The rest of the Valley basement and more....

Since I know the ISU fans love to read this blog -- they even cite it often in their discussions, and even quote entries before I am done entering them, I will start with an ISU topic...
ISU is struggling to find any more wins than Bradley has...their only three conference wins being extremely close wins over only the absolute bottom dwellers of the Valley (SIU, Drake, BU).

But yesterday's game, a 53-51 loss at Northern Iowa, was really a puzzle.........and it seems from the comments I have seen from ISU fans, I am not alone in these observations.....

Their starting lineup at UNI included Blake Mishler who scored 2 pts and grabbed a grand total of ZERO rebounds..

Meanwhile Tony Lewis has really fallen off the playing charts, even tho he BY FAR their best rebounder and Carmichael is their top scorer and 2nd best rebounder.
It almost looks bizarre...that Carmichael can go for a DOUBLE DOUBLE two games in a row (24 pts/17 reb against BU, then 10 pts/11 reb against Drake) and not even start!!!!
He's the freakin' MVC Player of the week because of how hot he is playing,.
Seriously -- how many times is the MVC Player of the Week a guy who has to get his production off the bench???
...and Jank simply doesn't see that and starts a guy that gets 2 pts, zero rebounds!!

Also -- does Rubin have some pictures of Jank's wife or something??
The guy continues to have games of zero points and 1 asst., and still plays ahead of Cousin (who had 14 pts, 3 asst. against Bradley and 15 pts, 3 asst last night.

BTW -- some wise guy asked this question about Tuesday's Bradley game...
Quote: "If Bradley wins at home and no one sees or hears it, did it really happen?"

well....I suggest you ask someone at ISU to get your answer, as they've been playing in front of a largely empty arena for years....



Speaking of SIU -- what's going on there?? They are loaded with experienced senior and upperclass returning starters. Fay and Bocot have been there forever and getting all conference mentions....Teague was some people's preseason POY, and they landed a 4-Star transfer in Diamond Taylor that is a steal from the Big Ten!

SIU has now lost 4 in a row and 6 of 7...losing last night 65-44 to lowly Drake.
In that 7-game stretch SIU is averaging only 54.5 points per game.
Bocot is averaging 5 ppg, 2 rpg, and Fay is hitting only 26% of his team leading 84 3-pt FG attempts.
Diamond Taylor hasn't even played much and has hit a FG in only TWO of their last 12 games!!!



Did you read about this???

There's a real "medical mystery" going on at Iowa...actually now TWO mysteries...
how did it happen and who's trying to hack and steal the information??

THIRTEEN Iowa football players who were doing off-season conditioning ALL suddenly got severely ill and were hospitalized with an extremely rare muscular disorder...
they had rhabdomyolysis...or the sudden, severe breakdown of muscle cells, which dumps a large amount of potentially damaging proteins into the bloodstream and overwhelms the body's ability to remove the proteins and make repairs...
Thus...generally the patient gets quite ill and has acute kidney failure....

BUT it is an extremely rare disorder unless the patient suffers a crushing injury to muscle or some toxic damage from a chemical poison or drug.

So how do 13 guys from the same team at the same time get this exceedingly rare disorder??....but the team is insisting it just happened and that there is absolutely NOTHING at all suspicious and that there's not even a reason to check if drugs were being used!!

The Iowa people are laying this off to heavy workouts and conditioning..but that's BS...every football program everywhere does that exact same thing and NONE have ever seen ONE single case of this condition!

Now their football coach is claiming that this is due to the fact that their football program is the best and works out players harder than everyone else..

AND yet -- in the very same breath -- he says his conditioning program is SAFE -- even though it just sent 13 healthy young men to the hospital with a life-threatening and kidney destroying medical condition for which there is virtually NO treatment other than to dialyze the patients (put them on artificial kidney machines!).

Many of the players' parents are very upset and demanding answers that they believe are NOT being given.
They are ticked that the head coach went on a recruiting trip and was not even available for them to ask questions when the kids were hospitalized!

http://qctimes.com/news/local/article_a0517628-299b-11e0-bd60-001cc4c03286.html
http://www.kcrg.com/sports/hawkeyes/Ferentz-What-We-Do-Here-is-Very-Competitive-115158609.html
http://www.startribune.com/sports/115155489.html?elr=KArksi8cyaiUo8cyaiUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUoD3aPc:_2yc:a_ncyD_MDCiU
http://www.sportingnews.com/ncaa-football/feed/2011-01/hawkeyes-in-hospital/story/ferentz-insists-iowa-conditioning-program-safe

In a separate yet related story.....the medical records of the thirteen hospitalized football players were hacked and stolen......proving just how dangerous the federally mandated process of keeping everyone's health information online can be --
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/campusrivalry/post/2011/01/iowa-hospital-investigating-possible-breach-of-football-players-records/1
http://www.cryptzone.com/news/article.aspx?category=Document-security&title=Iowa-Uni-suffers-possible-data-loss-incident&id=800381737

My take -- FWIW...but something this odd happening all as a single outbreak of this many players SIMULTANEOUSLY getting the same serious and complex condition from supposedly the EXACT same workouts that they've been doing for years...is beyond credibility....
there HAS to be some yet undisclosed fact...

That fact, if you want to speculate, almost certainly would have to be some drug those players were all using...and it is well known that many athletes -- especially those training in the off-season when NCAA drug testing is NOT going on -- are often trying to enhance their muscle building with pharmaceutical products.....

Here -- just for fun -- check this out...
when you google "rhabdomyolysis" along with "anabolic steroids"...you get close to a half million hits, many of which will point plainly to the WELL KNOWN and frequent connection between the two...
and that those steroids that are on the market all have "RHABDOMYOLYSIS" listed as a WARNING and known severe side effect.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22anabolic%22+and+%22rhabdomyolysis%22&hl=en&ned=us&tab=nw&aq=f&aqi=m1&aql=&oq=
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11436915
http://www.springerlink.com/content/67205822tk67228k/



If you've been watching -- Indiana has now zoomed to 3-7 in the Big Ten and they just MIGHT beat their 4 Big Ten Conference wins from last year...although it does get tougher...
They still haven't won on the road, and the Big Ten is showing itself to be really weak -- so wins at home over Illinois and Minnesota are hardly something to rush the court over and hold a bonfire celebration in the lobby about!
BUT IU fans are pumped....they do have several good 3-Star and 4-Star talented kids...and I think what this shows, is that when Crean is force to play other kids off the bench -- he suddenly discovers that they have some talent.
How come Roth and Pritchard were riding the bench?? Apparently Crean did not know those guys can win games better than the players he was using.

Also, anyone watching the broadcast last night on the Big Ten Network must have wondered where they got those announcers. The guys were the ultimate homies, hooting and hollering at every Hoosier basket and screaming like middle-schoolers and a Justin Bieber concert.
I thought I'd puke with how many times they told me Indiana was playing without a couple of their best players, yet did you know that Minnesota was also playing without TWO of their starters and best players!! They never mentioned that...hmmmm...wonder why??

In the end, IU will finish the Big Ten season with 4 or 5 wins, just like last year, but shouldn't they be better by now?? They have numerous 4-Star and 3-Star players -- as much talent as most Big Ten schools as I have proven. Why should they settle for a team that wins only a few conference games then celebrate like it's something they don't ever expect to happen again?
They have a tremendous fan base......let's see how patient they are.

Congratulations TC...you just beat an NIT team...


http://media.scout.com/Media/Image/90/900756.jpg



Here's the science story-laugh of the day...
They are reporting that a new space telescope has found literally thousands of new planets in systems far from ours...
http://www.space.com/10750-nasa-kepler-alien-planet-hunt-step.html

but here's what's funny....the news coverage points out that many -- dozens of these planets are in the habitable zone -- where supposedly life could exist!

Then they give one example...
http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2011/01/14/its-a-long-long-way-to-alderaan-but-kepler-10b-is-a-sight-closer/

But -- buried deep in those articles (you can look up others), they do concede these facts....

--that first -- those supposed new planets are not actually being seen -- only that minute evidence for their existence is being charted, and that the evidence is still not YET confirmed!

--that the surface temperature of the planet they give as an example is 2400 degrees Fahrenheit!! Hardly habitable by any form of life even conceivable..hotter even than a steel mill blasting furnace!!

--and that all these planets, if they exist at all, are hundreds and hundreds of light years away...so that likely we will never, never get any more evidence on them no matter how long we wait...and that nobody will ever travel there either.
We haven't even been able to get back to the moon with the costs spiraling out of control.

Now they are saying just to send another Mars rover, an unmanned mission to Mars...it's going to cost a minimum of another $2.5 billion....
and likely 100 times more than that to even begin a manned program there...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fn%2Fa%2F2011%2F02%2F01%2Fstate%2Fn100829S88.DTL

The money just doesn't exist and likely never will as long as we keep giving it away for failed stimulus purposes and for wasteful social programs, and to pay people to remain unemployed and unproductive!