Brief Sabbatical

A mixture of post-turkey depression order and other such distractions prevented daily postings.
Onward and upward.....


Current state of MCB:
Some brilliant games, quite a few surprise upsets, pre-season favorites starting out slowly, early season sleepers sprinting out of the gate, etc, etc, etc. In other words, your basic November, just with different actors in the play (welcome MVC!).
Congrats to the ACC for keeping all 12 teams ranked above 100 in offensive efficiency.
SEC is close behind with only 2 out of the top 100. Florida, has played well even with two losses, ranking 2nd offensively and 4th defensively (126.3 and 79.1!).
On that note, and of equal importance, to back up the early season praise , the Pac10, against common stereotype, has 8 teams ranked above 100 in defensive efficiency, with the biggest surprise of all being annually defensive deficient Oregon Ducks, ranked 6th at 80.3.

Teams that are probably better than given credit:
Nevada - Fazekas possibly best all-around player
Air Force - shooting the lights out, playing solid D, all while controlling the pace
Oklahoma - pay no attention to that home loss tonight, running clean enough to rebound
Notre Dame - Maryland was no joke, efficient on both ends

Not quite as clean than credit given:
Alabama - opponents are shooting poorly (38%) to help, but no forcing of TO's (only 16%) and not playing even good offense (ranked 84th) against sub-par early schedule
Duke - Maybe not great credit given anyway, but able to survive so far with poor offense, but stiffling defense aided by an extremely slow pace of 65 possessions per game. Turnovers are killing the offense led by Paulus, who stands at turning the ball over a blood-curdling 43% of his possessions.
Syracuse - two recent losses were justified as they've been running at 108 offense efficiency and 91 defense, nothing to put a gold star on. One bright note is that they stand at 2nd in block percentage, with Darryl Watkins leading the charge with an impressive 17.4% of oppenents shots blocked while he is on the floor.

From here, I'll start keeping up with daily snippets from various games.


Random stat of eye-opening potential:

Congrats to Demar Dotson of Southern Miss who has hauled in a mind-boggling 29% of potential offensive rebounds. If an opponent's shot clangs off the iron, almost a third of the time, the ball is landing in Dotson's hands. By comparison, the other top players are hovering around 19%. Hands like tractor-beams!!!!!