Andrew Warren, and the rest of the basketball news...

If there's anything good to be taken from last night's BU Game vs. Utah...it these thoughts.......

-we didn't do a bad job defensively on a team averaging over 70 ppg...especially defending the free throw line well.

-we need a healthy Sam Maniscalco!

-I would love to see an apology from a few people to Andrew Warren...those who were openly criticizing Andrew...can you imagine where we'd be without him.
It's pretty much the consensus we'd be a far better team if we had our two missing players, and we'd likely even be 8-0 with every loss a reasonably close one in which we just couldn't score in stretches.
But asking haters to apologize is like asking the BU stat crew to get things right...see below..

BTW -- Andrew Warren has a career night, 27 points, 10 rebounds...
bringing his averages to 19.0 ppg, 6.5 rpg...
Good enough for 1st in the league in scoring and 6-7th in rebounding.


Recall when Patrick O'Bryant was playing for BU and blocking lots of shots...
and plenty of his blocked shots somehow never showed up at the end of the game in the stats. I can still recall that someone claiming to have special knowledge remarked that was because when you block a shot that doesn't even leave the player's hands, then it does not count as a blocked shot, but instead it is either a held ball/turnover (if called) or simply a ball knocked out of the other player's hands and NOT counted as a blocked shot.
Well....that argument simply does NOT hold up...
Note the stat crew credited two BLOCKS to 7-3 David Foster in the first half...and both were the precise same play where he got his hand on the ball even before Prosser shot it and thus it never left his hands.
I am sure we're talking about the same play as the Utah site reports the play by play and Foster was awarded a block on the shot attempt by Prosser at 9:46 in the 1st half.
So -- either it is or it isn't a block shot under those circumstances...
It was said to NOT be a blocked shot when POB did that, but it WAS a blocked shot last night.


Did you see that in the high school game last night between Manual HS and Morton, for most of the 1st quarter, they mistakenly used a girls' basketball...the ball that's slightly smaller...and apparenly for almost 8 full minutes of play, it went undetected.
How can this be?? This is the job of the guys at the scorer's table, right?? The official game ball is first checked out by them, and it sits right in front of their noses until handed to the refs to start the game. Then the refs also check it out -- sometimes all three testing it, bouncing it, making sure it's proper and adequately inflated...

Yet -- they used the wrong ball!! Not what is said about the game...
" The first half was more like a prize fight, with each team looking for a knockout punch neither could deliver.
Manual (5-0) led 8-7 after an opening quarter both teams would like to forget.
OOPS: The first seven minutes of the game was played with a girls basketball, which has a slightly smaller circumference than a boys basketball. The mistake was found with 57.2 seconds left in the first quarter."

Try to do a google search and find if this happens elsewhere...
maybe it does, but it sure must not happen often, as there just don't seem to be any other examples!


In some interesting action last night...

-UNI beat TCU, but again got next to nothing off the bench...
their starters got all but 3 of their 64 points.

-SIU beat Chicago State, and Carlton Fay had another game where he goes 0-3 from 3 pt range and grabs a mere ONE rebound. Bocot was 0-7 & scoreless again!
If they didn't have juco Mamadou Seck netting 17 points and grabbing 14 rebounds -- they might not win this game!

-Indiana State loses by 30 to previously 2-5 Wyoming team!
They shot 29% so we know how that feels...

-Illinois State wins another close home game over a weak team, Montana State..
John Wilkins had a breakout game going 4-7, 16 pts.
Jackie Carmichael had another uncharacteristic bad game, just 3 pts, 4 rebs.
His averages over the last four games -- mostly very weak teams on their home floor -- is 7 ppg, 3 rpg.

-Missouri State clobbered Central Arkansas.

-Wichita State lost at San Diego State, 83-69, Kyles 18, Murry 11, Stutz 3, and Orukpe zero points and zero rebounds.

-Bill Cole, I thought, had a great game against Gonzaga. 8 pts, 2 reb, but good defense and a "high flying" alley-oop dunk!

-Tyler Les has his career's best game last night at UC-Davis, 12 pts, 4-5 from 3pt range, in 19 minutes.

-Indiana racks up another easy win over Savannah State, Matt Roth getting 9 whole minutes and going 0-2 from 3pt range. The Hoosiers play Kentucky next -- hmmm....

-Iowa beat Idaho State 70-53, but Cully Payne has the Daniel Ruffin-like sports hernia, he did not play, and is likely to undergo surgery which may require him to take the rest of the season off according to this report..
(Iowa also has other injury problems)
http://thegazette.com/2010/12/02/injury-could-force-iowas-cully-payne-to-miss-season/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

-ex-Bradley assistant Howard Moore, new head coach at UIC (Illinois-Chicago) has to be bummed.
He lost again last night to Akron on a close one. They fall to 4-5, but their their last two losses were each by just 2 points at the horn. They play at Illinois State next Saturday.

-Coach Jim Molinari gets a win last night, going to 4-4.

-Osiris Eldridge had 24 pts, 1 reb, last night in Turkey.


In the 1-pt loss by UC:A at Kansas, a horrible call at the end cost the game for UCLA -- the refs should be embarrassed..
UCLA coach Ben Howland, however, handled it in a very unusual fashion...
he called his buddy, John Adams, the NCAA's head honcho -- the NCAA coordinator of men's basketball officials!
Of course the NCAA guy wouldn't admit it was a horrible call...he backs his boy...
http://sports.espn.go.com/los-angeles/news/story?id=5885368&campaign=rss&source=twitter&ex_cid=Twitter_collhoops_5885368



If you want any evidence of what the world really thinks of the United States, you need to look no further than the next insulting blow the world's soccer community has dealt the United States.
Despite the US sending Presidents Clinton and Obama to land the World Cups of the future in America..FIFA has announced the nest two sites to be awarded as...
Russia and Qatar.......
http://biggovernment.com/publius/2010/12/02/u-s-loses-world-cup-to-qatar/

In other words - the entire world soccer community would rather spit in Americans' faces that make the sensible choice that would benefit their game more than any other thing they could do.
Qatar is a brutal, restrictive nation where anything other than toe-the-line Sharia compliance is punishable by death...yet let's give them the World Cup...
This has become as politicized and as activist as the Nobel Prize and in the end it is meaningless and silly.
I admit South Africa didn't do a completely bad job, but most people haven't heard the whole story of graft, scandal, corruption and stupidity that rules this last World Cup...
The US team almost lost out because of the horribly biased African officials our games had assigned..but just google "World Cup" and "South Africa" and "scandal" or "corruption", and you'll see what I mean. You get almost as many hits for that combination as you do by googling "Justin Bieber"!!!



With all the talk of the hot summer we had in the US...most people don't know that just about all of Europe, and certainly northern Europe is having record COLD and snowfall again this year..
http://www.clickgreen.org.uk/news/national-news/121698-uk-shivers-with-record-cold-snap-and-worse-is-to-come.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11855579
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/02/3082157.htm?section=justin

But -- so is the American southwest....
http://www.presstelegram.com/news/ci_16730462
http://www.azdailysun.com/news/local/article_9d1f5230-47e8-598e-938b-7cc4e6ec04d5.html

And Southern California -- one of the most greenhouse-gas-producing areas in the world had not only an extremely COLD November...
they had been locked into a COLD stretch that stretches way back to last spring...
They even had one of their COLDEST summers ever, but you sure wouldn't have known it by reading the newspapers...
http://www.dailytitan.com/2010/11/15/coolest-summer-on-record/


And although we all know how worthwhile their information is now -- because of the exposure of all the corruption and fraud in global climate circles...
but of course.......
... the "experts" at the UN still say that all this record COLD stuff all over the world is due to.......
you guessed it....the RECORD COLD is due to GLOBAL WARMING...!! Believe it or not...
I guess I just give up......
http://www.alternet.org/environment/149027/catastrophic_blizzards,_heat_waves_and_floods%3A_global_warming_or_just_crazy_weather/