MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Titan Q]

Heck, he has once already.  The kid was "Mark Gant" when he was being recruited, and he showed up in Bloomington as "Darius."  Very Hollywood-like.

http://highschoolelite.com/2004/gant.html

http://www.iwuhoops.com/RECR2004.HTM#Gant


This Titans fan is looking forward to seeing Mr. Gant play.  His skill set reminds me so much of former Carthage superstar Rob Garnes ('03)...if Gant could become about 75% of Rob Garnes, I'd take it!

[Jim Matson]

I think Gant will start and will do well.  I also think the Freeman's will pull good performances out of their more junior teammates - call it senior leadership.  Every good Titan team I've ever seen has had effective leadership from their core starters.

[Mr. Ypsi]

Q,

I always forget to check your site during the off-season, but finally went there tonite.  Sounds like Denny certainly THINKS he has hired a lifer with Rose (ala Horenberger/Bridges) - any impressions you feel free to share?

Some questions about the IWU schedule: am I correct that the Whitewater tourney has no potential in-region games (I don't think Clarke or Martin Luther are d3, and UWW is probably outside the 200 mile limit) - right?  For the DePauw tourney, I believe DePauw is in-region if we play them, but Judson is not d3 and OWU is too far away - correct?  2 other games: Albion would seem to be too far away; and I cannot recall, is Hanover in-region or not?

[Pat Coleman]

Whitewater is 186.6 miles from IWU.

[Titan Q]

Yes, I think when you look at a non-conference schedule nowadays you have to look at the Quality of Wins Index implications.  IWU has a chance to play 7 in-region games:

Clarke (n)
@ UW-Whitewater
vs Illinois College
@ DePauw
vs Wash U
vs Chicago
@ Hanover

I think 5 or 6 will end up .500 or better...some will even be in that .667+ band...and that helps.

Chuck, above is what I posted on May 30 re: IWU's schedule.

Regarding Ron Rose, yes, I think it is fair to say that Dennie Bridges hired Ron thinking he will be the basketball coach at IWU for a longtime.  At the press conference, Dennie said, "Coach Horenberger went to Illinois Wesleyan in the 1930's.  Ron Rose went to Wesleyan in the 1980's and knew Coach Horenberger well.  Maybe in 2030 we will have a coach who knew and respected Jack Horenberger."  Whether Ron will be the coach of the Titans 24 years from now or not, I think that statement says quite a bit about Dennie's expectations. 

[petemcb]

Chuck, fyi, Luther College in Iowa is also D3.  I don't know whether Decorah, Iowa is within 200 miles of Bloomington or not.  Can't be bothered to check at this hour.

[Mr. Ypsi]

Chuck, fyi, Luther College in Iowa is also D3.  I don't know whether Decorah, Iowa is within 200 miles of Bloomington or not.  Can't be bothered to check at this hour.

Thanks, Pete.  Somehow I never associated 'Martin Luther' with Luther of Decorah (the Switzerland of Iowa, if you believe their Chamber of Commerce!) - my oldest brother taught there for several years!  I suspect that would be beyond the 200-mile zone, and Q's list doesn't include it.

(Is the 'Switzerland of Iowa' sort of like 'the world's tallest midget'?

[petemcb]

Chuck, actually that's my bad.  It must be too late at night for me to read accurately........You were referring to some school named Martin Luther, about which I have no clue.  There is a D3 school named Luther College in Iowa, but it sounds like that's not the one you were referencing.

[Pat Coleman]

Martin Luther is a D-III school in Minnesota.

[Gregory Sager]

Martin Luther is a D-III school in Minnesota.

Not only that, but Anderson (which Chuck cited in his last The Boys Of Summer post as being a D2 school) and Clarke (which won the final NIIC men's basketball title last spring) are both D3 schools as well.

Uh, Chuck, you do realize that the full roster of D3 schools can be readily determined via the d3hoops.com regional pages, don't you? 

[Gregory Sager]

If a football game ends 21-14, isn't that just a 3-2 game in reality?

No, it isn't, and the more that I see this exercise in soccer apologetics creeping into American sports discourse, the more of an urge I get to set the record straight.

I understand the need for soccer enthusiasts to reconcile their sport with American tastes by explaining away the most frequent criticism directed at that sport on these shores: No scoring equals dull games. But the idea that a soccer goal equals a football touchdown, and that scoring in the two sports is thus roughly correspondent, does not add up. Here's why:

1) A football game is 60 minutes long. A soccer match is 90 minutes long.

2) Soccer scores are too low in terms of average number of goals scored to correspond to a typical football game. According to Wikipedia, the English Premier League averaged fewer than two and a half goals scored per match in 2005-06 for both teams combined. According to your formula, Joe, that would come out to about a 10-7 score in football terms, which is considered a very low-scoring game. The average score of an NFL game is approximately 24-17, which is about six goals per match if one adheres to your 1:1 correspondence of a soccer goal and an NFL touchdown. And scoring in college football is even higher on average than it is in the NFL, to say nothing of such permutations as arena football (congratulations, Chicago Rush!).

And the reality that soccer enthusiasts are loath to admit is that, in the defense-minded matches typical of World Cup play, goals are even dearer than they are in typical league play. Take the 0-0 game between the Swedes and the Trinidadians the other day. A null-null match is certainly not that uncommon in World Cup play. When's the last time that anyone heard of a football game ending 0-0? And 2-1 and 1-0 matches are certainly commonplace on every level of soccer, while 14-7 and 7-0 football games are far from common.

3) What really sets apart American football and its sister sports (rugby union, rugby league, Canadian football, Aussie rules football, Gaelic football, etc.) from soccer is the genius of variable scoring. Different modes of successfully launching the football at the opponent's goal via kick, pass, or run result in different point totals. In Gaelic football, for example, if the ball goes under the crossbar, it's a goal (three points), and if it goes above the crossbar it's a point (one point). Canadian football is distinguished from American football in that our touchback (which scores no points) is called a single, or rouge, up in the Great White North and is worth a point to the kicking team. Rugby distinguishes between a try (five points), a drop goal (three points), and a goal (two points). And so on and so forth.

The genius behind this is the fact that scoring isn't restricted to crawling ahead one point at a time the way it is in soccer and hockey. In the rugby family of sports (including American football), the variability of scoring opens up all sorts of permutations and possibilities that do not exist in soccer -- and they make decisions such as kicking a field goal versus going for a first down on fourth down, or choosing to opt for the two-point conversion rather than the one-point conversion, crucial matters of strategy. (Baseball gets a pass because, even though it technically follows the one-point-at-a-time mode of scoring, it's possible to score multiple times on one batted ball.)

You can't overstate the importance of variable scoring. In the rugby family of sports, you can go from being behind to being ahead on one play, or vice-versa. That isn't possible in soccer, in which you can only create or break ties -- and then only if the two teams are tied or separated by one goal in the first place. And basketball is of course fortunate to enjoy the fruits of variable scoring as well.

I'm not knocking soccer, mind you. I certainly view the sport much more favorably than I did a few years ago (and, yes, the fact that NPU is good at it means that there's a certain amount of self-interest at work in my increased appreciation of the sport). But let's not sell it as something that it isn't. The scoring in this sport is inordinately low as compared to other sports, and let's not pretend otherwise.

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

If you have to resort to scoring arguments, then there is no chance the person is going to become a football fan.  It's much like the dying American breed who enjoys 1-0 baseball games and basketball games where the combined total points remains below 150.  People don't care about quality play anymore so long as the game is high scoring.

The Trinidad & Tobago - Sweden match on Saturday was one of the most exciting football matched I've seen in a while and it ended 0-0.  It's more about what people enjoy watching and for some reason US sports fans are the only ones in the world who aren't big on football.

I'm ok with it, so long as there are still television stations that will broadcast it once in a while.  Of course all this is coming from a gyu who's favorite annual sporting event (outside the d3 final four) is the Tour de France (and that was the case long before Lance Armstrong).

[Knightstalker]

The USA was undefeated vs the rest of the "soccer playing" world through WWII.  Since the end of WWII and coinciding with the rise of soccer in popularity in the USA we have been 1-1-1 vs the rest of the world.  2-1-1 if you count the cold war.  Communism in action.

[Warren Thompson]

Greg:

Nice to see that you're knwledgeable about Gaelic football. That's one wild sport, but not as wild as its cousin, hurling. (The latter, I'm tempted to assume, was invented as an allegedly less-bloody way of settling ancient Hibernian tribal disputes.  )

[joehakes]

Football not only lends itself to TV commercials, it even creates opportunities for them.  Why was the "Two Minute Warning" invented?  Because the staff of one head and 12 assistant coaches couldn't figure out the clock?  No, it was to put another commercial break in the mix.

Despite the long and rambling answer that Greg gave, a 21-14 football game is still a 3-2 game, no matter how many different ways you can score.  Your answer that college football games are more high scoring comes from several decades of watching teams like Tennessee play the UNLV's of the world and win 66-0.  Riveting!!!!

(I was going to make a reference to NP football games being high scoring, but I will refrain from a cheap shot....at least for now.

The US World Cup game is 45 minutes away.  We all stand as Americans to support our troops...er, team.