David King

Rob Loe's best performance since "St. Elmo's Fire"!

Two words...BIG DANCE!\ Take care of business at U Mass, and I guarantee we're in!

This game is bigger than the SuperBowl in our house...as are most Billikens games.

I was driving my car Sat. night, and looking for the Denver/N.E. game on the radio, when I tuned into the last 5 minutes of the Temple/Richmond game on a Philadelphia radio station. Of course Temple lost that game, but their commentators were also complaining about the officiating. One of the commentators said there were at least three or four calls that were as bad as any he had seen. It made me also wonder if the A-10 officials are worse than other leagues?

Sorry, it should be "What They're Saying In Charlotte".

I never read other school's message boards, but I figured, since I live in Charlotte, I'd check out what 'Niner Nation had to say about yesterday's game. Well, they are up in arms, and mostly seem to blame the officiating.(Where have I heard that before?) I guess that sentiment must explain the outrage I sensed among the customers when I went to Starbucks this morning. To be honest, they have a pretty good beef about the 5-point play. Below are some of the better quotes: On Brian Conklin: -" Conklin is first team A10 All-Dirty. What a hack. Don't know why we didn't maul him a few times as he did to us, or perform his patented flop. What a hack he is. Players like that will make you not want to watch basketball." On the 5-point play: " I was able to see a replay on the TV moniter. The foul on the screener occurred so much before the shooter was in his motion that it wasn't even close. Total B.S." On the Billikens "thuggish" play: -"I noticed that the refs did not want to call a lot of fouls in the first half. St. Thugin got up to 9 team fouls and it was like the refs went "D@MN! thats a lot....we should probably let them play because we are just calling fouls left and right over here." St. louis then got 3-4 mins of thugtastic defense without a single whistle and we watched the lead go from 13-14 to 8. Teams like St. Louis should not be allowed to play Div-I ball." On the lack of "home-cooking": -"The refs also blew several other calls as far as I could tell, mostly going against us. The Niners did not get any kind of homecooking that I could tell, which is really a problem when the team keeps having to face it on the road. Did anyone get a good look at the Conklin elbow in the 1st half? I'm surprised he didn't at least get a technical, but maybe it looked a lot worse than it was. He and several other Billikens seemed to play a little bit dirty (sneaky trips on screens, pulls and grabs going for rebounds, flopping a lot) and mostly got away with it." BTW,there were zero references or quotes from Andy Griffith or any character from Mayberry RFD. But, there is one poster that goes by the name of Jim Nabors.

A review of one of my old textbooks; "Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking", by Dr. Merilee H. Salmon, confirmed the following: Since SLU beat Oklahoma, and Oklahoma beat K-State, and K-State beat Mi$$ou, through deductive reasoning, SLU beats Mi$$ou. That's good enough for me.

According to this morning's Charlotte Observer- "Rick Majerus' expalnation was that Loe was "soft" and Evans didn't play well in the recent loss against Temple." But, CR didn't get Loe's minutes, because CR only played 6 minutes, and he's been averaging 9minutes. it looks like Loe's minutes, all went to Cody Ellis, who played 32 minutes, after averaging 22min/gm up to this point.

More than a 3rd of the seats were empty, but the students are still on break, I believe. The most expensive seats they have are $25. That's what I got, and I was in the upper deck! The seats behind the announcers were all for students, apparently; many of who I noticed screaming at Majerus from about 10 feet away. I agree it is a regional school, and out of place in the A-10, but... they had 10 to 15 NCAA banners hanging up, 4 from the 2000's, and 1 Final 4 banner. I think their players had more tattoos than ours.

One thing I noticed was the Billikens ball movement on offense was good to excellent for the entire game, which resulted in a lot of open shots. The problem, for over more than half the game was hitting those shots, even lay ups sometimes. Again, we got about twice as many O boards than Charlotte. One glaring problem was turn overs. Charlotte's freshman point guard had 5 steals, and I believe he leads the league in this. But, there seemed to be a lot of unforced errors too. KM stepped out of bounds with the ball at least twice-unforced. Seemed like Jett threw the bal away-bad pass- at least once or twice, as well as others. Luckily, Charlotte had 22 turnovers- a result of our good defense. SLU is a superior team, no doubt. That was even obvious when they were down by double digits. It does feel good to say that after a win, for a change!

The referees seemed to be on our side today. They must have heard my daughter's angry threats early in the first half.

I'm going out the door, right now, headed for the game myself. Along with Tarheel billiken, my daughter and I will do our best to neutralize Charlotte's home court advantage with our raucous cheering. We'll also be all over the zebras, if they get out of line...again!

Sorry; you're right... it was Jimmy. Joey Chitwood was a brick layer.

Now this makes sense to me. The Loe 3-point shot foul and the McCall mugging were blown calls, but the refs could be biased against SLU because of all their attempts to take charges, some of which are more acting than result of the collision.

Maybe because he was the best shooter on the team? Joey Chitwood was white too; with possibly some Indian blood thrown in too. Hoosiers blows away Moneyball...at least the parts of Moneyball that I didn't sleep through. The book is much better.

Yeah, I agree, we need a scorer. If you've never watched the movie "Hoosiers", you ought to check it out. I usually watch it once or twice a month. There are a lot of paralells between the Hickory high school team, and the current Billikens team. For one thing, reportedly, the coach in the movie, played by Gene Hackman, is loosely based on Rick Majerus. Anyway, Hickory High school had a go-to scorer named Jimmy Chitwood. The Bills definitely need a Jimmy Chitwood. We could have had one in Willie Reed. They both are a lot alike. Both were head cases. I also think the Bills need to run the "picket fence" play more often. Majerus invented it after all. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think they've ran it at all, except possibly during the pre-season Canadian tour. Sure, many teams added the picket fence play as a staple in their offensive schemes after the movie popularized it. In fact, Keith Smart's game winning shot in the 1987 NCAA tournament finals was a perfectly executed picket fence. But, you don't see it too much these days. Hey Coach Majerus...How about running the picket fence!!!

I was just baiting Roy. By the way Roy, while we do share a love of the Billikens, I am a Mi$$ou grad, and turned down an academic scholarship to St. Louis U. Just to set the record straight, overall, no doubt, SLU is superior, but Mi$$ou has a few academic offerings which are better. Engineering, for one- which was my major. Also, the Mi$$ou journalism school is about the best in the country. There are possibly a few other better programs at Mi$$ou...Ag Econ, maybe? But, that doesn't mean I am a Mi$$ou fan. Hardly. while I was there, I went to one footbal game- Notre Dame kicked a game winning field goal as time expired right as I woke up from napping on the grassy hill that were the free seats at Farout field, and I went to one basket ball game- Kansas beat Mi$$ou. That ticket must have been free too. And I went to Mi$$0u during the Stipo, Sunvold, and Ricky "turn coat" Frazier era. They were ranked #1 in the country for a time while I was there. But, I wasn't about to jump on that band wagon! Far from it. I even once booed Stipo as I saw him walking across campus. I was SLU fan, practically from birth, and even though I didn't go there (although I do have 18 college credits from SLU) I still have many fond memories of SLU games and seasons. In fact, I still remember my first auto accident as I fish-tailed sideways during a driving rain on I-270 on Dec 22, 1979. i had just witnessed David Burns light it up in the old Checkerdome, but SLU fell to Mi$$ou 77-75 in OT.(The ref's sucked that night, too!) I guess the depression of that loss effected my driving. The guy I hit may well have been a Mi$$ou fan, because in his road raged fury, he yelled a lot of the same words at me as I had heard the Mi$$0u fans yelling at the Billikens earlier that night. I didn't go to Mi$$ou's J-school, so I can't explain it as clearly as I'd like to, but I'll just say that it is much better to be a SLU fan. regardless of that, though, Missouri is still a fine academic institution with many esteemed alum, other than myself, like Sam Walton, Cheryl Crow, Brad Pitt, the guy that does the Beetle Bailey cartoon, Steven Spielburg's wife, a NASCAR drive, and, not one, but two WWE wrasslers. However, i did notice that the posts on the Missouri board have far more spelling and grammatical errors than here.

No doubt you've analyzed it much more than I. I'll at least agree that the worst team in the Big East still gets a "C", and on further review, I agree that Villanova may not be the worst team in the Big East. But, there is no way that they are better than Notre Dame. The Irish are surging! What is Mi$$ou's grade?

How does Villanova get a "B"- They suck! They're the worst team in the Big East. Although, I admit the Big East is about the best conference. BC just beat Clemson, what's their grade? Overall, I agree. Let's move on and kick the sh!t out of UNCC!

So, did The A-10 president, or board of directors, let the refs know that they had to throw the game, or did the refs do it on their own, because unlike us Bills fans, they see the big picture, and know that a Temple victory is ultimately better for the A-10?

Well, with certainty, Charlotte must be destroyed! I'll be there to witness it.

It appeared to me that KC was looking to shoot more tonight than in recent games. He did take 5 shots, while his season average is 4/game; although he hit just one. But he did other things well: 5 boards, 3 assists, 3 steals, and only 1 turnover. and who is the alternative? Mike McCall Jr.- he only took 1 shot in 11 minutes, and had some costly turnovers. Overall, the Bills took 63 shots vs. 52 for the Owls, so, I don't think KC's lack of shooting is huge problem in comparison to other team short comings. I'm more concerened about KC's poor defensive showing. he was called out by the announcers a couple times for failing to rotate.

While BM has questionable interpersonal skills, there should be no doubt that he is a Billikens fan. Sometimes,my med's also wear out at the end of the day, or when I'm upset. Hell, last year my ex-girlfriend had to install chickenwire around her TV set during the season. But, Metzinger is wrong about most of his assertions in this thread. Nobody on the team played terrible tonight, but they did play below their abilities, defensively, and were led by kyle casity in this category.i noticed we also killed Temple on the offensive boards, but that was only because we couldn't freaking finish!

Possibly an overreaction by a fellow recriut, but, no doubt, a very disappointing loss. The conference season is still young, though, and a sweep of X would be nice. We gotta take care of business in Charlotte. Anything less than the NCAA tournament is a failure, but RM's job is safe, regardless. Khalif wyatt should definitely play in the NBA someday, and would be my pick for A-10 player of the year.

After wading through several articles on the ACC, I found these two paragraphs in the sports section of today's Charlotte Observer: "The new favorites: Let's not write off Xavier yet, but it looks like the league's top teams right now are Temple and Saint Louis (although the Billikens lost their league opener at Dayton). The Owls (10-3) will be even better when guard Scootie Randall returns from a knee injury. And although the Billikens (12-3) lost at Dayton, coach Rick Majerus has his team playing tough defense. Players of the year: Let's step away from Xavier's Tu Holloway, because of his role in the brawl and his team's slide since. So let's go with Saint Louis forward Brian Conklin, an excellent all-around player who's averaging 15.3 points (on 64 percent shooting) and 5.1 rebounds. Rookie of the year? It can only be Charlotte point guard Pierria Henry, who is second in the league in steals and sixth nationally with 2.7 per game." Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/01/07/2904965/temples-big-win-attracts-a10-spotlight.html#storylink=cpy