Old guy

Thank you too Taj, very nice explanation of the ins and outs of seed selection, and still complicated to me. I appreciate your and Pistol's effort to increase my knowledge base.

Thank you Pistol, the way seeds are chosen is and remains a puzzle to me.

Well, of course our lock of the 11th seed may depend upon other factors like who wins and who loses the final game of the season. I really do not think that we have a good or even mediocre chance of beating Richmond Saturday, but who knows? Who knows what will happen if Fordham loses the next game. Could we go up to the 10th seed. Any thoughts in this regard?

Wiz, I think we both said the same thing prior to this game, but not quite. You said the numbers and probabilities indicated a probable win for LaSalle but that we could win this game if our defense stopped their offense (which it did last night) and our offense was good (which it was not although it was adequate). I said SLU could win this game and that the numbers and probabilities were not written in stone. We were both right of course, but we have different points of view. One point to be made, this was not a low spread win, it was won by a 15 point spread in favor of SLU against all probabilities and predictions of a spread favoring LaSalle. We won a very nice and healthy victory last night. Another point is that the main contributors to our victory last night were Roby and Hines, not Crawford and Agbeko. And finally Neufeld, of all people, managed to play last night and to look like he was playing not just standing there. This is a major advance for this kid who has played very little this year. All of this could not have been predicted by prior scores and probabilities. We won nicely last night. We have 11 wins going into the final game of the regular season, and we have what appears to be an 11th seed in the A10 tournament. The 11th seed means that we are not ending the season at the rock bottom of A10 as was widely expected. Like Ford said last night during the Senior celebration, this season was a successful season for the Bills, we accomplished a lot and we are ready for next year. Amen to that.

Add to the list that we beat LaSalle by 15 pts!

First of all, it was a great win. 15 pts over LaSalle who was supposed to beat us by 5 to 7. Nice. We played steadily the whole game, LaSalle started losing control in the last 5 minutes of the game. Nicely done, nice win, our 11th win for the year. We have equaled the number of wins we had last season, not bad for a team that was expected not to win one more single game after the pre season. I do believe we will be able to win at least one more game, the first game of the A10 conference. We stayed for the senior celebration afterwards, very nice. Really liked Reggie thanking everyone he could think of, particularly his cousins who made it possible for him to come to the US to go to school and play basketball. Playing Ghans's national anthem was a very nice gesture, well done. I do like Mike and he has achieved incredible things (a Bachelors and a Mater's) in the last 4 years, besides basketball. Finally I really like Ford, he was losing his voice as he talked but he kept on talking. He acknowledged Crawford's injuries and what it cost him to continue playing with no complaints. Finally in terms of grading our Coach, as you all know I do not believe for minute variations in grades. I think Ford is a winner and a great thing for SLU. He has proven to be great at recruiting, he has proved to be great in public speaking and in motivating a weak team into becoming a cohesive team that plays like a team, he has proven to be a good coach. I think we just won big when we hired him. Sure I would call him an A+, but I think what I just described him as is much more than an A+ designation can convey. I hope you all watched tonight, it was worth it.

Team Rankings give the Vegas implied scores for this game as: SLU 66.2, LaS 71.2. Their spread is 5.

The pictures look like small ribs, looks good. Could not find the recipe

White Pelican you are an entreperneur just like the guy that created KFC. BBQ Pork Wings indeed, sounds yummy.

There are too many ifs in these speculations. For example: "if pigs had wings they would fly", perhaps not. If pigs had wings perhaps they would be like ostriches flapping around their useless wings as they run.

OT of course. You all know what the word CIGNA stands for don't you, "Call In Get No Answer". Leaving jokes aside, it is an acronym for the initials of the two companies that merged to form CIGNA, Connecticut General and Insurance of North America. More useless data for the useless data file.

Congratulations to Jalen Johnson, well done!

Hey NextYearBill, I think you are making this bet ahead of time. I am not talking about Hines playing or not playing next year because of his merits, not at all. I am talking about weird unanticipated events happening. Let explain it it this way to you. Assume for a that Goodwin cannot start practicing or playing by the start of next season because his shoulder is not fully healed. This is not likely to happen but it could happen. Also assume that Bishop decides to transfer because he prefers to be a star somewhere else rather than just another PG for SLU. Again, I do not think this is likely to happen but it could happen. If both of these conditions occur, Ty Graves cannot start playing until the second half of next year season. Given these unexpected events who do you think might be getting playing time as a PG if there is no one else to do this job? I would say Hines might. Again probabilities are very low for this chain of events ever happening, and you are probably correct in assuming that Hines is not likely to play next season when other PGs are available. But in the unlikely situation that we need a PG to play when no one else is available, then Hines may well come in, would you not agree? Again this is not likely to happen but it might. I am not taking your bet, I think you are probably correct in your assessment, but weird things do happen.

Checked Team Rankings, they have LaSalle as a favorite to win by only 1 star out of 5, certainly this is not a vote of confidence for LaSalle. To make some simple comparisons, St. Joseph was favored to win by 2 stars out of five, and George Mason (2nd game) was favored to win by 3 stars out of five. We won against both St. Joseph and George Mason (2nd game) despite the projections being more favorable to their winning over us than they are for the coming game against LaSalle. I keep on saying this, numbers and probabilities are not facts carved in stone. If they were we would have a hell of a lot less wins this year than what we already have. This does not mean we will win the coming game against LaSalle with any certainty, it means that losing this game is not a fact, not yet anyways. As Wiz says, this will be a game between a very good offense with no defense against a better (by no means the best) defense with a poor offense. In terms of physics an irresistible object vs an immovable target, or armor against penetration rounds. Who wins? It will be interesting to see how Ford preps the team for this game.

ChosenOne, I think the achievement of this team in winning games they were not expected to win is a big positive in and of itself. It shows a lot about Coach Ford and his staff in terms of their ability to coach and provide a sense of team spirit and cohesion to the team to the level that they have been able to win many more games than were expected to win. This board had some doubts about Coach Ford's ability to coach, I think we can cast aside some of those doubts based on the achievement of the current team this season. Yes, the team was far from having a winning year and we may wind up the season with less (or perhaps a few more) wins than Crew's team had last year. But who cares? This team under Ford's direction improved and has achieved a level of wins (so far) that went beyond expectation. This is a positive result for the year in my book.

I think we may be able to beat LaSalle next Tuesday, but I do not think SLU will be able to beat Richmond. It is likely that we are a lock for the 11th seed in the A10 tournament. This is not a terrible fate given our very limited potential for this season. If we get the 11th seed we are likely to play Duquesne the 1st day of the A10 tournament. This gives us two additional possible wins before we are likely eliminated the second day of the tournament. If we do get the two additional wins this will give us a 12 win record for the season which is higher than most of us ever expected we had any chance to get for this year. We are really doing a lot better than most analysis projected us to do this season. We owe the team and Coach Ford plus his staff a debt of admiration and gratitude for having achieved well over expectations for this year. Congratulations for all the work, the hard effort, and the team spirit you all forged these last couple of months.

As far as I know he was supposed to have his surgery right after he stopped playing for his HS team. So, by now he is probably a few weeks post op and looking good with no external support to the shoulder. That is assuming he did the surgery as expected. Thank you for the identification of the players in the photo crymdg2.

The baby race was funny. One of the kids just shot out at the very start of the race going straight for the other side and then lost interest a couple of feet away from the goal and just sat down on the canvas and watched the others win the race. You can never tell what a child that age is going to do.

I am assuming Goodwin is the kid on the Right withe the SLU hoodie. Is this correct? I am happy to see that neither of them is wearing any kind of visible arm braces or restraints. As we know Goodwin had recent shoulder surgery. It is nice to see him showing no evidence of this procedure.

I predicted 15 wins, this qualifies me (as the Wiz called me) as one of the greatest optimists in this board. However, the season is not over yet, we still have to play LaSalle and Richmond, plus the A10 tournament, and we are up to 10 wins. We may well finish the season with a few more wins.

I was there but went for dinner with friends afterwards. This is what I saw: we started playing very well and after 10 minutes or so spent building a significant lead, the Joeys kind of woke up and started playing just as we were losing our drive and confidence. I have no idea what happened there but for most of the rest of the game we played pretty poorly. The refs were a curse on us, as usual. We gave up a 15+ point advantage in the first half. Until about the middle of the second half we continued playing poorly but managed to regain some ground. Then in the last 10 minutes we woke up again from our slumber and started playing to win. We did win this game by 1 point. I cannot understand why the other guy drove to the basket when he needed a 3 pointer to tie the game but he did and lost the game with his last basket. We won the game. It felt good to win but it was not a game well played by our team. I do not know if we can beat LaSalle or Richmond but it would surely be nice if we did. As of now we have 10 wins to our credit. This is a significant achievement coming from a team that after the pre-conference play was pronounced incapable of winning much of anything else, the probabilities were against us in this regard. Well we managed to win a few more games more than we were expected to. The team has done better than was expected at that dark time after the pre-conference games. Ford has done a great job coaching them. We should be ready now for the final games of the season and for the A10 tournament; maybe we will win a couple more games, who knows?

Fully agree with you.

Are you becoming a pessimist or what?

Yes it is a winnable game, let's hope it happens. Unfortunately that is exactly what St. Joseph's players and fans are thinking about this game, it is a winnable game for them as well. At this stage in the season nothing is likely to be easy for us, let's hope we can come out with our A game this time and roll over St. Joseph's.

That is true Glorydays, a mediocre player in a really bad team can become a star. A very good player in a team full of starts may be pushed aside as mediocre. That is a very good observation.