. In the 90s she did it, or came pretty close.

    They all try.



  • @Lulufulu let me say this and then I’m done. - -simple question? - -Did or di they not - -every single Div one college have a chance to recruit those same ladies? yes or no? Did these girls that went to U-Conn when they came out of high school did they not have a recruiting process? Was U-Conn the ONLY school that recruited them? Is it U-Con fault that these girls after having multitudes of colleges recruit them, is it U- Conn’s fault that they chose U-conn.? - -Should U-Conn say when these girls say I want to play at U-Conn should he say OH NO I’m sorry you can’t play here- - -because that will make all the other schools so much inferior? Did ALL other colleges have a chance to recruit these same ladies? Plain and simple. It’s Not U-conn’s fault that all this talent wanted to play for one of the best Coaches in America. - - Great players want to Play with Great players just like in Men’s - -why do you think Sooo many guys want to go to Duke? - -Kentucky?- -because great players again want to play with great players. - -Tired of hearing about how these other team are so inferior - -who’s fault is that? - - sure the hell not U- Conn’s. - -Maybe, just Maybe these other colleges need to try a different approach. - -It’s an awesome accomplishment NEVER EVER going to come close to being duplicated ever again period.

    The only reason as your trying to say that it’s invalidated cause you say the competition is so inferior - So does that mean KU 13 yrs conference championships in a row is some what invalidated? - - Look how sooo many people say how bad it is for the Big 12 for us to win the conference every year. - -Is our competition that much inferior? should we be winning it 13 yrs in a row? unless our competition is weak?- -Why have we won 13 yrs in a row? - - Cause we keep getting really good players - -and again good players want to play with good players, - - the good players want to go to the tradition rich Schools, exposure, Y That’s why yr after yr Kentucky, Duke, north Carolina Ku keep getting the really good players - -that’s why U-Conn keeps getting the really good players - -ok It’s done we can beat this to death we not going to get any where - - -ROCK CHALK ALL DAY LONG BABY



  • I forget which analyst it was at ESPN, may have even been a coach, but they basically said that women’s basketball is at a similar point in its evolution to where men’s basketball was in the 60’s and 70’s when UCLA was the dominant program in college basketball. UConn will be dethroned at some point, but they are in the middle of a UCLA type dynasty right now.



  • @Lulufulu

    The gods of recruiting distributions move in mysterious ways.

    @DanR

    And no freshmen ineligibility.



  • @jayballer54 I totally understand your line of reasoning here. I agree with it. The UConn team has similar talent stacking to Kentucky, Duke mens teams. I think @jaybate-1.0 has the most solid reasoning on why talent stacking is going on and it appears its a thing in womens ball too. It is what it is. Definitely not the players faults.

    What I am saying is that the UConn womens team could not win against better competition. Specifically they could not win that many games against any high elite major team in any power conference. Well, ok maybe the lower tier teams like Texas now and OU now. But still no way they win 20 games in a row in any Mens Div 1 conference. For UConn to strengthen their legitimacy amongst the best teams ever to play the college game, they need to do it against the best competition.

    @Texas-Hawk-10 just made a solid point. UConn now is kind of like UCLA 50 years ago when they were the only dominant team. Things have progressed in the mens game. No single mens team will ever be that dominant. Yes I am including Duke and Kentucky and Kansas in that statement. I am not diminishing KU’s streak of 12 straight conference champs. No way any other team matches that streak any time soon in todays game.

    I would personally love to see UConn womens team play summer games against any high elite major program in Mens Div 1. They want to be considered amongst the best teams, they gotta prove it against the best talent.



  • @Lulufulu I think women swimmers who win medals in the Olympics should have to prove they are good by beating men, too.

    And high school football champions should have to play college teams.

    The NCAA College World Series winner should have to play the MLB runner-up at least.

    Serena vs Nadal, or her records don’t mean crap.

    After all, if teams can only beat their entire competition, it must mean they aren’t any good. They should always have to compete outside their sport to prove themselves.😝



  • @Lulufulu

    I am with @mayjay…I think…

    Women’s basketball teams playing Division I men’s elite teams is silly, it would not be a contest.



  • @mayjay Serena vs Nadal!? I like that match up. She’d kick his ass. Seriously. Serena is a beast!! I love her and her game.

    I do see your point though. And I agree with it.



  • @Lulufulu I was going to mention Billie Jean King vs Bobby Riggs, but no one was suggesting she play anyone under 50!

    Glad you took it in fun! Added an emoji!




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