Old guy

I vote to name him Bubba or BB

Sure, why not.

For all we know Adonis Henriquez may have been known as AD to his friends and team mates for a very long time. For all we know taking the abbreviation AD after joining the Billikens represented no surrender of anything meaningful for him. For all we know the opposite may be true as well.

I wonder how much Welmer will actually be able to play this season, that is, once his injury is fully healed. I like Roby and think he may be a glue man for the team. The thing I wonder about Bishop is his injury last year. It was never clear what it was that he actually had. I would be much assured about him if we knew he had had an ankle fracture, than this ill defined and ill diagnosed injury he had. As it is, I am reserving my opinion on him until I see him play this year.

Agree, NY did not have the full eclipse, St. Louis did. In order to get the amazement you had to be in the path of the total eclipse other than that it looked at times like the Apple logo, a big ball (looked orange with the glasses) with a bite taken out of it.

It was an amazing thing to watch anywhere you were at.

I fully agree with what you say Bauman, it is interesting information presented in some detail.

I think you are giving the 144 list a degree of accuracy it plainly does not have. Just face it, this is not a predictive tool, and as far as last season's final rankings go, they really have nothing to do with our potential performance this season. Kenpom's final rankings from last season are accurate for last season.

Thank you Taj

Sluballs, is Sasha Otte Ghanian by any chance? I had a friend in grad school from Ghana with a last name Otto.

A word of caution about Maui, they are experincing an outbreak of lungworm disease with a number of cases affecting the brain of those contracting the disease. The outbreak is small but the number of cases is much larger than it has been for many years. See the following health warning: https://www.sciencealert.com/a-brain-invading-parasite-carried-by-snails-has-health-officials-concerned-in-maui

Just to be contrary I like the strong French cheese, the Italian as well particularly a good Gorgonzola

Aquinas, I think we will see enough of French in action during the season. The lack of news or "information" about him does not concern me, he will do just fine. I think French may be one of those people that just does what he has to do and does not attract attention upon themselves.

Billikenbill that is exactly what terrorism is, an event or something that shatters your sense of comfort and security and replaces it with fear.

True it offers all kinds of things. Some of the tools you find in the net are quite valuable, others are not, the problem is to determine which is which.

3Star, the internet is not a tool for prediction. The internet is a tool to express opinions, as misguided as they may be, and have them read and approved by possibly large numbers of equally misguided people who read the original misguided point of view. It is a great media, because you (plural you) can always find someone in agreement on anything that is said regardless of how accurate or way off it may be.

With all due respect to the Wiz, whose opinion I regard highly, it is not right to interpret statistical pronouncements as being inflexibly correct in what they say. For example, the 2 letter variation as the max up or down shift you may see in a team's performance from a season to the next season is both correct in general terms (it represents 2 standard deviations or 95% of all possible outcomes for the new year) and also incorrect in specific terms, ie. regarding a single team. Let's take the Bills, last season we ended with a ranking of D, of course that means that this particular team would have a very hard time going down by two letters because there is not enough space below the D rating to go down 2 letters. So the Bills have less than the 2 full letter potential for going down below last year's ranking. On the other hand there is plenty of room above us to move into. If we want to deal with a space of possible outcomes for the Bills encompassing 2 standard deviations on each side of the median, and we start at D, there should be the space of a single letter below us but above us there would be an area of 3 letters (standard deviations, one in the negative side of the median and 2 int he positive side). All together this is the full 95% of all possible outcomes available to the Bills. We can go down to F or up to A. Yes, I am aware it gets more complex than that when you add the + and - to the letters like in F- or F+. However we are talking about the area where 95% of the possible outcomes will fall, and starting from a D, this stretches out to an A. If we had started from a C the total possible outcomes would go from an F to an A. So, you may think that this is an atrociously broad band of possibilities, but hey what do you want, we are talking about 95% of all possible outcomes. I think the vast majority of these possible outcomes for the Bills are above the level where we ended the last season. Explaining this in a different way, the real determinant of the range of outcomes available to a team in a given season is largely dependent upon the level they start the season at, not the level they ended the prior season at. From that point of view we do not know how well we will start this season we but have every right to expect it will be at a much improved level over last season. Let's give it some time and see what happens. I know this post will be put down by others, possibly including the Wiz, but again what is life without some degree contrarian opinion here and there..

We will have a better idea of what we can expect next season after the MSG tournament is played.

I do not know for sure but I believe that Duke and Kentucky bring in similar level classes year after year, maybe a couple of slots down in any particular year. For them this is nothing new, it is the way it is. I do not think this is the case for Arizona or Mizzou but I could be wrong here.

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Very nice and usable information Taj, thank you for sharing.

Cheeseman I am going to agree with you in this one. Let's move on and let Mizzou go their own happy way.

Cute happy looking kid with his hearing protectors Pistol. All the best.

That depends on whether you are wearing a hearing aid or not. If you are you may not hear much of anything other than very loud volume stuff (after you turn off the hearing aid before it blows your eardrums off in the high decibel level of the stadium).

I do not deny that they give ethics classes and a thin patina of Jesuit values or try to do so, however compared with the rest of the curriculum the impact of these is minimal (I am talking about my daughter's experience at SLU Law school 10 years ago). The same goes for med school (late 60's Georgetown, also Jesuit). By the way how many Jesuits did you have in the faculty at the law school when you attended? Many years ago we did not have a single one in the faculty at the med school (again Georgetown, Jesuit of course). I have no idea if my daughter had a Jesuit in the SLU Law School faculty when she was in (about 10 years ago), she never talked about any priests in the faculty while she was a law student.