Pistol

Not only Salecich, but Cassity. These guys are both billed as shooters and have to start knocking them down consistently. They're both 0-2 from downtown at the half. Prior to today's game: Cassity: 32.1% 3P%, 42.1% FG% Salecich: 25.0% 3P%, 31.3% FG% Cassity is getting better, but both really need to start coming around and being more consistent from the field. On a positive note, 2 halftime stats I absolutely love to see for the Billikens: 3 TO, 4 blocks. That's awesome.

Did anyone ever find a video link? I'm listening to Earl and Rammer and watching the ESPN Gamecast, which is surprisingly fast today.

I like the fight we are showing to get back into this one. This could have gotten out of hand early and now we're at the third media of the half down by 2. I also like that this team dunks the ball. 3 already by my count- that would be a good week in the Soderberg era. Reed with a foul vs. Spears- watching Charlotte play at Xavier last weekend, I knew he'd be a handful for Willie. Hopefully length wins over strength and Willie can stay out of foul trouble.

The poster was actually wrong. Carter was president last time Dayton won at Xavier. Some of the guys who sit in the section I do at Xavier games have custom Jimmy Carter shirts for every Dayton game. I don't know why the atmosphere sounded disappointing on TV, brian. It was pretty loud and tense in there the whole time. Guess they didn't have the good crowd mics set up. Second-wildest atmosphere in there this season after the UC game. This isn't the first terrible clock crew Xavier has had to deal with; the Butler one was also devastating. These guys have been doing the clock at XU for years, so I don't know what the problem was. The old guys might take a little longer to wake up.

My girlfriend's parents are XU alums and have been season ticket holders for years. She and her siblings grew up XU fans and remain as such, even though 2 of them went to SLU. Her dad always has 2 extra tickets because his partner at work that he splits 4 seats with only gets to about 3 games a year, so we get to most home games. I live within walking distance of UC, but Xavier takes about 10 minutes to get to, and that includes gameday parking traffic. And I'm up before 7 AM 5 days a week, so I find myself waking up before 10 on weekends anyway, even when I'm out late the night before. An 11 AM start is not an issue for me. There isn't ###### else to do on a Saturday morning in the winter, so I actually think this is a decent start time in terms of not missing anything else going on. Plus, these are two of the best teams in conference, are about 1 hour apart, and have a great rivalry. I have free tickets to almost every XU home game. My favorite sports team in the world has a combined 3 games against the teams playing. We're all on here (presumably) as basketball fans. Are you still wondering why I'm going to this game? By the way, X fans are pretty loyal. I admit that the whole game colors thing is a gimmick, but this is easily a sold-out game every year.

You are correct. They tend to kick things off in the east and head west, and the A10 gets an earlier slot than the ACC/Big East games. Also, the X-UD game is on ESPN2, not ESPN, just so people know. Syracuse-WVU is on ESPN at noon, followed by GT-UNC, while the X-UD game is on ESPN2, followed by Mizzou-Oklahoma, then Georgia-Mississippi State, then Wichita State-Creighton.

I think I just read somewhere this is our first 2-0 start since joining the conference. Sorry, I don't feel like looking it up right now, but I believe it because it feels like it. Going 3-0 will be tricky. Charlotte has some beef down low that will be hard for our beanpole bigs to stop. He got position against Frease and Love a lot when they were at Xavier a couple nights ago. We might have to have Conk and Cody guard the post.

How do you calculate that happiness percentage? I've got 3 on the ignore list (but only 1 in common) and can't figure out how much happier I am.

I'll be at the X-Dayton game. Should be a good one, as Xavier is coming off a convincing win vs. Charlotte and this is a heated rivalry game. The 11 AM start time makes it interesting, too, as I don't think I've ever gone to a regular season game before noon. Xavier had people at the exits after the Charlotte game with a section-by-section map of what color to wear for this game; apparently they're doing alternating blue and white sections, so it should look kind of neat on TV. I'm also checking out the Xavier-SLU women's game here in Cincy on next Wednesday, the 20th. It will be my first time seeing the women play since I graduated in 2005. Xavier's women's team is ranked 12th and shouldn't have too much trouble with SLU.

Oh, I get it- the home game. I thought you meant at Dayton, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because I didn't think we were actually selling out any home games this season. Am I wrong? And yes, I do have season tickets at SLU so fortunately if it does sell out, I'm covered. That's one of the few home games I will have been able to make this season, which sucks. As for the best sections to booze and scream, probably the ones behind the students and band would be your best bet. I'm in 118, next to the students, and it seems like most of the crazies are on the other side of the fence from where I sit.

Are they sold out? I called last month and got 4 in section 405, row N, low-numbered seats. So if you're able to get any tickets, there will be at least 4 people in that section who won't be offended by your typical SLU fan behavior.

Chartering flights was not unheard of prior to the Majerus days. What they do now, I can't be sure, but I think Rick's hope was that they were going to charter most, if not all, of the road games where flying was necessary. In the Romar and Soderberg eras, it was pretty simple. If the road game was within about 4 1/2 hours or so, the team took a bus. If it was a bit farther, the team took a commercial flight unless it was more cost effective to charter a plane for that trip. For instance, Cincinnati is a very expensive airport and between 5 and 6 hours by bus, so that was always a chartered flight. Some of the smaller C-USA cities in the south that were a good distance from a major airport required charter flights. Memphis was a bus ride, but Chicago, Milwaukee, Charlotte, New Orleans, and a lot of others in that conference were inexpensive commercial flights. Conference tournaments (Cincinnati, Louisville, and Memphis when I was there) were bus rides, even if they took a little longer to get to because they'd have the bus for a longer time anyway and had to get there sooner than for typical road games. Granted, this was before the economy tanked and energy prices shot through the roof, so if SLU has a whole has imposed cost-cutting measures on travel, I imagine a lot of those old C-USA opponents (and now Dayton and Xavier) would have become bus trips instead of commercial or charter flights. I would guess that since most A10 schools (with just a couple exceptions) are in cities served by major airports and just about every opponent is outside of the bus trip radius for a single game, commercial flights would be the way to go. But my understanding was that Rick had gotten the school to agree to pay for chartered flights for just about every trip. This isn't actually prohibitively more expensive than flying commercial when you consider the number of people going every time. We only have a couple conference opponents anymore that are in realistic bus trip sites.

I can't believe all the loopholes in the smoking 'ban' they passed. What a half-assed job. After living in Chicago for 2 1/2 years and now about the same amount in Cincinnati, I've come to take for granted how nice it is to go out and not have to deal with smoke. It's a rude awakening every time I come back to St. Louis. Restaurant and bar business is just fine in both cities, by the way. There's always an awkward period for the first couple months, but it picks up quickly after that. More non-smokers not only come out more but spend more time out, which is huge. And smokers learn to step outside for 3 minutes at a time, not that big a deal. I can't wait to start trying more of these places in Midtown. So far, I've only gotten to The Good Pie and Pappy's. Every time I've tried to get in any of the others before a game, the wait has been too long to make the game in time. I've enjoyed reading these threads (but they also make me jealous none of these places were around when I was at SLU).

Has any SLU team ever been that successful on the road? This year, we've shown we can't win on neutral floors, or places like Bowling Green. And we didn't just lose there, we got smacked. How are we suddenly going to become road warriors? My optimistic conference finish for us is 8-8 because we play 8 road games, and that assumes we win every home game, which probably won't happen. Looking at the 8 road games in conference this year, none of them should see us favored. LaSalle is the best bet and Xavier just barely got out of there with a win this past week. I'm also not going to project anything crazy like that for next year until we show we can win at least one game on the road. At least next year we play at Fordham.

But in his defense (and trust me, I am no apologist for Mizzou), the academic ratings of the Big Ten schools in the US News & World Report (for some reason the authority on the subject) are f-ing ridiculously inflated. How are the lowest-rated schools in the Big Ten rated #71 (Michigan State, Indiana, and Iowa)? Most schools in the Big Ten could qualify as safety schools for B-students in those states. Whatever they're doing to manipulate the USNWR rankings needs to be outlawed. F the Big Ten. Not that Mizzou or any of the other potential Big Ten transfers (Rutgers, Cincinnati, UConn, Syracuse, Texas) are far greater academically, but what needs to be acknowledged is that these ratings are a pile of wet crap.

That was awesome. I also liked Braylon Edwards introducing himself as from "Lloyd Carr's University of Michigan." The University's insistence on using Saint instead of St. never struck me as pretentious as 'The' Ohio State University. I always thought of it as differentiating itself from the City, but not in a way that is intended to say SLU is above the City, just that it is a religious institution instead of a secular one. And that seems fair. I'm still amazed at how many people I encounter outside of St. Louis who think SLU is a public school. And the reason The Ohio State University seems pretentious and wrong to me is that it seems like it's trying to distance itself from the other public schools within the same system (and there are at least 3 state schools in Ohio I'd rather go to, and many state schools that have better programs in individual fields; THEOSU is just big).

Good to see this story getting some positive national press for St. Louis. This has to be the thrill of a lifetime for that kid and his family.

I know, and it makes me hope there's no crossover between this site and that one in terms of posters. It also makes me wonder when I read the comments below those articles, if those are the comments that remain up on the website, what are the ones they remove like? And that makes me sad. I guess the last time Burwell came up on here and I defended him, the complaint was that his year-in-review didn't stack up against Bernie's and that there was a mistake in one of his 'moments,' that he said the scene he saw in the tunnel in Super Bowl XXXIV was wasted in a losing effort, when we actually won that Super Bowl. That seems like something that got by the editors, because a quick change in the last two Roman numerals gives the Super Bowl that the Rams lost. So it was a typo, or he misspoke, or he forgot which game he saw that in, or something like that. Point is, it seems like a relatively small hiccup in his overall body of work. His job is different than Bernie's, for one thing. He's paid to take more of an "Outside The Lines" angle on sports, which I've always liked because I think too many sports fans are afraid to look at off-field issues. It seems to me like the people that don't like him never wanted to like him from the start and are never going to like him anyway.

It was deleted because it was posted by one of Metz's most recent incarnations on here. Then I saw on my Facebook feed that Rick Majerus (or the guy posing as him) posted these: So, putting on my Encyclopedia Brown cap, this is an easy one: 1. Metz posts the articles about Majerus on here. 2. One of the administrators, who suspects it's Metz and doesn't want him starting more crap on here than he already has, takes it down. 3. Metz responds angrily on Facebook as Rick Majerus, who obviously isn't running his own account because he has said in the past he doesn't even use email. 4. Metz threatens legal action against billikens.com and not deadspin.com (which is the actual party that has posted horrible and probably false things about him online), proving that he's not actually Rick Majerus and just an angry person who doesn't like how he's treated at billikens.com. Wow. The term "new low" is something that does not scare Metz whatsoever.

+1 Never from such a male-dominated board would I have expected any push whatsoever to get dudes back on the cheerleading team. Those guys are nothing but a punchline for fans. Dropping them and consolidating the cheer and dance squads was a smart move by the athletic department. As an aside, is it just me or do male cheerleaders seem to go prematurely bald more than the rest of the general population? I don't know what it is, every time you look down at those guys, half of them are significantly balding for their (presumably) 22-or-younger age. I remember asking as a kid watching SLU games why they used older guys to be male cheerleaders. It sounds like an old school Catholic shame tactic: "Looking up girls' skirts makes your hair fall out." Seriously, though, look for it; once I noticed, now I notice all the time.

Nice story. Too bad almost everyone here seems to hate Burwell for some reason.

The large-format schedule banner outside Anderson Arena at Bowling Green had us listed as "ST. LOUIS" and the ticket stubs did as well.

Yes. No way the towel story is true.

Too bad it wasn't men's so someone could take our unwanted record.

That was my senior year at SLU, and what a brutal season it was. We went 9-21 in 30 games, and went 1-11 in games decided in OT or by 6 or less points. The only close win was when Reggie hit a buzzer-beater at Southern Miss. If half of those went our way, it was a .500 year. What a nightmare season. Reggie missed a couple because of his injury and was slowed down in a lot more, but that was also the season he took a leave of abscence when his brother was shot. Frericks played 11 of 30 games. 3 concussions will do that to you. Meyer missed the first several games with a foot injury, which lingered after he started playing, too. Clarke missed the last 5 games with back spasms. Vouyoukas missed 3 games, but I don't remember why. Ohanon, Polk, Newborne, Drejaj, and Brown were the only guys to play all 30 games. No one started every game, though Polk only didn't start once.