Maedhros

I mean, you don't have to agree, but it's not like the case for why Illinois will be good this year doesn't exist. To answer your questions, they don't have a Trayce Jackson-Davis All-American but Matthew Mayer and Terrence Shannon are proven DI players as good or better than Xavier and Race. Skyy Clark and Ty Rodgers aren't quite rated as high as JHS and Renau, but they're high four star Top 50 recruits we'd be thrilled to land. RJ Melendez and Coleman Hawkins provide breakout potential, like we have in Geronimo and Bates. It's a lot of new pieces, but they have a proven coach who won the Big Ten last season after losing an All-American to the draft. BartTorvik has the Illinois at 13 to start the season, right there with Indiana at 11 as favorites in the Big Ten. FWIW, here are his 2023 Projected Contributors in the Big Ten. Illinois is well represented. I'd be optimistic if that was Indiana's team heading into the season, so I don't really get the antagonism.

"Jizzle" James is Edgerrin James Jr. Yes, that Edgerrin James.

For a Christmas a few years back, I bought a gift that was Jelly Belly roulette. The box was filled with jelly beans that looked identical in color, but one was a tasty flavor and the other was one of the novelty awful flavors. Unfortunately I couldn't be there to see my family try it out. Seems risky to me!

I really love the habanero sauce from Tijuana Flats. In general habanero strikes the best balance for me between heat and flavor. Too much heat and you can't taste anything. The sweet spot is to eat something just hot enough to get your adrenaline going, enhancing the experience of the food you're eating.

I need to switch internet providers. AT&T was all that was available in my area when we moved in, but I'm paying almost $80 monthly after fees and getting only <25 MBps down and <2 up. I'm interested in Verizon's home internet - 5G at a great price - but it's not available to me yet. So I'm looking at Metronet, which sells a basic plan of 100 MBps both down and up, for $65 after fees. Anyone have their service, and would you recommend it?

I love the smell of first place in the morning. Smells like... victory. Y'know, from the night before. A back-and-forth slugfest over the A's. After the Mets lost their third in a row to the dregs of the NL. And now a 10.5 game lead in June has been completely erased.

The best grilled cheese I ever had was the Quechee Gorge sold at the Woodstock Farmers' Market in Woodstock VT. Sadly it appears to be no longer on the menu. It does get mentioned in a number of articles just like this one, though, and the internet says it had smoked Vermont cheddar, provolone, parrano cheeses, along with tomatoes and honey cup mustard, grilled on roasted garlic parmesan bread. My wife spent a couple months trying to recreate the recipe at home, after trying the sandwich on a family trip to Killington.

The point is to share his opinion with others, which is the same reason we're all here participating on this message board. Do you write each post thinking you deserve a cookie? 2K followers is a lot more than I have on Twitter, and I'd bet more than you have too, so that's a weird thing to point out. No, I hadn't heard of this author before this article, and I certainly hadn't visited his blog. But I read the article before it was ever posted here because it had been picked up and shared by people I do follow, people who agree with what he has to say. Check the replies and quote tweets, and you'll see many examples. The author is not alone in his position, nor expressing some hot take. He's documenting what what many in the fanbase feel about these guys, and why. I don't think the HH guys are the reason why Dawson Garcia or Jeremy Fears chose not to attend IU. But any honest assessment would agree their behavior didn't help. So why defend an unnecessary self-inflicted wound? It's great the good they've done for the program, but this doesn't need to be some utilitarian dilemma. We should be able to find people to promote the program who don't also motorboat public art. Like, it's strange that this is something we even have to ask of grown men. I stopped listening to the HH podcast apart from their behavior on Twitter. The last straw for me came during the 2020 season, when they went in on the players - specifically the Crean recruits - rather than the coach, after some disappointing losses. They thought we'd be so much better with those players gone... in what turned out to be Archie's best season. Their fanboyish approach of "Bob Knight good, everything else bad, except the current thing which we support" just isn't for me. (I'm guessing they've fully turned on Archie, and are now all in on Mike Woodson). If that's all it was, sure, no problem. It's no worse than what I read on message boards just like this one, and I'd agree with the defenses of them offered in this thread. But it's the creepy and actions documented in the article that has me convinced I don't want these two Matthew Leskos representing the program. I want more articles like this one, voicing those same concerns and eventually pressuring the administration to demand better of those with whom they associate.

I started this last year. I have MLB.tv for the Braves, pick up YTTV for the MLB postseason, and let it ride all the way through the college basketball season and the NCAA Tournament. I only need cable channels for live sports, and only for about half the year.

Ha! Not literally, but their "Fire-In Da-Hole" is described as waiver-worthy. I can finish it, but too much heat and I can't taste what I'm eating. The "Hot" level is a nice balance for me.

Joella's is my favorite place for fast fried chicken. Great cuts of whole meat, and terrific heat levels. The parmesan garlic fries are my go to side. Nothing like bringing home some Joella's and sitting in front of the TV for some sports or a movie when I want to treat myself.

The script Illinois jerseys are straight fire, though. Indiana needs a script alternate immediately.

Where are you at, so I can stop by for a beer run? My family has a condo in Killington, though it's been a few years since I've gotten up there to vacation. We would keep the fridge stocked with Long Trail. I had Heady Topper once, though there was another IPA the bartender recommended that I liked better. Wish I could remember the name... I'm with you, I much prefer West Coast style IPAs over the East Coast style that's oversaturated the market. If I'm ordering an IPA, give me a big, bold, piney hop bite.

Going by the 247 Composite (because it was easy to research): If Page commits, he'd be our sixth highest rated recruit since Crean was fired. Page would be Woodson's fourth Top 50 recruit in just two years; Archie had three total in his four years. Page would be Woodson's seventh recruit overall, all of which are currently Top 100 guys. Archie only ever had five Top 100 kids, and only once in the same recruiting class (Romeo and Jerome) Recruiting classes almost never end up as great as you can imagine them when offers start going out. I do think there's a need in this class for someone who could provide length and scoring on the perimeter. But if Page commits I'll still be pleased with what Woodson has done so far. Time to start building relationships for '24, and the real make or break class in '25.

I recently had Boss Tweed, the imperial big brother of M-43. Would recommend. I think in general I prefer the flavor balance of a DIPA over an IPA. Lots of standards in that list, some obvious choices you can get anywhere. I don't know how many people are going to make regular trips to Vermont to keep their fridge stocked with Heady Topper, though. 😂 If I were to make my own additions, I'd mention Cigar City's Jai Alai and Rhinegeist's Truth. Both are available almost everywhere here in Indy, at least, and are extremely solid.

I collect shot glasses. Any time we visit a zoo, museum, or for any other personal interest I'll always pick one up. I'm not sure how it started, probably as a lark back in my early 20s, but it's amazing how many places sell them. Even Westminster Abbey and Stonehenge will sell you one. It's a neat way to remember the places I've been, and some of the designs are fantastic. I also collected baseball cards back in my early teen years, when there wasn't much demand on my personal income. It's something for which I've always felt a nostalgic pull, but to get back in I would have to have very specific targets in mind. The scope is just too big.

My wife and I do a bracket each March. Whoever wins gets to hang their school's banner for the year. She doesn't follow sports much, and her bracket still beats mine about half the time. 😬

Sports rivalries are and should always be for entertainment purposes only. When I graduated high school and enrolled at IU, just as many of my friends enrolled at Purdue. They didn't stop being my friends, and I still drove to West Lafayette for weekend parties and poker nights. When I met the woman who would become my wife at a concert in Indianapolis, I didn't stop dating her because she graduated from Purdue. That would be silly. Because as soon as you allow a sports rivalry to spill over into any serious aspect of your life, you're doing it wrong. I don't know why you're so hostile to fans of other schools. But their acceptance here speaks to the strength of this board, not its weakness. The hostility you've displayed is excessive, and frankly more than a little bizarre. You realize it's just basketball, right?

Verbal Commits has 1750 names on their transfer list for 2022 alone. A vanishingly small percent of those names are players I've ever heard of. Many names are transferring to or from a school I wouldn't know existed if not for the occasional buy game. Some players don't have a new school listed at all; I presume they are being counted among the 46% not playing basketball next season. The national discourse around the transfer portal focuses on power conference teams, and especially Top 25 teams using up-transfers from smaller schools to reload. But that's only the tip of the transfer iceberg. There are 358 teams in Div I alone, and most transfer activity goes unnoticed.

This post speaks to my concern. Our percentage is obviously pedestrian, but worse than that is our volume. We ranked 321 out of 358 teams in attempts per game, and 319 in percentage of our FG attempts that were from 3. Some of that makes sense when you have an All American down low, but you'd also think the attention on Trayce would create open shots for others. The three point shot wasn't a weapon in our arsenal last season. That's a potential path to victory available to our opponents that we just didn't have. It put us at a disadvantage in most every game, requiring us to be more efficient everywhere else on the court. You can win like that, and we did, but the margin for error becomes so much smaller when your opponent can take and make threes and you can't.

Does anyone know how this works? If I put in an application, do I have the chance to decline when I learn what seats are available to me? Or do they charge me when they find out, and I'm stuck with what I get? I'm interested in going, but don't want to be stuck in the rafters.

That's certainly true of Rivals and 247, but both services only go back to 2003. RSCI started in 1998, with Dane Fife ranked 14. Fife started in just 11 of Indiana's 33 games as a freshman.

Khristian Lander and Tamar Bates were both ranked 25-35 by the various services, not quite as high as JHS in the 17-24 range, but comparable. Before that, to find a top 25-30 RSCI recruit who didn't start as a freshman you'd have to go all the way back to... Dane Fife in '99.

I agree and I don't. It's hard for me to look at the roster - largely identical to the one that finished 9th in the conference and needed a deep BTT run just to earn a play-in bid to the Tournament - and think we're somehow now Big Ten favorites. We have a lot of great pieces, but we also know they don't fit together all that well. For whatever his other faults, Parker Stewart was also our best three point shooter, in both rate and volume. We have a veteran PG, but our experience is otherwise concentrated in the frontcourt. To dramatically improve this team needs someone unproven to step up, freshman or otherwise, and it's an open question as to who that will be. So my expectations for this team are somewhat less than those thinking Big Ten Championship. I'd be thrilled with a top three conference finish and a Sweet Sixteen berth. That would still be arguably be one of the five best seasons of the past 25 years. I do agree last season was uneven, far more middling than the memory created by those last few games (St Marys aside). It's fair to allow a transition season, but last year's results need to be the absolute floor for the Woodson administration going forward, and would be wholly disappointing if repeated. We need to show clear improvement and progress in year two. I think where I disagree is with the idea that we need to set the bar high. I was as vocal a critic of Archie as anyone, pretty much from the jump. But some of the rhetoric used in his defense was not without merit. Woodson in year two is still working around guys he inherited. Talented as those pieces may be, some skills are clearly lacking, or overlap. His own recruits are only just now entering the program; his second class is not yet complete, let alone stacked on the first. Woodson is also working to change a culture, which even fans watching from their living rooms could tell had stagnated over the four years of the previous administration. The problem with the Archie era wasn't that these defenses were false, it's that we never saw any progress toward overcoming these challenges after four years of waiting. Yet some were still willing to give a fifth year, I guess to see what might happen. It feels weird, then, to see calls for results now from Woodson. In no way would a repeat of last season be acceptable. But I don't need a '11-'12 type breakout season either. We have the ceiling for it, sure. It'll be enough for me, though, if I see us improve on the issues and outcomes from last season, establish some consistency, and keep a strong recruiting pipeline flowing into the program. That will be enough to keep my optimism alive, even if we fall short of a Sweet Sixteen.