I guess it happens to the best of them. Sometimes you run into a bee hive, like we did last week. In the end it is only one game. Duke is fine and so will L'Ville.
Notre Dame who looked like they were dead and fighting for an NIT bid are playing like the best team in the country tonight- they cannot miss. They have a 30+ lead on #7 Louisville. Basketball is a funny sport.
I guess it happens to the best of them. Sometimes you run into a bee hive, like we did last week. In the end it is only one game. Duke is fine and so will L'Ville.
Fran Fraschilla made a great point in the postgame analysis of ND-Louisville. In a 30-game college season, he would expect his teams to play 5 really good games, 5 really bad games, and the other 20 games would be how his team normally played. I'd say that UL tonight had one of those really bad games, just like Duke vs. Clemson. Consistency is great, but hard to achieve with college kids.
Random sidenote: I can't believe a PAC-10 game is actually on ESPN now, it's UCLA at Arizona State.
Clearly the game has passed by Rick Pitino. He can't recruit, can't use his bench, and can't teach big men.
And with UCLA going down, that means
5 Duke
6 UCLA
7 L-ville
8 Wake
All had major losses this week. Ours was the least offensive - we are the only team that lost to a higher ranking opponent.
Next weeks polls should be interesting.
Not to hi-jack the thread, but did anybody see the Northwestern-Illinois game; the former are up 7 with two minutes and can't get the ball past half court. Illinois wins on a last second shot by a point. The weird thing is that Northwestern, coached by a Carrill disciple, plays a beautiful half court game and then can't handle a press. College basketball this year is nuts!
It's not just college kids -- it's basketball. It's what makes the game great: a virtuouso performance one game doesn't imply the same performance the next time.
Offensive consistency is almost impossible for any team. Defensive consistency -- which depends more on effort -- is easier to achieve (if you call scrapping on every possession "easy"), but every team has its blah days.
sagegrouse
That game was spectacular! As a born-Illini fan, it was extremely exciting, and rather satisfying to to watch the comeback that didn't happen Wednesday. Looked like the spectacular Illinois basketball of a few years ago.
As for Notre Dame v Louisville, I strongly believe that these sorts of games show the parity of the Big East AND its weakness. Notre Dame is not a great team, and they'd lost 7 in a row as proof of this mediocrity. The ACC upsets, as a point of comparison, are teams that have barely lost 7 games all year. Yet instead of dropping no. 7 Louisville dangerously close to OUT of the top 25, it's gonna be used mostly as a case for Notre Dame's greatness.
/rant
His key point that I liked was: really great teams will win some of the 5 games they play poorly in. That's why no one was too bothered by the Wake loss, why the Rhode Island game at the beginning of the year wasn't a big deal, and why the UNC loss is so discouraging.