Tag Archives: Terrance Ross

Tooting the horn and a few other things

As Matthew said earlier today, there’s a ton going on in Seattle sports right now.  So, I’ll start with the news of the hour and hit on a few other things.

  • Max Browne of Skyline High School, who most recruiting experts thought to be the number 1 quarterback prospect in the nation, verbally committed to USC tonight.  It’s not a huge surprise as many thought he’d be leaning that way.  Let me start off by saying, that it’s never good to lose the best players from your own backyard.  Browne is a huge talent and it would have been great to have him as a Husky.  With that being said, once the Huskies took two quarterbacks in the last class, this always seemed like a bit of long shot.  It’s not a huge position of need for the Dawgs and Browne has a much better chance of being Matt Barkley’s successor than he has of being Keith Price’s.  It’s hard to fault Browne for not staying home or the coaches for not keeping him home on this note.  Of course, Browne hasn’t signed yet, but he seems like he wanted to get the process over.  Good for him.
  • Matthew recapped Terrance Ross’ and Tony Wroten’s decision to enter the NBA earlier today.  He also took a look at what the team might do next year.  Don’t forget to take a look at that.
  • Husky football has started their spring practice with all of their new coaches on hand.  Bob Condotta will have all of the coverage and we won’t be able to cover it to the normal extent because this year’s practices aren’t open to the public.  We’ll try to give a few recaps at some point but hopefully there’s no huge news coming out of practice because that usually means there was an injury.
  • Earlier today the Mariners decided to keep Alex Liddi over Carlos Peguero, meaning Chone Figgins will get the majority of the time in left field over the next week or two.  This is where I toot my horn a bit.  I advocated for this move to happen on Monday and Jack Z just happened to agree with me.  I think it’s the right move, although who knows if it will make much of a difference over the next few weeks.
  • My last little bit is on a piece put out by Seattle Sports Insider today.  About a week ago, I wrote a post about sabermetrics and how I don’t think we can solely rely on them.  The subject of what the Good Guys had been working on recently came up in a mini-discussion I had in the comments of this SSI post with author Jemanji.  I told him that I’d been trying to find the right line in measuring sabermetrics against the other elements in the game and he responded, not only with a comment but, with a whole post on the matter.  In short, he used a Bill James article on the subject of sabermetrics to help us understand the concept better.  Sabermetrics should maybe be seen as questions that we’re trying to solve instead of statistics we can look up on fangraphs.  The likes of Dave Cameron and other Fangraph writers may disagree, but it’s an interesting concept.  You should all just go and read it by clicking here.  The quote he uses at the top is mine, so that’s kind of cool.  They have a great blog and they’re all good guys (no pun intended) over there.

There’s a lot more happening around but we’ll save it for another day.  I’m going to try to get a few things up on the M’s before Friday, hopefully that happens.  Stay tuned and thanks for reading!

Andrew

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Bad News, Good News, Great News!

Ready for the bad news? It is a bleak day for Dawg fans, there’s no 2 ways around it. Yesterday’s loss was frustrating, untimely, but certainly not surprising, at least if you’ve followed this team all season. On one side, the Huskies exceeded pre-season expectations by winning the Pac 12 outright, a truly awesome accomplishment. On the other side, 20 of the Huskies 21 wins have come vs. opponents with an RPI of 75+, and time and time again the Dawgs have narrowly missed on opportunities to make a statement, and erase doubts. The biggest factor, for me anyway, is leadership. Gant is the only contributing senior, and I think he has done his best, but his personality is not that of a Brandon Roy, Will Conroy, Jon Brockman, Isaiah Thomas, or Quincy Pondexter. Gaddy, Ross, Wilcox and Wroten, for all the good that they’ve done in spurts, have not embraced the role of captain, the guy that pulls his teammates up in the face of adversity. The result is a plethora of head shaking moments, and some success based largely on raw talent like Lorenzo Romar has never had. It’s tough when talent does not fully translate, and potential is not reached. If this core stays together for another year and really gels, they are a top 10 team, but Ross and Wroten seem destined for the NBA, which nobody should blame them for.

Now for some good news. If the Huskies do make the big dance, which is officially an “if”, their seed will likely be an 11 or 12, rather than a 9 or 10 which seemed possible a week ago. But does it matter? I would argue being an 11 or 12 seed is often better than being a 9 or 10, at least in terms of making a sweet 16 run. The recent numbers back this up. Since 2001, here are the seeds, and what % have made the round of 16.

9 seed- 2/44 = 4.5% make sweet 16
10 seed- 8/44 = 18%
11 seed- 6/44 = 14%
12 seed- 9/44 = 20%

The great news? Check it out, your Mariners are in 1st place! Granted the games don’t “really” count, but we’ll take what we can get.

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