To be completely and embarrassingly honest here, I did not have much faith in Nebraska’s chances against Kansas State last night. I figured Michael Beasley would do his thing, as would Bill Walker, Jacob Pullen, and the rest of the Wildcats. Sure, I was excited about the game, but I didn’t expect a win because I didn’t want to leave disappointed.
The game, a Nebraska victory, was more than 24 hours ago, so I’ll be brief with my observations:
1) KSU tried to be really aggressive in scoring; Nebraska’s defense never made KSU hold on to the ball for more than 18 seconds or so before the Cats got a shot off. On the other hand, the shot clock ran down to its final seconds a ton on Nebraska’s end, including one awkward shot clock violation. Don’t know what this means, but I’m glad the Huskers were always able to hang on to the ball for that long instead of committing stupid turnovers every time the clock started burning down.
2) As I briefly mentioned in a post last night, Michael Beasley is a huge brat. I can’t recall a moment where he wasn’t complaining about one thing or another. This was after he promised in a pre-game interview that he was going to put up fifty points against the Huskers. Um…Michael, darling? 17 and 50 are not the same thing. Do they not teach that in Manhattan?
3) Steve Harley was awesome in the first half, dumping in tons of sneaky little baseline layups on his way to 20 points. He said in the postgame press conference that the team worked a lot on backdoor plays during practice this week, and it was obvious that their work paid off.
4) Which is it, coach? K-State coach Frank Martin said both of these things after the game:
“Give them [Nebraska] credit. Doc’s a good basketball coach. I’ve said that before. Doc’s a grinder…they deserved to win.”
and
“In 23 years of coaching it’s the most embarrassing defensive performance of any team I’ve ever coached. And that includes 13-year olds.”
So did Nebraska win this, or did K-State lose it for themselves? Does Doc Sadler get credit for his coaching last night, or KSU not show up?
The world could seriously use more coaches like Rutgers women’s coach C. Vivian Stringer, who doesn’t use any of those stupid coach’s cliches in her interviews. Things have gotten to the point where every word from post-game press conferences is meaningless, something we’ve all heard as recently as the last time we watched a basketball game.
5) Cookie Miller had more steals (5) than points (3). Nothing more to say here.
6) I want you all to know that I was NOT part of the court-storming nonsense. People…it’s K-State. It’s not Kansas, nor Texas, nor North Carolina, Duke, or anyone that amazing. As much as I wasn’t expecting to win, I wasn’t so shocked at the outcome that I thought storming the court was appropriate. What I did think was appropriate was kindly reminding Beasley of how many points he didn’t have. Ooh that felt good.
7) Last thing about this game: Why on earth do college students insist on chanting “Overrated”? It makes no sense to me. Don’t you want to say that your opponent was a superb team, and your team was better? KSU was #23 going into last night’s game. So if they were really overrated, then Nebraska basically beat an unranked team. I’d rather say that KSU really is a Top 25-caliber team, and Nebraska brought enough game to hang right with them.
UPDATE: one more “last” thing:
Doc Sadler’s suits and angry yelling aren’t fooling me. I know who he really is:
Labels: basketball, Huskers, numbered lists make the world go ’round, Painty
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