Random Thoughts from HCU Game

Basketball
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HCU is a bad team in a bad league, so take it all with a grain of salt. A few random thoughts:

  1. Trevin Knell will have a few games when he’s on fire from deep and will help us win a couple games we would have otherwise lost.
  2. Stewart’s D will get him minutes against hyper athletic 1s that Hall can’t handle. He’s a gamer.
  3. The new big man needs to get on the treadmill. Holy smokes…
  4. The announcer said Spencer Johnson is the oldest player in D1–well, he plays with that type of maturity. Easily our best player.
  5. Jaxson Robinson may break out and meet his 4+ star recruiting ranking. He looks far more comfortable out there. He has a quick release and can drain from deep. If he also starts scoring in the paint he can be a star.
  6. We are not going to have to rely on Fouss to score like we did last year, which will result in less attention on Fouss and he will get a bunch of easy buckets.
  7. Reading between the lines, I love what Pope is telling us: we will be outmanned in every conference game, and the way to compensate is to be unconventional and bomb up 3s at every opportunity. When we are cold we will lose but probably would have lost anyway, but when we get hot we can beat teams we have no business beating.
  8. Dawson Baker is a SJ type player–I think he can be a real positive contributor.
  9. If Marcus’ waiver is approved, we may be able to compete in the middle of the league and make for a really fun team to watch.
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What is with Baker? What’s his injury?

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Khalifa has been fighing injury which has really slowed his conditioning. And we head into a super important matchup with SDSU without Hall, Baker and Khalifa at 100%, all fighting injury.

4

Seems too typical for BYU and injuries. Hall looks ready.

5

BYU will play 18 Big 12 conference games.

I think 8-10 would be a great finish.

I think 6-12 is a fair expectation.

Worst case scenario 4-14 is not over reaching.

Any comments? I’m just not sure how it will go. I saw Baylor play tonight, they look way more talented and athletic than BYU and there are 3 other teams in the conference that are ranked ahead of Baylor nationally right now. Yikes!

6

We could potentially go 10-4 before league play with a very soft non conference schedule. Add that to 6-12 in conference and if my calculations are correct that’s 16-16 and at least not totally embarrassing.

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Do you know the latest on this? Has the slow-moving wheels of dishonest NCAA rolled a little bit on this yet?

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No response yet. I think best case the NCAA punishes BYU by making Marcus miss meaningful games–starting with Friday vs SDSU. Worst case they drag it out long enough to make it difficult for him to sign a good professional contract in Europe this season, then deny it leaving him in limbo until next season–successfully harming both BYU and Marcus. The longer they delay, the more it harms both BYU and Marcus, and IMHO the NCAA loves a good chance to screw one of the few schools that actually tries to hold its athletes and boosters to a higher standard.

And YES I’m pretty bitter and cynical about the whole thing. The NCAA truly is a den of corruption.

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I really like how Noah and Stewart played. Noah was great on the boards and he seem to have better control down low than last year. Stewart seem to be a foul and turnover machine last year but seems much more in control this year. His post game interview he said he had worked a lot on settling down and it shows. If those two can step up it definitely helps our team going forward.

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Waterman looks stronger and more in control as well. San Diego will be a real test to see where this team can go. They may surprise a lot of naysayers. Pope wants them to shoot a lot of 3’s. They have to shoot at about a 38% or more from 3 point land to win against Big12 teams.