Your prediction of the Valley at the end of regular season play

[ShockerPhi]

This will be all the funnier when you boys finish in the bottom half of the league. Say sixth? Sixth or seventh seems about right for the boys from Sedgwick County.

If you switch Wichita State with your miserable school, you will be right on the money with your prediction.

[LuskingforGuttin]

If you switch Wichita State with your miserable school, you will be right on the money with your prediction.

Based on the attitude of our newcomers and another year of experience playing "Luskball" I suspect we will be higher than sixth place. You have a good squad but you just lost too much from last season. I could be wrong of course, but if you are thinking finishing first or second or actually making it to the weekend in St. Louis for once...this isn't the year. You'll be a heckuva lot closer to sixth than first.

[shock]

Its okay guys, you all know SWMO people can't count.

[ShockerPhi]

I don't think we will be first. I realistically believe we will be 3rd. 6th is nearly unfathomable in a terrible league for a squad with so much talent.

[LuskingforGuttin]

I don't think we will be first. I realistically believe we will be 3rd. 6th is nearly unfathomable in a terrible league for a squad with so much talent.

It's really not a bad league if you study it closely. Even the teams that finish at the bottom are vastly superior to the bottom feeders in such conferences as the WCC, CUSA, Colonial, A10, Pac-12, etc. The statistics bear this out. I bet you the sixth place team in this league could probably win 9-10 other conferences out of the 31.

[wufan]

Casey, enough already. Go back to your high level contacts and listen to what they say. They've never steered you wrong before. ;)

[shockmonster]

Well, no one has ever accused me of being too logical, so maybe that's why I don't understand/agree with your statement. I believe that this team has a very high ceiling, but a lot of the players are also very new to one another and D-I inexperienced. Key to making this combination of plus/minus to turn into a successful team will be team chemistry. How fast it develops, how many players "get it" and which ones, will all impact that level of success.

Unfortunately, predicting team chemistry is a lot harder than determining how tall a player is, how athletic, and how our returnees will probably do. Top this off with how an outsider would look at losing 5 key players, it wouldn't be unreasonable to hedge one's prediction. What was the last MVC team to lose that much from their previous championship team, add as many new (key) players, and still finish in the top 3 the next year. I'm not going to research it, but I bet it happens very, very seldom. I'm not saying I agree with 5th place, but I could see an outsider debating between 3rd and 4th and going conservative with 4th. That 4th place pick also wouldn't say that I didn't think the team wouldn't be a serious contender for a Valley Tournament Championship either.

Your statement is logically worded. His wasn't.

[ShockTalk]

It's really not a bad league if you study it closely. Even the teams that finish at the bottom are vastly superior to the bottom feeders in such conferences as the WCC, CUSA, Colonial, A10, Pac-12, etc. The statistics bear this out. I bet you the sixth place team in this league could probably win 9-10 other conferences out of the 31.

First, anytime you're talking about teams below 250 RPI, there is no such thing as vastly superior. Next, 4 of the 5 conferences you list were rated lower than the Valley, so maybe our bottom feeders should be better. The Colonial was way down last year at #14 and I'll also give you 11th ranked WCC bottom feeders being worse, but how about the others? Using RPI from Warren's, SIU and BU were #256 and #268 (technically, we had only 2 bottom feeders). Atl-10 bottom two: #242, #262 (not worse). C-USA: #216, #251(nope). Pac-12: #265, #270 (we're kind of spliting hairs here, but definately not vastly worse).

Speaking of the Valley's 6th place team last year, yup, one could make an arguement for them being pretty good last year as 5 teams were tied for 3rd place. Of course, one could also say we had 5 teams tied for 7th since those teams were 5 games out of 2nd and 7 games from 1st. I would hope that the 6th place team from the 8th ranked Valley could win the title in 4-6 of those conferences as they are all pretty much D-II programs. But maybe not. Our 6th best RPI team was #137. Only the bottom two conferences had their best team below that mark. And starting with the 7th lowest conference, you had at least one team in the top 100, if not multiple teams in the top 100. So if you mean at least competitive with their top teams, yes. Likely win those conferences, not so much.

[WuDrWu]

It's really not a bad league if you study it closely. Even the teams that finish at the bottom are vastly superior to the bottom feeders in such conferences as the WCC, CUSA, Colonial, A10, Pac-12, etc. The statistics bear this out. I bet you the sixth place team in this league could probably win 9-10 other conferences out of the 31.

Outside of Creighton, the league was SEVEN games worse than WSU last year. The league is NOT that good, the league is marginally competitive amongst 8 shithole programs praying they'll catch lightning in a bottle every 6-10 years and 2 programs reaching for prizes you watch on tv only.

Don't come here running your mouth. Your team is a coin flip from being in the play in game 3 of the last 4 years.

Everyone thinks their new guys are the cat's ass, but there isn't a neutral anything that thinks your new guys can carry our new guy's jocks.

Now, maybe we'll suck and the Bears will shine...time will tell. But discuss that bs with your 4 women's basketball fan buddies over JQ Dipshit NoLockerville. Nobody here is interested.

[SpanglerFan316]

The season better start soon.

[Aargh]

We need to check LukkingForGuttin's methications. His prediction that the Shox are a bottom half team and SWOMO is "better than 6th" - uh that makes him predicting that SWOMO will finish ahead of WSU in the Valley. Fans are supposed to support their teams, but that's just plain delusional. I think WSU is returning more talent than MSU.

As for MVCFan, trashing WSU is politically correct on MVCFans. That site seems to be having fewer and fewer posters, and trashing WSU is one of the better ways to keep the remaining posters coming back. If you read the posts there, you will learn that UNI is the best basketball team in the history of the MVC - well, CU should get some consideration. Indiana State is an MVC Champion.

WSU has The Beast, and he's going to be on fire this year. It's his year. If the team doesn't have chemistry, they will have bruises, cuts, abrasions, and contusions. Throw in DWill, Cotton, and Wessel - all of who are fairly athletic and fairly tough and stocky - and I think "creating chemistry" won't be a problem. The coaches don't call fouls in early practices.

Other than the National JuCo PoY and a first-team JuCo AA, we're not counting on anybody who hasn't been in the system at least a year. We're only counting on 2 new guys, and those guys were 2 of the top 5 or 10 JuCo guys in the nation last year. OK, our backup PG (if we don't use Dwill or Cotton) is a first-year player who's a top-100 guy who may have been the best PG in the nation in his class.

I'm not worried about chemistry. I'm worried about Armstead knowing exactly where Wiggins and Early are moving to when they're setting up to get open or rolling off picks. I'm expecting some TO's when the passer expects a different direction on a cut than the pass receiver executes. That's not chemistry - it's learning each other's tendencies.

[MoValley John]

Everyone thinks their new guys are the cat's ass

Okay, WuDrWu, either you stole the Phrase cat's ass from me, or it's a southern Kansas-Oklahoma thing. I've been saying cat's ass for almost 20 years and have never heard it anywhere else, my kid said it at Catholic school last year and got in big trouble. Also, my wife hates it! I have to give credit for it to a guy from Jett, Oklahoma, though.

Anyway, awesome use of the cat's ass!!! I literally laughed out loud!

[SpanglerFan316]

It's just a prediction and I even acknowledged that it might be too low. It's mostly based on the fact that the teams ahead of them (for the moment) all return more than WSU and we won't know how the Shockers look until we see the new pieces on the court together.

I have to assume that you are smart enough to realize that WSU has too much talent to finish fifth in the MVC, as you predicted, and are just trolling your own site to get page views. There is a chance that WSU finishes fifth but the probability of that has to be really small. I would guess that if you had to bet $10,000 on it, you would not pick WSU fifth.

I have never signed up for MVCfans and I never will. I imagine very few WSU fans will sign up there; why should we? You're running a rigged game and the way to deal with a rigged game is to ignore/avoid it.

PS You came to SN; we didn't go to mvcfans.com. You said your mind was fixed "no matter how much hate mail I get." Just so you know, this isn't "hate mail" since you are visiting here. If you get any "mail" from WSU fans, it will probably be "apathy mail."

[Dave Stalwart]

I love having a delusional southwest Missouri d-II state fan predicting we will suck on our own WSU board because no one else in Springfield is even talking about the bears this year. I guess if you love basketball, it gets lonely down there. If there are people predicting us 5th or 6th, I feel like I should be able to predict 1st and get away with it. Which one is crazier?

[ShockerFever]

But you make predictions because you want to be right don't you? In what parallel universe do you see the Shockers finishing behind Evansville? If you picked us third you wouldn't be laughed at, but fifth behind Evansville? LLLLLMMMMMFFFFFAAAAAAOOOOO

If the Shockers finished fourth behind Evansville with what we have on the court, I would expect coach Marshall to step down from his head coaching position in shame. Could they beat us on one night? Sure. Stranger things have happened to KU. But finish ahead of us in the standings? O M G..

On that note, it's really hard for me to believe that NIU could finish ahead of us either. We would have to be terrible for that to happen.. there is just too much talent.

I predict that BJ and ISU will be no match for us from the middle of the season on. Whether or not we finish ahead of them in the standings will depend on if we dig ourselves a whole at the start of conference play. I will guarantee you this, we will win at least 12 MVC games. Take it to the bank!


T


...:cool:

Who cares what a seldom-visited, biased conference board moderator thinks? Does it really surprise you all that much?