Today is the Lady Beav's birthday, so I am taking her out to lunch and then wine tasting. I'm not sure I'll be home for the game, but either way, I don't have time to write much about it this morning.
All I'd say is I'm expecting a loss for the same reasons I outlined last week:
1. The Beavers only play well versus Goliath teams where they have no pressure and nothing to lose.
2. The Beavers only play well at home versus such teams where the crowd forces them to focus.
With UCLA on a roll of late, they meet one of two criteria, which means a Beaver loss. This stat from the official site backs me up:
The Beavers are scoring about the same no matter where they play this season, averaging 71.4 points at home and 66.4 points on the road per game. The big difference is the scoring of their opponents, which are averaging 65.9 points at Gill Coliseum and 80.0 points per game on their respective home courts.
How do you explain allowing 15 more points on the road other than a complete lack of focus?
Nelson and Smith are going to have their way inside. Honeycutt will make them pay for playing a zone. I expect a romp, and the Beavers losing streak to UCLA to uptick to 13 straight. The only things certain in life are death, taxes, and the Joe Burton costing the Beavers another game.
79-59, Bruins.
When: 1pm
TV: FSN (Nationally)
Radio: KPAM
80-51 UCLA
They are going to murder us because the men’s basketball team doesn’t possess two little things: pride and courage.
So, it’s a 29 pt loss or a 20 pt loss.
Isn’t it sad this is what OSU Basketball has become?
I think about 20 years ago we would have predicted a chance to beat UCLA. But now we just assume we’re going to bend over and take it.
24 to 8 OMG
that’s after UCLA had a 16 pt run
OMG
Has CR lost this team?
Yep.
I would venture to say that he has.
Cowardice, personified.
And here’s the part where they actually start fighting, just to fall short.
You sound like you’ve seen this before. Deja Vu perhaps? :-)
26 – 17
MAYBE I BROUGHT THE BEAVS SOME LUCK? LOL Yeah, right!
16 to 4 run for the Beavs. Not as good as the Bruins 16 to zip run BUT NOT BAD.
Not bad, but will fall short when they come out tired as they had to double their efforts to come back from complete and utter embarrassment.
just cooling my heels til the burn out at the end.
Halftime.
I’ve watched several games this season and finally feel as though I have enough observations to approach this team with some psychological assistance. The two key factors that OSU (and all young teams!) needs are focus and relaxation. Before they fully understand these concepts, they’ll continue to be that underachieving team.
The ways to build upon these factors are in practice. You can see that we rock n roll on defense (#1 steals/turnovers nationally), but as soon as we get the ball, we can’t calm ourselves down to convert those opportunities into points. Building awareness of the mental transition needed at this stage will help control tempo and build a better balance between our offense and defense. (Unlike football, the same 5 guys have to immediately shift their attention 180* depending upon the play of another teammate.)
There’s no reason why we should blame youth for this inability to score. If they can defend this well, it’s nerves that are holding them back from succeeding on the other side of the ball.
Overall, this needs to be the place to start from a psychological perspective. Sure it’ll come with time and experience, but the best teams practice mental skills the same way you would technical. Confidence and wins then follow.
My hopes…
1) OSU takes a breath each time it steals the ball instead of going for another failed fast break during the entire second half.
2) A sport psychological consultant is hired soon!
Go Beavs!!!
Sounds good!
Imo this is a post that should make it to CR!
“The two key factors that OSU (and all young teams!) needs are focus and relaxation.”
Isn’t this what I’ve been saying?
When they are huge underdogs, they can relax (nothing to lose). When they’re at home, the crowd forces their focus. It’s why they play well in those games and no others.
Huge underdogs seems equivalent to oscillating losses. Based upon the Pac-10 season so far, we can expect a win next against Oregon.
(Current pattern; ASU win, 1 win-3 losses, 1 win-3 losses, 1 win-3 losses)
Predicted finish:
Oregon win-3 losses, ASU win.
Maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll break out of this pattern by realizing we’ve completely lost the season, (thus effectively relaxing!) and just start playing to our potential for next season.
These are the little Nostradamus style prophecies that must become self-evident to our athletic program personnel in order for prosperous change to begin taking place.
Monkey, you a student of Tucker at OSU? You sure seem to line up with his philosophy.
No, I don’t think I ever had Tucker as a prof at OSU. I did take a few philosophy classes though.
I work with athletes as a Mental Performance Trainer. My Masters is in Sport Psychology so on occasion I like to weigh in from my professional perspective.
How are our perspectives similar?
Where was Burton?
There was something out there about him being in the doghouse because of practice habits and I think some academic issues. I guess Daniel Deane needs to scoot over and make room for him.
Bright spot: no Burton.
It’s not a surprise his practice habits are bad. Someone commented that he plays hard, and I had a good chuckle at that one. The guy has watched potential rebounds bounce off his shoe laces.
You have to have a couple of consistent weapons on offense and really the Beavers have nothing. You can say Cunningham, but he can’t hit open jump shots. He gets points from one on one slashing to the basket. They are getting absolutely nothing from running an offense anymore. The sad thing is that with how hard they play on defense, they could get by with a mediocore offense, but not an abysmal offense. Have they shot 45% from the field in more than a handful of games? And I bet they won most of them.
One thing that keeps me interested in OSU basketball is how bizarre this team has become. They took 31 more shots than UCLA and forced them into 26 turnovers and yet the game was never really close. It goes along with leading the nation in steals, yet having a 9-15 record. Just a strange, strange team.
Angry, you missed on this one….Joe Burton did not play, so I guess he did not cost them the game.
Oh, my new goal is to add a Joe Burton joke or jab to every write up. I think I will try to add Keith Pankey to every football write up, too, even though he doesn’t play for OSU anymore (thank God!!!).
This is the strangest team in the NCAA. What is amazing is to watch mid-majors after watching the Beavs…these teams are comprised of 1 and 2 star recruits yet play a cohesive game and challenge legit teams. I don’t understand our offense; it reminds me of trying to figure out a Rubik’s Cube as a kid. I’ll leave unraveling that gossamer to someone else.
It seems to me that you are making your discontent with Joe Burton’s basketball ability/inability far too personal. You make him sound like a loathsome individual and I don’t think he is.
And how do you have ten guys at the D-1 college level and none of them can shoot the basketball with any consistency during a game? How do you get 16 shots blocked? How did these guys score in high school? I mean, even when them make lay ups, they are usually not clean, they always catch a lot of rim. As Angry talks about, something is going on mentally with this team, yet to CR’s credit, he does have them playing better defense.
You didn’t hear. The NCAA created a waiver just for Pankey. He is allowed to play for another year just to screw us again. The campaign was spearheaded by Chip Kelly.
What would Ralph Miller do?
These guys would have caused Ralph to choke on his Scotch and Mores. I guess he would have never recruited most of them to begin with. Ralph would have taught them fundamentals or else kicked them off of the team.
Reading these comments confirms my decision to boycott OSU basketball until Calvin Haynes is no longer playing. Looking forward to missing Calvin’s next game against the Ducks.
Seems like to me that since the Civil War that OSU has gotten worse, and uo has gotten better.
Everything turns to gold for them, while everything turns to coal for us.
It is truly amazing the Beavers lost this game when you look at the stats. They took 31 more shots, made 4 more. They forced 26 UCLA turnovers and had 16 offensive rebounds. You know you’re just awful when you have all these stats overwhelmingly in your favor and you have to make a big comeback to just make it a 8 point defeat.
I see the Beavers are back to practicing at 5:30 now. They have 5:30 am practices every day this week leading up to the Civil War game at Oregon
Everyone see where Buker mentions the site. You’ve hit the big time, Angry!
Everyone see where Buker gives the site a mention? You have become a celebrity, Angry!
http://blog.oregonlive.com/behindbeaversbeat/2011/02/starting_tuesday_rundown.html