So welcome to my own personal thread where I drone on about my make believe basketball team.

I will give a detailed review of recruiting in a little bit. So far, its been a ton of fun. Except for Nebraska kicking me off a recruit, but what are you going to do when there is so much time until signing.

But I have avoided any battles, and maybe if I can go one more cycle without any it will be time to find a target of my own......or I'll have to defend one of my players. Hopefully I can go into attack mode, because its WAY more fun.

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And the final tally, $14,300 over for next year. After the 25% reduction, that should be plenty to use FSS on Kansas and most of the bordering states.

I'll have 4 more openings next year, so my bankroll should be around $65,000 after NT/PT money and FSS costs. I will completely make over the roster in 2 years, which is why I took this job. Should be interesting to see how things roll in the season.

I was surprised at the uneven performance of the power conference schools. Lots of walkons taken, and lots of 1-star recruits that I frankly thought were beneath me. Maybe they can win with 3-4 great players and no one else. Wichita State will have to win with 10 good players. But with 10 in back to back classes, and an uptempo offense and a pressing defense, that might just be possible.

Oh, and to anyone reading this, I am happy to take criticism, questions or comments as long as they are intelligent or at least funny. So post away :) And join the MVC when you grow up.

I had always heard that D1 teams take a walkon to get more recruiting $$$, but it almost seems like half of them take 2 walkons. I guess no one redshirts, and IQ isn't that important to them. We'll see how much of a drag 2 walkons are on several of the power conference teams.

Maybe I need to rethink my strategy.....

I don't put a lot of stock into the CI recruiting class ranking, but we ended up #40. Not sure if that is good or bad. The MVC ended 13th out of 27, which is fine for a league that is half sims.

After 2 successive losses, it is official. Wichita State is not good. This is the worst team I have had. My previous worst record was like 16-12 I think, and I will be lucky to get there. But my biggest worry is that David Crowe has not improved a single point in any category. I thought he would be great due to his high potentials, but despite starting both exhibition games, he has not gone up a single point.

On the bright side, SG Pete improved 7 points today and SF Macy 6. The whole team gained 29 total. So there is potential. My biggest issue is IQ. None of my freshman knew the Triangle, except for PF Mount. So that has led to 15 and 17 TO in my two games. You can tell its IQ related because TO are usually concentrated at the PG, and Papp only has 1 in each game. Nothing I can do other than crank the Triangle practice minutes up as far as I dare.

On the defensive side, all 7 of my new players came in knowing the press, and only one knows Man, so I think this combo experiment that I have tried in exhibition is going on hold.

Our first opponent is Davidson, who's starters outman us by an average of 63 points in the core categories, 505 to 442. Including a lead of 10 in Ath, PER & by 15 in Passing. My highest rated player is 660. Davidson has 4 over 700. I am not expecting a victory.

Crowe will be a good case study of a 16 WE player. Either starting him will increase his WE, improve his rate of growth and make him great, or else he will be a total bust. I think we will know tomorrow. If he still hasn't improved, then he is a bust.

After one game I have good news and bad news. On the good news, Crowe gained 3 points today in Ath/Def/Stm, so it looks like he can improve. Maybe a little slower than he would with a 50 WE, but that 16 will come up over the course of the year, and I am sure he'll end up gaining more than 60 points this season.

On the bad news, we are terrible. I have never lost a game to badly. 68-29. We shot 30% from the field, Davidson shot 69%. We committed 12 turnovers to their 8, got our shot blocked 8 times vs 0 for them, and committed 14 fouls to their 6. It was putrid. 13-34 at half. My leading scorer had 5, and is probably my 10th or 11th best player.

I am not sure if scoring 29 points worries me more than the 69% oFG%. Both are not signs of a winning team.

I guess we'll learn the depths of our crappiness tonight as we play Colorado State, a lousy SimAI team with 2 walkons. If we can't give them a game, then there is no hope for this season. Its still my offensive IQs, leading to a lot of TOs, blocked shots and other bad stuff. The defense was just bad, but Davidson hit 10 of 15 3's so maybe they got a little bit lucky.