"Regression" and the analogy of the rising fastball
In baseball, hitters will talk about pitchers whose fastballs "rise" as they reach the plate. Physics has basically proven that this is false, but that certain pitchers appear to have a rising fastball because it doesn't drop as far as the batter typically expects.
I think that's what's going on here. Folks have shown that we didn't "regress" as we understand the word, and we did actually get better, particularly on defense. But it seems that we as a team and many of our players plateaued at some point before the end of the season, and we had a very high profile slump by Andre at the end of the season.
So, our "regression" appears to me to be an illusion created by the fact that we didn't progress as much as many of us expected.
lets put it another way then
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Kedsy
Some people need to open a dictionary and re-familiarize themselves with what the word "regress" means. In our first game we beat Belmont by 1 at home. Davidson was beating us at halftime. Unranked Washington scored 54 points against us in the 2nd half. In what way were those performances better than our winning handily in Tallahassee, or coming back from 20 down to beat NC State? You can argue our defense was substandard (for Duke) all year; you can argue we found it difficult to play our best for 40 minutes in any game this season. But nobody in this thread has made anywhere close to a convincing argument that we regressed over the last part of the season. And that's because it's simply not the case.
I'll meet you halfway...the team didn't progress the way one might expect...individuals may have, clearly, but as a team they did not. In fact I think the individual progress, helped hide regression as a team. More and more individual effort it seemed as the season went on. Thats what my eyes told me. But if you believe the "team" was working as well on Friday as it was in January, so be it. Again, I think some individual performances were hiding some chemistry and lack of teamwork issues...but hey, you may know more than what the players seem to think.