C5 at 9/16 was not the problem
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This might be a controversial take but I actually do think the refs shoulder some of the blame for this game. I have stated elsewhere the entire team and coaches are to blame for this loss but since the refs have been mentioned, let’s talk about that. First I want to make it clear that I’m not entirely positive the the reffing was UNFAIR with in this game. But compare this game to the Texas Tech game and it isn’t even the same game. How can they both be called basketball? The rules were completely different! This team has been built to play within the rules as they have been called for a majority of the season and last night was something different. WVU players shoved, held, hand checked (that’s a euphemism!), tripped, bumped, and everything else to prevent the “freedom of movement” we have been hearing about all year. Blame the Tech refs for calling the game so close, or the WVU refs for “letting them play” but the comparison between the two is absolutely ridiculous. This “home whistle” stuff has to stop. And this is coming from a KU fan and we get our share at home. Again, NOT AN EXCUSE, but certainly a problem.
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I think you’ve nailed this issue. The only real way to beat a team that wants to dog fight is to out talent them, or play their game. Like you said KU doesn’t have the kind of muscle to play this type of game. So KU has to out talent them. A lot of posters want to blame KU players for this poor showing, and maybe there is some truth in this point of view. Yet the Coach deserves the loin share of the blame.
Huggy brought the X’s and O’s and Coach did not. It’s the story/issue that has divided the sight. Some believe Coach can do no wrong, and the others question what the Coach is doing. Whether Coach intended to or not he has built a team that can run and shoot, yet his true desire is to pound the ball inside. I’m beginning to wonder if KU has an identity crisis? Coach demanding a ground and pound game, and the players better suited to a Coach Williams style of play?
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@justanotherfan “It’s not about moves for Lucas. It’s about the time it takes for him to catch/gather and execute an offensive move. If you are unguarded at the college level, you have less than a second to catch a pass and start making a move before the defense recovers to you. Landen cannot do this. He has to catch and gather before he can make a move. By the time this happens, the defense has recovered, unless Landen is dunking on a lob.”
Great post. On Lucas, last night Fran hit on exactly what we’ve been chirping about. Lucas has the ball just inside the top of the key, and his defender is standing in the middle of the lane, “playing centerfield” as Fran said. Is this helpful to Ellis? Heck, near the basket, they he presents zero threat. Lucas, in that game last night, made no sense.
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@DCHawker another tactical coaching error. Did coach even watch the WVU-UVA game?
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@DinarHawk One certainly hopes that someone on the staff watched the game in which WVU not only suffered its only loss, but got beat (down) 47 - 19 over the last 23 minutes of that game. Particularly as UVA is very similar to KU in terms of personnel - veteran team, not really big, strong guard play, and one fairly skilled forward - big difference being that KU ostensibly has a lot more quality depth. By the way, while our perimeter players are our strength and I like FM and DG a lot (putting aside last night’s performance), those who have said we have the best guard tandem are perhaps being a bit hyperbolic - certainly don’t have anything on Brogdan and Perrantes.
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Huggins team out scored KU every time the tempo picked up. Huggins has designed his team to muscle in transition. WVU wanted to play KU in transition. Transition basketball is where being the most physical pays most Dividends to a muscle ball team geared to run.
KU has to learn to play this way or else.
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I’m confused. Many people on this site thought that this was going to be a very tough game and that KU could lose. Some people stated that they had penciled this in as a loss before the season started. We then proceeded to play a bad game and got beat. How does anyone here think that you get beat? THE OTHER TEAM PLAYS BETTER for whatever reason. Teams that are beaten usually get out hustled, out rebounded, and out played.
Except for a couple of people who all of a sudden think that the winner of the league will have 1 or at most 2 losses, the general consensus has been that the winner will probably lose 3 to 4 games and most of these will be on the road. Well guess what, we lost a game on the road. Who in the hell thought that that would never happen this year.
This is what I love about this site. People go on and on about how only tournament losses count, who cares about winning the Big XII, yada, yada, yada. The sky is falling. Bill Self is washed up. The season has now taken a different direction. We will never win again except against KSU (no one here ever thinks it is possible to lose to KSU). Now if we lose to TCU on Saturday and OSU next week I will become nervous about this team. Until then I will be disappointed that we didn’t win in Morgantown and will be waiting to see what comes next.
Chill!!
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@sfbahawk You miss the point - it is how we lost. None of us on here expect KU to go undefeated in the Big 12. That is unrealistic, especially against so many good teams.
The fact that they were outtoughed, outcoached, and had no in game adjustments from Self is why many, including myself, are displeased. Everyones best effort was not on display last night, including Self.
Really, in regards to getting to the final four, winning the conference is not important, Recent teams that made it to the final four have proved that. But it sure leaves a sour taste in my mouth when guys are getting punked and beaten badly all game and nothing is done by anyone. Inexcusable.
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@DinarHawk Well winning the conference might be important…it can help you get a #1 seed…which makes an easier path (in theory) to the FF.
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@Hawk8086 I hear you, but a one seed has helped us a grand total of 1 time. Maybe it would do these guys good to get a 3 or 4 seed.
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@DinarHawk Yeah, maybe.
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@DinarHawk My point is that when teams lose their best effort is generally not on display. That includes players and coaches. You and I are both displeased by the loss. What do you think Cyclone fans feel right now? There is a poll on one of their websites questioning whether they should forfeit the rest of the season. Fred Hoiberg who sits at the father for the past few years is being crucified for not leaving enough good players. Jameel McKay is going from defensive player of the year to “What has happened to Jameel?”.
Fans are fans. This is the best of all possible worlds when the team wins and the season is going into the toilet when it loses. Frank Mason didn’t all of a sudden become a wuss. Brannen Greene didn’t suddenly become a bad shooter. Bill Self did not suddenly become stupid (although there are some who always think that is the case). They played a bad game.
I must have forgotten that the 2008 team never played a bad game. How was it that we were not undefeated that year?
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@sfbahawk I get your point, but do you not think that this loss is eerily similar to the WSU game last year? WSU did not play an exceptionally excuted game. As dragonslyr has noted, they were the aggressor and played with a chip. WSU wanted to win more. They applied defensive pressure, and we crumbled, just like yesterday. Is that not concerning to you? I am not trying to be negative, but seeing how nothing has really changed in that department says a lot about development and coaching. What is preventing a team in the tournament from doing the same thing? Oh well, I guess, if the other team beats us again in March. They played better right? Just happens. Self never got outcoached. You know what, the players were tired! That’s got to be it! (sigh)
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@DinarHawk do you happen to remember what happened to Perry during the first half of the wv game at AFH last year? do you have any idea how bad his knee was? And Cliff who was just starting to get it, was sidelined? Did you see us play OU w/out those 2 and BG was home due to discipline problems. Pretty darn close game. Did Perry play in the big 12 tourney? I could go on about Embiids injury, but we’ve beat that dead horse for 2 years. I’d really like to fill your cup up.
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@Crimsonorblue22 Ridiculous excuses. Again, what some still insist on doing here – the simplistic explanation.
You seriously bring up Embiid? Yet coach Self’s game plan, without Embiid vs. Stanford, knowing he didn’t have Embiid, was to stick with the pound the ball inside dogma. Against a team with tall post players. And then to blame missing bunnies. Further, as even the game announcers noted, he just left Wiggins standing on the wing. Perhaps you saw Wiggins’ quotes after the game.
A coach’s job is to put his players in the best position to win. Not just to put them on the floor, as is the implication of your (and others comments) – where it is in every instance to blame the players.
Against WSU, Self got to play his favorites – Lucas and Traylor, right? Even with the 5th and 22nd player in the country on the roster right now, he makes that choice. Further, KU was obviously not ready to play. Self made the choice to switch to “bad ball.” And, of course, we have the acknowledgment by Self that he tried to make last season’s team into something it wasn’t.
All of that does not mean that the players don’t share some of the blame. Of course they do. But Self shares some of the blame (a fact which you and some others never acknowledge). In certain games, though, it is clear that a loss is the result of getting out coached, and most times in varying degrees.
For example, vs. Michigan in 2013, was Self “out coached”? No. There were some decisions Self made that were questionable – not fouling before the game tying three, poor last possession management. But not out coached. Stanford, though, was a schematic failing, and complete failure to adjust during the game. Out coached by a superior game plan. But if you don’t want to look for it, you won’t see it.
In the game just before the Michigan game, vs. UNC, Self’s strategy was excellent in not getting sucked into UNC’s small ball. Our approach to start the second half was perfection. And you point out the OU game last season. Clearly one of Self’s best coached games. And when we discuss Self’s failures in situations, those failures get most of the discussion. A large, large majority of the time, that’s not the discussion as we don’t have a lot of Self failures to discuss.
I have this vision of the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys when it comes to some and their defenses of coach Self. If the guy decided to start Tyler Self over Devonte Graham, some here would cite Self’s coaching record and defend his decision.
The difference is that you, and others, will never acknowledge that Self can fail, or that he fails at times in his prep, or that he fails at time in his game plan. And you mistake the discussion of when there are failures as an attack on the man, his character, and his accomplishments. Just like @sfbahawk did above – referring to Self “not suddenly becoming stupid” and just saying we played a bad game. This is perhaps the best example of this inability to comprehend the nature of a discussion. No one said he has become stupid. We’re just saying the guy isn’t perfect, and can make mistakes, and there are times when his decisions negatively impact the team. A great majority of the time, it’s a positive impact – what we all see in great product that Self puts on the floor.
Self is having an outstanding season from a coaching perspective. We get focused on a few main topics, but what else are we criticizing? Not much. Some here can’t stand any criticism.
You can go through life just saying “Uh, they played a bad game.” Others might look at the most important question in life, which is “why?” But that requires independent thought. I admit, though, it is much easier to say “they played a bad game” and move on. Quite frankly, I can’t imagine spending the time to post if all I was going to say is “Bill Self is never wrong” and “They played a bad game.”
It’s interesting - @sfbahawk says, “Frank Mason didn’t all of a sudden become a wuss.” Right. The question is “why” did he and Selden have such great difficulty vs. WVU. The next easy step is to look at what WVU did with its press and defensively. Then the next step is to look at what we did to deal with it. What we do to deal with it is directed and orchestrated by one man. He makes the decisions.
And no one says the players don’t have a role in this. Of course they do. That’s part of the analysis that I freely acknowledge. Guys can just play bad and there are no schematic or game planning issues. No doubt. It’s just that a certain group of folks say that Self has no role in it. That’s a big difference.
When someone can’t acknowledge that a human being can make mistakes in judgment, that someone completely lacks credibility. If you acknowledge that Self can make mistakes, then you acknowledge that positions different than Self’s position may be correct. Again, what those in the Self is God group ignore is their lord and savior’s admission about his errors last season, and the fact that posters here were right when Self was wrong.
It’s certainly fine to have 100% faith in someone’s judgment. I have no issue with that. But when you have the 100% faith, you can’t objectively analyze the person’s decision. 100% faith is akin to blind faith. And when you’re blind, you can’t see your hand in front of your face. But then again, you don’t need to.
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We play TCU on Saturday.
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@HighEliteMajor said:
It’s interesting - @sfbahawk says, “Frank Mason didn’t all of a sudden become a wuss.” Right. The question is “why” did he and Selden have such great difficulty vs. WVU.
I am not buying the family in a snow storm hypothesis. Easterners are all used to blizzards. They grow up with them. I have lived there. I never worried about anyone being late, because of a storm. I knew they were going to be late.
I am not buying the scheme hypothesis. If it were the scheme, then Frank and Wayne would not have been the only ones baking pop tarts. Devonte would have had his baker’s hat on, too.
I am not buying the Stanford analogy. Embiid was absent. Self was trying to maintain a team model hoping Embiid might somehow be persuaded to return. This team had no such injury to a starter impeding it.
I am not buying the “didn’t just suddenly become a wuss” reasoning either. Why? All competition over the course of a game, a season, or a life intermittently exposes legacy softness that has to be hardened, or one has to concede one’s ceiling has been reached. This team has been a team that suffered through hardship to prevail, but suffering is not the same as hardening. But to get to the top, you have to be hard to the core, or as nearly as one can be. This team found it has legacy softness in at least Frank, Wayne. The softness may be in Svi and BG, too. And in others that were not exposed. Suffering is NOT the same as hardening.
Frank Mason and Wayne Selden ran into a buzz saw fueled and run by a very tough Mountaineer logger–Bob Huggins, running what may be thought of as a thug-saw.
KU had this season been the experienced team dishing out the hurts to less experienced and/or less physical teams.
KU had gotten the idea that it was tougher than other teams, because it had met all such challenges of toughness.
It was an honest mistake.
Competition by its very nature exposes what we did not know we did not know.
The thug-saw cut Frank and Wayne to the quick and found soft marrow, not hard bone.
Now the bone must be healed and the bone callous thickened, so that the marrow cannot be reached so easily by a thug-saw.
Self has apparently hidden from he media.
Self has sent his assistant, Kurtis Townsend, to speak of not competing.
Self has apparently decided to get a thug-saw, but wisely not to become associated with it.
Pity the next opponent.
Pity WVU in its visit to AFH.
KU basketball players may all be issued Devin Williams model goggles for the return engagement just to send a clear message.
This isn’t the end.
This is the beginning.
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@jaybate-1.0 I agree with your theory. To paraphrase, Self said post game “We were full of ourselves”. I agree. I think these guys were too confident that they didn’t compete hard enough. And it showed.
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@DinarHawk Self said after the game the Jayhawks (14-2, 3-1) may have been “a little full of ourselves” after winning 13 in a row and vaulting to the top of the national polls.
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@benshawks08 Like this when Wayne was called for charging?
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The identity of this KU team (and the previous two years as well) is that they are a finesse team. WVU, WSU, Stanford, Temple are all physical teams and these are the teams that have made KU look their absolute worst in the past 2.5 seasons. This team doesn’t have the enforcers that they’ve had with T-Rob, the twins, Cole, D-Jax, Simien. Nobody on KU is going to make opponents pay for going to the rim and nobody is scared of KU right now because there’s no reason to be afraid of KU.
KU needs an enforcer in the middle of the defense that can make teams think twice about driving the lane.
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@Texas-Hawk-10 still someone is going to have to step up and decide that they aren’t going to get punked and bullied. It is a mindset that they must have in order to make a deep run. Any of them have the potential to be that, they just don’t know how to or that they can.
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@Texas-Hawk-10 Mr.Withey!!!
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@Texas-Hawk-10 I know everyone thinks Perry is soft, but he’s been tougher than anyone else on the team, in my opinion. Well, Frank’s tough too, but you know what I mean.
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@nuleafjhawk Perry played tough against WVU, but the team overall is still a finesse team and didn’t fight back against WVU’s bullying.
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@Texas-Hawk-10 IMO, “finesse” may not quite be the right word. Ironically P erry is the only one not playing like…what @drgnslayr 's wife always says!
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@nuleafjhawk are you throwing his wife under the bus?
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@nuleafjhawk Finesse doesn’t explicitly mean a lack of toughness. Finesse just means you game is more skill based than power based. To me, skill based means you have multiple moves in your repertoire and power based are guys that are naturally stronger than others and depend on that strength and have a limited repertoire of moves.
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@Crimsonorblue22 I would never do that! But @drgnslayr has mentioned several times that his wife likes to call them the “P” word. As do I.
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Interesting note. I was partially watching the San Antonio Cleveland game while keeping my dad company at the hospital and at the end of the third quarter Sager was interviewing Popovich…
I would love to see Coach Self go “full Popovich” on a reporter that asks dumb questions…
You gotta tell me that? I already know that stuff…What is the question…I’ll ask them nicely to commit less turnovers…how is that…what the hell do you want me to do?..Classic!!!
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Judging by the early life and education section of his wiki page, Poppa appears to have some spook background that perhaps allows him to be a little bolder than the average coach with the media. Just a hunch though.
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Whew!! Im glad this post survived the data dump!
I’ll rest easy tonight.
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That was blast from the past.
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@Lulufulu I’ve chuckled at your post three times now. The hand wringing we went through about Center! Man. This thread represents about 30 others lengthy ones like it.
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IMHO, one thing that people are still not clued into sufficiently about the digital age is that ALL information on the internet appears unreliable to significant degree by definition, because it can be altered so many intentional and unintentional ways without any ability to verify and paper trail it beyond a reasonable doubt. Michael Crichton’s novel “Rising Sun” dramatized the intrinsic problem with authenticity of digital images long ago now, but the problem is inherent in all digital information. Changes can reputedly be made that are untraceable and undetectable. Not only digital photos but all digital information is suspect IMHO.
Without putting too fine of a point on it, it appears internet information is likely way more protean and unverifiable regarding accuracy and authenticity in both real and legal senses than any one can yet adequately grasp.
When a mass of data disappears, not just the data disappears but that data had contextual links to other data that we cannot even begin to understand without extensive investigation and analysis, and even then we may or may not be able to arrive at understanding beyond a reasonable doubt…
There are just endless steps from keyboard, to RAM, to hard drive, to wifi hub, to internet relays, to servers, to storage, to retrieval, where information can be corrupted accidentally, or intentionally by means probably not even discoverable. Heck, even random packet loss can corrupt. Proving beyond a reasonable doubt what appears actually is, or was, the accurate, authentic action of a communicator appears to be VERY difficult on the internet. How does one prove beyond a reasonable doubt that digital content was not corrupted? that the intent of the communicator was not tampered with? If Gerry Spense, or someone of his caliber, were in court, I suspect it would be very tough. This has been the problem from the beginning with the concept of total information awareness. So what if the government is totally aware of all information if the information it is totally aware of is corruptible to a significantly indeterminate extent? And reputedly our government itself is but one of many players actively engaged in poisoning the well of digitized information. Most governments are reputedly tampering with digital information and so probably are many other kinds of organizations. Who can even say beyond a reasonable doubt that this thread above was not tampered with even before it first appeared on any screen, or that it hasn’t been tampered with numerous times since. There is no escaping this problem. IMHO it is part of the double edged sword of digital connectivity.
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I believe this access to total information has changed our psychology about information. No longer can a piece of information be devastating, because we recognize it as only a piece, and maybe also we no longer perceive it as immutable. The soundbyte gotcha age is behind us. Contrast Howard Dean’s Howl to Trump’s “Grab em by the _____”. Everything is now contextual, which is more realistic, but attempting to frame the context, rather than finding the news, is where the pundits butter their bread.
With the mass proliferation of available perceptions, any piece of information, which used to be perceived as concrete, is now abstract. It is an incomplete object without opinions attached to it. I wonder if most people are uncomfortable handling information that has not already had an opinion attached.
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@approxinfinity Howard Dean’s howl was epic btw.
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@approxinfinity said:
concrete
You are a astute and insightful analyst of the interface of digitalization and its effect on meaning in culture. You are enough younger than me that you could put into clear words what I could only fumble around the edges of.
We are dealing with a paradigm shift in the foundations of meaning in a digitized culture vs a predigitalized culture that will be as pervasive and “impactful” as occurred to meaning in the ascent of bureaucracy and industrialization during the era of paper on printing press has been.
The early phases of this changes produce alarmist analyses that emphasize the incomprehensibility of what is to come and naively argue that because the change is incomprehensible to us that it spells doom. This is a prejudice of educated intelligence; that without broad, fitting and effective knowledge human action is doomed. Wrong.
History records humanity negotiating these periods again and again. It is frankly what we do. We are creatures that endlessly create meanings out of sensory input that may or may not help us live. Nature’s indifferent context then selects us endlessly in tiny increments towards meanings that work, whether they are true or not in any given moment.
Life is the record of expedient fit with context.
All meanings possible at a given time have been tried at one time or other in large or small attempts. Times and context change and new meanings are tried along with old ones.
What works is repeated, if it does not too suddenly traumatize the order.
What does not work is often kept if it perpetuates the order.
Digitalization changes meaning as you say with such breathtaking clarity.
The question is: can we find a way to benefit from it by making it not too traumatic to the order?
I never worry about humans creating new effective meanings the way Jean Baudrillard did, when he said humans had destroyed first god, and now the truth in their progression from agrarian, to industrial, to digital, and that without truth humans were doomed to a random, meaningless existence not unlike plants; that Baudrillard could conceptualize only as a void likely to lead to extinction.
Baudrillard betrayed what I referred to above as the prejudice of educated intelligence. It believes like a slave master that meaning, order and rational work can only occur with the epistemically equivalent of masters and slaves. Note that the institution of slavery has always been an integral part of not just the culture and its legal and economic institutions, but a part of its epistemology also. One learns to be a master or a slave. Similarly one learns to be an educated person or an uneducated one. Hence education is not only an institution of law and economics but of epistemology also.
Baudrillard reasoned that if digitalization and mass culture make knowing the truth about reality; I.e., ends meaning coherent relation of individual with knowable context as he understands it; that humans are doomed because they will make effective choices only randomly and the prejudice of an educated intelligence assumes that that will be insufficient for effectiveness human culture.
First, most animal and plant cultures get on perfectly well with out the kind of knowing that Baudrillard’s prejudice of the educated intelligence is mourning the loss of.
But second and more importantly, there is no reason to assume that human beings, which are so prolific at imagining and making up and imputing meanings will not invent a fitting new meaning of what is going on in the dynamics of knowing information in the digital age–as you just have.
Unexpected shit is going to continue to happen.
Digitalization itself will trigger some of it as people are slow to learn the implications of the fundamentally new at any time.
But we WILL get the hang of this change too!
Whether we do anything good with the new opportunity; that’s the $64^100000000000 question.
Put yourself back at the time the Egyptians, who believed in nature god’s you could see and feel and that verifiably did things in their work , like the Nile, and the sun, were confronted with some Jews that invented a sky god that they god say or attribute anything to without you being able to disprove it. You knew a lot of bad shit was going to happen because of all the lying, cheating and deception that the new wet ware was going to make possible. You didn’t really see how anyone could believe this nonsense. You prayed to the Nile and it silted your farm land richly. The Jews prayed to this sky god and said it damned you AND made the Nile silt your lands. And these crazy bastards were running around cutting the foreskins off their own kids and saying god and god’s book made it law they do it.
You didn’t like it, but you knew they had successfully changed the nature of meaning with this sky god invention. And they designed damned good pyramids for you. So, you went along to get along.
Meaning is expedient that way. Meaning is more a strategic reconciliation than a fact. Meaning is as rigid and objective, or squiggly and subjective, as is expedient at the time for the deeply wise–especially for the great philosophers and theologians. There is no question that great Christian and Jewish theologians would have been great nature god theologians before sky god’s were created, or, if you prefer, revealed themselves. Abraham would have been a stunningly good nature godder had he been born awhile earlier and not known about Yahweh. Jesus was by all accounts a solid Jew before god revealed himself to Jesus. Meaning thus is a strategic reconciliation with what can be known. Wise persons? They try never to lie, because they understand the underlying flexibility of the truth. Lying is even more rigid and subjective than the truth. Thus, Lying is wrong is not just as a moral, but comes as close to an inflexible truth as there is.
We will adjust to this new digitalization of knowing. Some eggs will get broken along the way. Some already have been. But we will adjust.
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@jaybate-1.0 great post. Meaning also is heavily related to language and the implicit context that is attached to each word as per the audience. “Sky god”, as you said, makes Yawheh feel foreign to us, while God comes with implied context and feels more entrenched and undeconstructable. Just by changing the language you open up the possibility of new ideas, just as changing the tuning of a guitar might facilitate a new melody.
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Thanks and I believe quite devoutly in a Christian sky God. It’s the wet ware that was around, when I came along. And it works for me. And if I had been born in Brooklyn with Russian immigrant parents, I would likely believe in a Jewish sky God, or an Roman Catholic sky god, or a Russian orthodox sky god . Or if I had been born in the Arab community is suburban Detroit, I probably would believe in an Islamic Sky god. And they would work for me and I would probably secretly believe that I was not the chosen and the others were not infidels for believing what they believed, just as I do today, though publicly peer pressure might occasionally make me have to say such things to get the whole sale price, or to get my child a good education, or a good job, or marry into a respectable family, if he/she wanted such things.
All will be well and all manner of things shall be well.
