2018 - 2019 BYU Hoops

[smokymountainrain]

St Mary's is a good example of why BYU isn't very good. sometimes you just don't have very good players and that means you will lose a lot of games. as fans we like to over-analyze this stuff, but a lot of times it's just that simple. you look at that St Mary's team and they just don't have the horses like they've had in the past. Fitts is good, Ford is good and outside of those two guys, they just don't have guys who get it done night to night. though it is great to see Baxter playing pretty well for BYU.

[BlueK]

St Mary's is a good example of why BYU isn't very good. sometimes you just don't have very good players and that means you will lose a lot of games. as fans we like to over-analyze this stuff, but a lot of times it's just that simple. you look at that St Mary's team and they just don't have the horses like they've had in the past. Fitts is good, Ford is good and outside of those two guys, they just don't have guys who get it done night to night. though it is great to see Baxter playing pretty well for BYU.

St Mary's isn't as good as last year, but the ranking systems still put them in the top 50 right now. That makes it a pretty nice win by the metrics the committee cares about. Unfortunately we aren't in the hunt for an at-large right now, but if we were it's a win that would count.
#35 on pomeroy
#43 on Sagarin
#47 on the NCAA Net rankings

But these kinds of posts are a little funny to me. We just beat a team most of us expected to run us out of our own building like they did at theirs. We don't have the talent that matches up to the teams we see most often during primetime on ESPN, obviously. But this game last night against a top 50 opponent also says to me that the talent isn't performing up to its ability much of the time.

[Jeff Lebowski]

St Mary's is a good example of why BYU isn't very good. sometimes you just don't have very good players and that means you will lose a lot of games. as fans we like to over-analyze this stuff, but a lot of times it's just that simple. you look at that St Mary's team and they just don't have the horses like they've had in the past. Fitts is good, Ford is good and outside of those two guys, they just don't have guys who get it done night to night. though it is great to see Baxter playing pretty well for BYU.

Deep, man. Deep.

[CardiacCoug]

Randy Bennett cracks me up.

When asked about the Marriott Center crowd and how it affects the game he says “It definitely affects the referees.”

Always good to beat St. Mary’s even when they are a little bit down. Hate those guys.

[jay santos]

Randy Bennett cracks me up.

When asked about the Marriott Center crowd and how it affects the game he says “It definitely affects the referees.”

Always good to beat St. Mary’s even when they are a little bit down. Hate those guys.

I listened to an interesting podcast a while back I think it was freakanomics on home court advantage. Home court advantage is real, but teams don't shoot well or worse home or away. They don't perform better or worse. There's no apparent weather related advantage. The only advantage is the officiating will change their calls to favor the home crowd. Seems like they had studies to back it up. Can't remember well but interesting.

[BlueK]

I listened to an interesting podcast a while back I think it was freakanomics on home court advantage. Home court advantage is real, but teams don't shoot well or worse home or away. They don't perform better or worse. There's no apparent weather related advantage. The only advantage is the officiating will change their calls to favor the home crowd. Seems like they had studies to back it up. Can't remember well but interesting.

Well, we do know SMC shot terrible last night. Missed their first 13 attempts for 3. That's not normal for them and likely had nothing to do with officiating. Something was in their heads.

[CardiacCoug]

I listened to an interesting podcast a while back I think it was freakanomics on home court advantage. Home court advantage is real, but teams don't shoot well or worse home or away. They don't perform better or worse. There's no apparent weather related advantage. The only advantage is the officiating will change their calls to favor the home crowd. Seems like they had studies to back it up. Can't remember well but interesting.

Yep I have read about that too. I agree that Bennett is probably right about home court advantage. Not sure that time where Haws dribbled it off the St. Mary’s player’s foot gets reversed if not for the crowd going nuts.

What seemed convincing to me is that the home court/field advantage is different between different sports but similar within a sport and corresponds to how much the refs can influence an outcome in a given sport.

[BlueK]

Just for fun I've looked up when in the conference schedule BYU lost their first game against a sub-100 ranked WCC opponent. In other words, when did BYU pick up their first "bad" conference loss by committee standards. BYU didn't have this problem when they were in the MWC. They always beat those teams, at least under Dave Rose anyway. This year, 7 games in, we don't have one of those yet, as USF and SMC are top 50 teams. Looking at the schedule, the most likely place for it to happen this year I think would be game 12 at USD or game 13 at LMU. And San Diego might not even count depending on the ranking system because they're #93 right now in Pomeroy. They are #121 on the NCAA NET though. it's also funny to me that the year the bad loss happened immediately (2014), followed by a second bad loss in the very next game, we still made the NCAA tournament.

2019: game 7 played - hasn't happened yet
2018: game 4 - Pacific (NIT)
2017: game 6 - San Diego (NIT)
2016: game 6 - Portland (NIT)
2015: game 5 - Pepperdine (NCAA)
2014: game 1 - LMU (NCAA)
2013: game 11 - San Diego (NIT)
2012: game 7 - LMU (NCAA)

[smokymountainrain]

Deep, man. Deep.

i deserve that.

[cougjunkie]

Randy Bennett cracks me up.

When asked about the Marriott Center crowd and how it affects the game he says “It definitely affects the referees.”

Always good to beat St. Mary’s even when they are a little bit down. Hate those guys.

2 minutes in to the game he was yelling at the refs and asking why they were protecting TJ? He said he hasn't earned that treatment and brought up the 22 free throws he shot against Pepperdine.

[BigFatMeanie]

Cougs are burning up the nets with a whopping 11% from 3 so far tonight. (1-9).

[BigFatMeanie]

And the Cougs increase their torrid pace of poor shooting closing the first half out at 9% from 3 (1-11), 36% overall from the field.

[LiveCoug]

Gavin Baxter started over Luke Worthington. I say that was the right call.

Discuss.

[Joe Public]

They're looking much better in the second half so far.

[Joe Public]

Baxter with more flashes. Exciting.