Basketball is just hockey without DEFENSE! :p
College Basketball
- Thread starter SmallChunk
- Start date
Steve Bartylla
5 year old buck +
One of the kid's on last yr's team was my son's best friend when he was really short, stayed at our house a bunch....really great kid. Sure, Evan Anderson hardly played, but it was still fun watching them because of him. This year has been an incredible treat to watch these guys. As I've wrote several times already, regardless of what happens next, this is the very best Badger BB team I've seen in 38 years of watching Badger BB...And, man, it's been a fun season to watch. It's going to be real fun to see what they do next year. They are losing a ton of talent (everyone will think Frank & Sam, and that is obvious, but JG has been the most underrated player on the floor every game this year, IMO...For Bo's style of BB to work at its finest, you absolutely have to have a JG on the team). Still, it will be fun to watch them crawl their way through games when they aren't the better team on the court, again...I just hope it doesn't take another 38 yrs to see a team as good or better than this one, but I suspect it might.
wiscwhip
5 year old buck +
You've got to think seasons like this do nothing but help recruiting, but that alone doesn't get you to the promised land. Hard work and dedication more than anything pushes these guys to the level they are at. It is hard to find guys who can fit into the Grinch's system, still make the grades required to play at UW, and then play ball at a level that will get you to where the Badgers now stand. Anyway you look at it, win or lose on Monday night, they did this with guys that are considered 3 star talent and with guys who can perform academically as well. That can not be said by any team that they have defeated in the last 3 rounds or the team they play Monday.
wiscwhip
5 year old buck +
I would agree, Hayes is a 4 star as well, but I think you are arguing semantics here. Sure we got a few low to mid tier 4 star guys, but we are no where near the level of a Duke or Kentucky, who not only have rosters full of 5 star talent, they each have 9 McDonald's All Americans on their rosters this season, the best of the best. No comparison whatsoever! Just sayin'!
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wiscwhip
5 year old buck +
Precisely my point, and yet they still manage to compete for Big Ten Championships and more!
wiscwhip
5 year old buck +
Got interested in your comment NoFo and did a little digging, might not be as lofty of standards as you think, at least where sports recruits are concerned. We all know Stanford's reputation for acedemic excellence, and I happened to find this comparison:
Sure, some of Duke’s recruits were, and are, first-rate students. But the Blue Devils have signed many players over the years that Stanford could not touch.
In my mind, that’s one reason Duke has been so successful in signing McDonald’s All-Americans: It’s a world-class private institution with the admissions flexibility of, say, a state school.
I won’t get into names of the players Stanford couldn’t touch, because it’s not fair to them and because I’ve got the data:
According to figures released by the NCAA for players who were in college in the late-90s thru mid-00s — the latest figures available (trust me: it hasn’t changed significantly) — here are the admissions figures for Duke and Stanford men’s basketball recruits:
Duke average GPA: 3.13
Stanford average GPA: 3.46
Duke average SAT: 968
Stanford average SAT: 1123
So you can see, there’s a substantial difference. Duke’s admissions are actually closer to those of the heathens
North Carolina average GPA: 2.84
Duke average GPA: 3.13
North Carolina average SAT: 915
Duke average SAT: 968
TMIL
5 year old buck +
It was an exciting game. It must be a great feeling for the Wisc team and fans. Only their second final ever, first since the 40s isn't it? Good stuff. I was happy to see Wisc do it, its way more exciting to see an upset like that than to watch the cherry-picked KY just run through it as expected. Plus, I went to a Big 10 school, Illinois. I'm wishing Wisc luck vs Duke.
wiscwhip
5 year old buck +
Averages are meaningless. I think what they were pointing out is that it is different for academic students and student athletes. So sure, I can see where Duke's average admission SAT was likely much, much higher than the 968. All universities have huge numbers of academic students compared to a tiny number of the student body which are athletes and that would more than make the average score considerably higher. Average admission SAT scores don't mean squat. Given that Duke is a private institution and not a public school, they do not have to adhere to some of the same rules of admission or reporting of data that a state school might need to consider. At private schools, those admission discrepancies are perfectly fine, which is not always the case at public universities. Here is a excerpt from a newspaper article on the subject, it is far more prevalent and widespread than you are admitting.
"The newspaper did not bother to collect information from the private universities that compete in those conferences -- prestigious and high-profile institutions such as Duke, Stanford and Northwestern Universities and the University of Notre Dame -- because they are not subject to the state open-records laws on which the Journal-Constitution based its requests for information. (The newspaper did include data on one private institution, Syracuse University, that was contained in its certification report, which it made public on the athletics department's Web site.) Most of those independent institutions tend to have academically selective student bodies but to recruit from the same population of athletes as other institutions, giving them wide gaps in qualifications between their athletes and other students.
Despite those laws, even some of the public universities did not provide the relevant information, the Journal-Constitution noted. "Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh refused to provide the information. The University of Kansas and West Virginia University said their most recent NCAA certification self-study did not include the information. Kansas State University deleted all of its sport-by-sport data," the newspaper explained.
For those colleges that did report their information, the gaps in academic preparation between athletes and other students are wide. The average SAT for all freshmen at the colleges in question was 1161, while the average for all athletes was 1037, 124 points lower. The average SAT for football players was 941, and for male basketball players, 934.
The averages mask much wider variation among colleges. The University of Cincinnati, Clemson University, the University of California at Berkeley and Georgia Institute of Technology all had average SAT scores for their men's basketball players of roughly 950. But at Cincinnati, the basketball players were within 124 points of the student body at the urban public university; at Clemson, the gap was 201 points; at California, a highly selective flagship, 350 points; and at Georgia Tech, one of the nation's leading public institutions for science and particularly engineering, 396 points.
Similar gaps show up within conferences. To judge by the SAT scores of its freshmen, the University of Florida is the most selective institution in the Southeastern Conference, yet its football players had the lowest average SAT score, 346 points lower than the average for all students."
Again, averages mean nothing! And Duke won't even post their true numbers, so we will never know how skewed their admissions numbers are between athletes and academic students.
Buckly
5 year old buck +
I do know that Duke as well as most colleges I assume, have wide admission standards regarding students with "exceptional talent". That doesn't necessarily means just sports though, and I believe Duke has pretty high standards regardless. I don't really watch college basketball, just the finals.
wiscwhip
5 year old buck +
Oh, they all do it, public and private schools alike, it is just that public schools are required to make that information available, thus they are generally held to a higher standard by the Deans, Boards of Regents, Academic Standards Committees, and the general public. Private schools are not required to make those numbers part of the public record, so schools like USC and Duke can recruit star talent that a state school wouldn't even begin to look at due to low academic scores. Football and basketball have become so big now that recruiters are looking at these top prospects while they are sophomores and even sometimes as freshmen, you can bet they are checking and talking academics with these kids right out of the box. Those recruiters know by the time these kids are seniors whether they will make the academic cut at their universities and whether or not they should continue to pursue them as recruits throughout their senior season. There is no point in spending time and money recruiting a kid that will not get admitted to your school. Private schools don't have to worry about any of that, so they can recruit to their hearts content based on athletic performance and not really worry about the kid getting admitted, because no one will ever know if the student was actually qualified to be admitted.
SmallChunk
5 year old buck +
Hey, at least we have great deer hunting!!!.......oh wait.... ;)
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dipper
Guest
Bucky is a one point favorite, not good. The Badgers always do better when they are underdogs.
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dipper
Guest
I know but it's a badger sports program. Either football or basketball, we do better when we have a lower rank or underdog label.
I've been saying this all year with this team though, this team isn't like any I've watched before. Some fellow alum on this site were being "realistic", and not giving credit where it was due. We'll give him a pass though because he's from southern California. :)
I've been saying this all year with this team though, this team isn't like any I've watched before. Some fellow alum on this site were being "realistic", and not giving credit where it was due. We'll give him a pass though because he's from southern California. :)
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