I have recently tried my hand at STAT-KING. I quickly glanced at the formula and confidently picked Tins for both the first two games. Tins in fact was the stat-king for the first game but I lost the tie breaker. The second game stat-king announced Stevie Thunder the winner, which surprised me. A quick look at the formula and I realized my error. It's on a per minute basis. OK, I thought, per minute makes sense. However, I was still surprised Jenkins was not the winner, so i did what any actuary would do, I ran the numbers. I wanted to make sure I understood intimately just what the king valued, and what did I found?

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I'm sure everyone is getting as excited as I am for the start of basketball season. Actually, most of you are probably more excited since most of you probably didn't go to the exhibition game like I did. If you had, you would already remember what a CPH team looks like on offense. Anyway, I thought I would put up a poll to gauge the excitement level going into the season as we all await Bird's basketball preview.

Naturally with the season starting, I started to get excited about this year's schedule. While Kansas and MTSU are intriguing games, they don't offer the same allure as some past non-conference opponents. Looking at the future opponents there are some good ones coming up, but we also have a couple holes to fill. The recent formula appears to be UGA, one BCS conference team, one non-BCS team, and one I-AA team. So by my math we need a second BCS team for 2012, 2013, 2014. See future opponents below.

Leaving out U(sic)GA, since we play them anyway, I was wondering what teams everyone wishes we had on our nonconference schedule.

If I had my druthers, the teams I would most like to play are Auburn, Alabama, and ND. Of course Alabama WAS scheduled for 2013-2014 and the postponement of the series is the whole reason we have this hole in our future schedule. We haven't played Alabama since 1984, but there is just too much history in this series for it to not happen at some point. I can only hope we add this series back at some point in the future.

When I think back over the last few season the series the fans were most excited about was probably the ND series. I tried to look at their future schedules but I don't know enough about it to determine if they have any availability. I would guess this is somewhat of a long shot.

After the ND series I would say the Auburn series was the next most popular. However, Auburn is already on the schedule for 2017 and 2018. Therefore, I seriously doubt we would add them for 2012-2014.

Personally, I like playing the second SEC team. Going through the conference Tennessee would be my next choice, but seeing how they just backed down from UNC they may not want to. After that...Kentucky?

So who should DRAD add? I am out of ideas.

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The following links are from a new basketball blog that Luke Winn linked to in his power rankings. What the author is doing is going through and looking at the average data for all bcs coaches over the last seven years. His results shed some light on our CPH discussions and the time framematches up well with Bird's point guard analysis. There are 72 coaches included so the ranks shown are out of 72.

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"DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)—While the Iowa Hawkeyes prepare for their biggest bowl game in years, thousands of their fans back home may be scrambling to find a TV to watch them.

Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s demand that cable company Mediacom Communications Corp. pay more to carry its stations could leave 700,000 cable subscribers in 11 states without some local channels on Jan. 1. That includes about 400,000 subscribers in Iowa, most of whom will lose the channel televising the Jan. 5 Orange Bowl between Iowa and Georgia Tech."


http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/news?slug=ap-cabletvdispute&prov=ap&type=lgns

I haven't seen much commentary on what people think about the defense this year. I think it would be fair to say that most fans probably expected a rebuiding year when the season started. However, the defense has most likely failed to meet whatever limited expectations you had. I posted a poll to see what people think the problem is this year (coaching, talent, experience, injuries). Specifically if people think Dave Wommack is the problem or if they think there are mitigating circumstances for the defense's performance.

For me, the inexperience excuse goes out the window about midseason. Also, I have never heard so much talk about needing to simplify schemes. If players can't learn a scheme by the end of the season the problem is most likely with the teacher. Certainly there have been some injuries but the defense has been bad most of the year regardless.

When I look at the roster its hard to argue anyone had a good season except Derrick Morgan. Morgan Burnett didn't have the year a lot of people expected. Jefferson had his moments but was fairly inconsistent. Tarrant didn't have a pick all year and he and Butler played very soft coverage for the most part.

The Wommack era is very different from the days of Tenuta. Personally, I was ready for a change but now I am not sure what our overall strategy is. To my untrained eye we can't generate pressure and often are playing soft coverages on the corners. However, we also give up a lot of big plays and opposing teams consistently find wide open receivers.