Dirk X West

Tech beat OU in Norman 69-67.

COVID rates are a lot lower there if nothing else.

The system may be stupid, but it is what it is and all the teams play the season out with the same set of expectations about how the the champion of the league is determined.

A one off game is not analogous to a tournament, at least not for me. It's subjective, though.

Who's they? Unless you're referring to officials representing the Big 12 conference, it doesn't matter what "they" say.

We're talking about two different things. I'm talking about what is officially recognized. You and Al are arguing what *should* be officially recognized. There is, in fact, official recognition in basketball for both the regular season and tournament champ. There has never been official recognition of two championships in football. Division winners in football in the 12 team Big 12 era were recognized as division champs, not conference champs.

No, there has never been a separate regular season champ and a CCG game champ officially recognized in football like in basketball, in the years the Big 12 football has had a CCG. You are a good poster and seem like a good guy - and a can understand the travails of being a fan of a non-blue blood school (I'm a Tech fan) - but these arguments are kinda sad, I have to say. ISU didn't win a conference championship in football, period, by any standard.

There is no "regular season champion" (as opposed to the CCG winner) in football. That's the difference.

Yes.

I thought the question I posed was absurd. I intended it to be. The concept of of whiteness is inherently absurd.

Some Spaniards have red hair. Are Spaniards considered to be white?

Fortunately Everton hasn't suffered a single major injury this season.

It's actually more like 11 to 9.

It's a little harder to win when you don't get to shoot 39 FTs.

They also had no issues dealing with the wind, as far as I know.

Conservatives never stopped doing this, by the way.

She didn't get canceled. She got fired.

Game recognize game

This article from the Athletic (which is behind a pay wall) explains some of things factoring into Dallas's slow start: The Mavericks’ 8-8 start is the consequence of a bizarre NBA season 1. This Mavericks season has reached a distinct middle-of-the-ocean-and-no-land-in-sight moment. Josh Richardson returned to the bench in street clothes on Saturday night, proof that time has continued moving forward despite what it might feel like. But Dallas has now played 16 games – falling to 8-8 after Saturday’s 133-108 defeat to Houston – without us having any clue what this team will actually be. Even when it was only missing Kristaps Porzingis, the team was still acclimatizing Richardson’s addition and starting an ineffective Dwight Powell. There’s been almost no normalcy to the season’s first month; points have been tallied and results finalized but uncertainty reigns. And, sure, you’ll run into the Americas eventually if you keep sailing west, but there’s no telling when that might be. Richardson should be back next week, Carlisle announced before the game, but the other absent players – Powell, Dorian Finney-Smith and Maxi Kleber – will likely remain out longer than that. The exact timetables are hard to measure; the players have conditioning tests to pass in their ramp back up to play even after they’ve cleared health and safety protocols. In the meantime, the Mavericks push forward through one of the most grueling stretches of schedule I’ve ever seen associated with professional basketball. Since the team’s postponed game on Jan. 11 gave them an unplanned breather, it has looked like this for the team (each line represents one day): GAME TRAVEL GAME TRAVEL GAME GAME TRAVEL GAME TRAVEL GAME TRAVEL GAME GAME Sunday is the team’s first true day off – a day sandwiched between two home games with no travel required – since Jan. 12. And while the team plays seven more games in 11 days starting Monday, that stretch contains less travel, including a day off between a doubleheader at Utah and four home games, almost doubling the five they’ve played thus far. Between returning players and more days off, the team might actually look alive again in the coming weeks. It just might not seem that way until it actually happens. 2. 8-8 after the opening month Dallas has had is good enough. It’s a frustrating, dismal opening month for all the reasons outlined above, but the record has them tied for the eighth seed in the Western Conference along with San Antonio and Golden State, two teams the Mavericks will cruise past at full strength. Dallas beat San Antonio just Friday night, after all. They’re the better basketball team, I promise you. They’re better than the Grizzlies, a team currently ahead of them in the standings. They’re likely better than Phoenix, although I’ll wait for further evidence from both parties before deciding one way or another. Dallas is in no danger of missing the playoffs, even if the blasé start may unfortunately impact their ability later this year to push for home-court advantage. 3. I’m being rational in case you don’t want to be. I know what it’s like to be a sports fan; the irrationality is the whole point. This is an objectively miserable time to be one of the Mavericks’. To lose games and get frustrated is the fundamental sports experience, but to do so without the rest or players needed to function is something worse. There’s no baseline to reset our collective expectations to right now. The basketball math guys keep talking and writing about the rubber band effect, like our own Seth Partnow earlier this season. He describes it like this: This brings us to the second odd trend we’re seeing: The decline of the “rubber band effect.” It’s a common feature of many professional sports that teams play differently with and without the lead. These stylistic changes are sizable enough that for flow sports such as soccer and hockey, which use time of possession-based metrics (or estimates thereof) to track dominance over the course of the game removed from the randomness inherent in games where scoring events are as rare as in those sports, substantial game state “score effects” need to be built into the analysis to account for teams playing more defensively with the lead and aggressively when chasing. Though less the case in the NBA than in those sports, there is plenty of research suggesting a sort of gravity pulling the score margin toward zero, which gets stronger the larger the margin. In other words, when commentators say, “You know they’re going to make a run later in this game,” about the losing team in a 20-point game, they’re remarking on a trend that’s generally supported by the statistics. Teams who fall behind tend to play better, and vice versa. And yet that hasn’t happened much this season. Dallas saw it happen when it beat the Clippers by 51 points. But it happened Saturday night, too, when the Mavericks cut an 11-point halftime deficit to a three-point game within five minutes. Wes Iwundu missed an open corner 3 to tie it, and then … the resistance crumbled again. The team was down by 19 points by the quarter’s end. The rookies played the final six minutes of the game. We’re not used to basketball looking like it has this season, something that goes deeper than the lack of fans and post-game hug police. The game being played on the court has different trends than in the past. It’s perfectly reasonable to look at the Mavericks last night and call them out for a lack of effort because that would probably be true in past seasons. I’m not sure that it is this year. Fatigue, both mental and physical, doesn’t randomly target a specific ability of a player so much as sapping all of them by increments. It’s not like a tired player suddenly can’t rebound or only gets worse at making layups while being 100 percent in all other areas. Rather, everything he does falls to 90 percent, or 85, or 80, until fatigued players suddenly look like James Harden wanting to be traded. So that’s the baseline we don’t have for this season, and it’s made everything less fun. And, yeah, of course some players simply haven’t been good enough, and of course some games have been lost that shouldn’t have this season. But I think you’ll find that even the wins sometimes feel hollow, like the Clippers blowout that seemed more like another 2020 aberration than the historic event it statistically was. Which, I don’t know — I don’t have all the answers or solutions. I certainly don’t mean to say sports can’t be enjoyed right now. This is just an attempt to explain why they might feel different than normal. 4. Here’s something to enjoy, observed from my media seat at the American Airlines Center: At some point in the second half, Rick Carlisle called for Jalen Brunson to check into the game, and when Brunson passed behind him, he tapped him on the shoulder and kept walking. Carlisle turned and looked where Brunson was no longer standing — the mildest prank ever invented, which I know you all played in high school. He then pivoted his head the other way, but Brunson was already reaching the scorer’s table by then, not even acknowledging what had just taken place. You got got, Coach. 5. Another thing you can enjoy is Luka Doncic, who contributed a 26-point night with five rebounds and eight assists despite the otherwise depressing box score. He often meanders his way towards the “best offensive player alive” label before stepping back from it with a rash turnover or a literal step-back 3 that misses badly — among the few flaws remaining in his game, especially now that he provides better defensive effort more often. (I still wouldn’t call him a good defensive player, despite that three-game stretch where he was playing incredibly well on that end, but he’s certainly good enough, with a more functional on-off switch than he’s shown before.) Now that he’s added effective mid-range counters to his game, it’s tough to think he won’t reach that label soon enough. I asked Doncic about it afterward, and he says he worked on it during the offseason and feels comfortable taking them. Carlisle added, “A guy like him has to have mid-range counters because of all the ways guys are going to play him, and he works on it, so it’s a weapon.” I would agree with that. This season, Doncic is 24-of-42 on mid-range shots, as defined by the NBA’s stats page, which already tops his 20-of-57 mark last season. As an eternal reminder, analytics don’t decry mid-range shots, but bad shots: If Doncic continues hitting anywhere near 57 percent of his mid-rangers, they’re good shots, especially when you consider it must affect how defenses play him when he drives and makes it easier to score in the paint or kick to his teammates. 6. Willie Cauley-Stein did so much in the 19 minutes he played, which is usually a sentence you write when referring only to someone’s good plays. That certainly isn’t the case this time. He did actually bother DeMarcus Cousins more than any other Maverick, although not enough to prevent Boogie from a 28-point, 17-rebound evening. But, mostly, he was just incredibly noticeable for what felt to me like every single moment he was on the court, always doing something, whether or not it was a basketball thing worth doing to help his team win. This defensive possession on the game’s opening play is something that I don’t have words for. Like, if the following video clip was what basketball actually was, I would not have a job. I cannot describe anything that happens in this play. I am sorry. 7. Dallas plays Denver on Monday, followed by the sounds-like-the-name-of-a-law-firm Utah & Utah and Phoenix & Phoenix doubleheaders. The Utah games happen on the road while the team returns home to finish playing the Suns for the season. Enjoy this bizarro campaign as much as you can — I sincerely mean that.

And Rodgers still hasn't made a SB without Mike McCarthy.

Ruh roh, packers

Which OCs like QBs that get hurt all the time?

He did. And he seems like a bit of a dumbass.