YOU DON'T TRY TO LIMBO UNDER TRAVIS FORD...
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You don’t roller-skate in a buffalo herd.
You don’t shave with a rusty blade.
You don’t shine your shoes with barbed wire.
You hit a baseball injected with nitroglycerin.
You don’t bungee jump off the empire state building with a 10 pound test monofilament line.
You don’t play air guitar with running chain saw.
You don’t swallow scorpions.
You don’t suck on a firing machine gun.
You don’t clean your family jewels with a string trimmer.
You don’t push the button holding a nuclear bomb.
You don’t smoke and water ski on a gasoline lake.
You don’t try to jump across a black hole.
You don’t tell your secrets with a laser on your window.
You don’t sit your OADs if you want to sign more.
You don’t get elected President and print your own currency interest free.
You don’t lose the disruption stat on the road.
You don’t try to win games on the foul line on the road, because the refs will never give you a favorable whistle.
You never, never, never, never, never, never, EVER stop shooting treys when you are 1-7 in the second half on the road with less than a 15 point lead.
You don’t pull the mask off the old lone ranger.
And you don’t mess around with Jim.
Oh, and you don’t try to limbo under Travis Ford.
Those are big don’ts I try to observe.
Now let’s list a couple things that weren’t the cause of the loss.
Rebounding was irrelevant at 35 a piece and even on offensive and defensive rebounds too.
Shooting 52% from the FT line was not the problem. Had KU shot 70% from the FT stripe, it would only have made 3 more free throws and that would still have left KU down 67-65 at the buzzer.
Shooting 40% didn’t help but it didn’t guaranty the loss. Darby O’Gill and the Little People shot about the same.
What killed us was making six more TOs and getting 4 less strips, and playing to win the game on the foul line on the road and instead getting 7 less FTAs than OSU.
Why was getting significantly fewer FTAs such a big deal?
Because we could have been shooting treys with those possessions.
But those are just the things we did wrong.
The question is why did we do them wrong, when we didn’t have to?
Self went into the Iba tabernacle and began to feel guilty about playing “outside in;” that’s why.
The ghost of Henry began taunting Self.
He said, “Man-up and play us inside-out, or you are not one of my disciples.”
And so Bill manned up and ended the outside in game that worked so well.
And lo he played inside out.
And knowing his bigs could not play Nash and Cobbins that way, he tried to win it by getting into the one and one.
But it did not work, because the referees gave OSU all the calls that all referees give all home teams, when the road team is trying to play the way ghosts want them to.
But to put the game into perspective, playing exactly the wrong strategy for fully one half the game the team only lost by 5.
In a backhanded sort of way, that shows how much better than OSU KU is. OSU could not possibly have lost by only 5 playing exactly the wrong strategy even at home.
But such metaphysics get us no closer to an 11th title.
Time to think next, steal a win the next gam on Tuedsay, and begin planning for trying to win games sick with flu in 7-10 days after exposure to Forte.
Next.
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@jaybate-1.0 PHOF for the Darby O’Gill and the Little People mention! Haven’t seen that movie in ages and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else (aside from my brothers) who has.
“But to put the game into perspective, playing exactly the wrong strategy for fully one half the game the team only lost by 5.”
Something to put in perspective is that playing that way for one half we lost that particular half by 16 points, 37-21. So while the game as a whole might backhandedly show how much better we are than OSU, hopefully that half shows how awful we are playing that way.
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I understand you point about making 3 more Fts, but you also have to look at missing the front end of 1 and 1s. I know we missed at least 2 front ends. Make some of those and it creates more opportunities, which then changes your %…does that make sense?
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@jaybate-1.0 I was thinking the same thing about being exposed to Forte…guard him but not toooo close!
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@jaybate-1.0 said:
You never, never, never, never, never, never, EVER stop shooting treys when you are 1-7 in the second half on the road with less than a 15 point lead.
This is the only one on your list that I must disagree with. If your jersey says KANSAS, you bolt to a huge lead then just quit playing basketball. Just effing quit.
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How much did the pressure and extended defense lead to us away from outside - in? That is referenced in recaps by players and Greene in particular.
Could it be we really haven’t worked up plays and philosophy for a true O-I game? I don’t see us running sets that are significantly different from our normal movement short of a little less hi-Lo.
I’ll leave that for the true BBall minds to answer?
Also, Self is 3-5 at OSU. Is that his worst road record in Big 12 and, the question needs to be asked though I can’t fathom it, does he “under” coach for his alma mater?
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It seems to me that Travis Ford kind of gets Bill Self in a way few coaches do. I would say Fran Dunphy does too. Always a good game even with less material.
In contrast, it seems Fred Hoiberg doesn’t get Self so much as Fred can scheme things Self doesn’t get.
Ford is always a pain in the neck even when we win.
He seems always to know what Self is doing to succeed with a team, find the weakness, and stick a needle in.
The second time around Trav knew to use Nash and Cobbins to take away our big man attacks from the outside and play our bigs straight up inside. This left our two point guards and Selden back where they were early in the season: no place to pass to. He puts three gnats on our 3 perimeter guys with no where to pass to, and, voila, turnovers flow like manna from heaven, because our point guards and Selden are not good improvisers. Game. Set. Match.
Oh well, Self just has to get better at Travis…
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“You don’t…”
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@Bwag I can’t see it being true, but I’ve often thought (even before yesterdays game) that Self “under coaches” at least one OSU game/ yr.
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@jaybate-1.0 No doubt. I noticed a ton of 3 out 2 in sets in the 2nd half. Cliff on the bench too! Wtf to that.
Trying to think percentages here. What are the odds that KU goes through the last 8 games at 7 - 1 or 6 - 2?
Conversely, what are the odds that ISU, OU and.or WVU win out the remaining games?Me thinks KU has the better odds here.
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@Bwag - I really like your reference to Greene’s post game comments. Here’s the main quote from Greene:
“Just the fluidity,” KU sophomore Brannen Greene said of KU’s second-half woes. He hit three three-pointers and scored 10 points the first half, failing to score in the final half. “When they started pressuring us, we started our offense farther out than we wanted to. It just threw off everything. When you are able to start the offense around the three-point line, you are in scoring position. We weren’t in scoring position with our offense. They got after us and some of us got rattled.”
Hmmm … lots of info there.
Remember Greene’s quote from this week -"Greene said Self allows him to fire away ‘as long as it’s in the flow of the offense. His main thing is get the easiest shots. Sometimes me shooting a long three is our best chance at that point. Wherever the shot clock may be, certain parts of the game, certain times of the game.’ "
It is more than obvious that Self limits Greene’s ability to gun. The answer to yesterday is easy. OSU’s pressure got us out of our normal offensive flow.
And a similar refrain – we didn’t adjust, change, or modify our attack. We saw the same thing we normally see.
With that, Travis Ford outcoached Bill Self.
Just as Self outcoached Kruger, things can go the other way.
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I used to love Jim. Used to go to his joint in the Gaslamp District of San Diego. What an incredible talent and what a huge loss for him to go so young. His kid has carried on the legacy and added to it. RIP Jim.
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@HighEliteMajor and after reading Greene’s comment I saw Jesse reported Ford specifically coached his team to not let us shoot 3’s. They’d live with some 2-pt lay ups.
How do we scheme to get good shots against that D? That is the question. Our “lay ups” were hurried and as ugly of shots as I’ve seen taken in a long time.
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Instead of giving credit to squirt, we should give it to his players!
“We were asking coach Ford to put it in,” Nash said of the press. “And he was trying to make sure fatigue was good for us and we just told him, ‘Bring it on. We don’t care. We want to win this game.’”
