Rice Card Set

UTEP will play Rice next, and I wanted to post the Rice card set.


A few things to notice:

1) Look at the low field goal ratings. I think only one Rice player shot over .400 all year.
2) Virtually every player is better on "secondary" than they are on "action". My strategy for Rice will be to have the players shoot immediately unless someone like T'wana Gobbi (assist = 52) is holding the ball.
3) The rebounding ratings are also generally row. No shooting + no rebounding = bad team.
4) In particularly, look at the -10 Road Index. Rice didn't win a single game at their opponent's court all year (they were 1-1 on neutral courts).

Game Thirteen: UTEP 90, Tulane 52

"I think everyone was nervous with the beginning of conference play. Coach Ballard emphasized that this Tulane team was going to be tough, and that the beginning of conference play was always tough. "This is going to be a brand new season," she said in the locker room before the game.

Do you ever dread something and then when you get there you find out it was a bunch of nothing? That was what this game was. Tulane couldn't hit shit. We started off on a 12-0 run and there was no comeback. Coach said that we could beat Tulane at the boards if we tried, and we made them pay for it anything they tried to get close to a rebound. I'm looking at the little piece of paper they give us and they had like, what, seven rebounds or something in the first half? That's weak.

All they could do was foul us. I heard their coach screaming about the calls, but they were just frustrated. They didn't go to the line at all in the first half. Zero for Zero, baby. At halftime, it was 44-14 and this one was in the bag.

#35 (Letell Hanson) hadn't taken a shot all during the first half, so they let her loose, and she went 4-for-5 from behind the 3-point line. Sweet. At the beginning of the second half, Coach sat me out. 'I want you to score those big points against a good team. You're going to probably be the first person I sit out when there's a rout," she told me. I had 20 after the first half, and only when our starters and scrubs were getting tired did they put me back in in the second. I scored 18 points - 38 overall - and two off my personal best. And I didn't even play the whole damned game. If you would have kept me in full time, Coach, UTEP would have got 100 points."

--Brenda Dean



I was truly surprised by the magnitude of the rout. Tulane wasn't too bad in Conference USA, UTEP was facing a conference opponent for the first time, Tulane had a couple of players who could really shoot. I never expected something of this magnitude. UTEP pretty much slowed down the game through the back half of the first half and a big part of the second, with the only rule being, "if Brenda Dean gets open, let her shoot it."

It's the first time I've seen a team go 0-for-0 at the free throw line during a half. Tulane had 7 rebounds in the first half, and 9 rebounds in the second. Patricia Clark had 12 rebounds all by her lonesome. Tulane shot 23 percent in the first half and with no rebounding power, they had no chance.

It was getting ugly in the back part of the second half. Tulane's players were in deep foul trouble - two fouled out - they had one injured player and two players with forced rests. Two players had used up their stamina and there was the real danger of an all "no stamina" team on the court. I was thinking about some exception to allow the rested players to come back on the court, with the limitation that they could only shoot on secondary.

My house rules for stamina are a bit tougher than the regular rules for Statis Pro Basketball.

a) A player who has run out of stamina may not shoot, even from secondary. If the ball ends up in the players hands after the second advance phase (a "must shoot situtation"), then I treat it as time expiring or the ball being lost in come other way. The player is not charged with a shot attempt.
b) The rebound rating of such players is lowered by five.
c) The defense rating of such players expands to +5.
d) Players who have run out of stamina may neither steal nor block. However, they can still assist.
e) Players who have run out of stamina may not take part in double-teams.

A few noted about the boxscore. First, there is no half-by-half breakdown of assists, steals, and blocks. I simply forgot to do it.

Second, note the attendance as "not recorded". Here's how I'm treating attendance. I take attendance right off the real-life UTEP-Tulane boxscore. I'm assuming that "not recorded" means that the attendance was one of those few-hundred-people affairs and that UTEP's media director decided not to print it.

I do some randomization based on the defense number. For every game that UTEP wins in my game that the real-life UTEP didn't win, I generate a random two digit number. If the number is between 01 and 25, I give UTEP an extra one percent boost in attendance. (UTEP's attendance should now run around 103 percent of normal.)

I don't want to get into some sort of advanced metric for attendance. I'd rather just do it on the fly. After all, I want to have a life outside of this game.

Oh yes, and the current UTEP RPI rankings:

AP Poll RPI: 47
Coaches Poll RPI: 34

Hey, a few more wins and we might break the Top 25 on the Coaches Poll.

Tulane Card Set

We're getting ready to enter conference play, and the Tulane cards are ready to post.



As it turns out, for the first time, the "injury rule" actually came up with an injured player. Jennifer Jiles will be injured during the UTEP-Tulane game, which will reduce Tulane's active roster down to ten players.

Game Twelve: UTEP 86, Idaho State 60

"We made it back from New Mexico. Two major observations.

One: the players from Idaho State are -- well, not that I'm saying that I'm gay, I just want to make that clear -- they're pretty. I thought we were playing a bunch of cheerleaders. It was a very whitebread team, everybody had long straight hair and looked fantastic. We looked like a bunch of bums next to these girls. They were fine. They even smelled good.

I'll get to the other observation later. We didn't have LaToya (Thomas) and Letell (Hanson), so we started the sisters, Brianna and Anna Neal. We got off to a slow start. I wasn't hitting anything, and Idaho State led 10-5 at one time. We caught up to them, and after we went up 14-12, we went on an 11-2 run to lead 25-14.

So we thought we had the game in hand, but they came back to within three points, 29-26. I was sitting on the bench with two fouls. We managed to take a nine point lead into halftime, 43-34.

We couldn't knock them out, though. We were up 56-44, and then Idaho State went on an 8-0 run. They got to within 56-52 and I was really wondering if we were going to blow this game.

It didn't happen. We were ahead 67-55, and Antonina Martynau hit a 3-pointer. Then I hit a 3-pointer, we were up 73-55, and it was smooth sailing. I think that pair of back-to-back threes snapped the back of Idaho State.

That leads to my second observation. I don't like not scoring. I just figured it out. I'm selfish. I would rather have the ball than not have it. Sitting on the bench when I get into foul trouble just kills me. I fouled out - again - so I'll hear it from Coach Ballard, who didn't seem too happy about our win and really took the joy out of our celebration.

I think that everyone knows about me, because I can tell by the way they defend me that they know my weaknesses. Okay...make that three observations...."

-- Brenda Dean



UTEP finally gets its 10th win as the last non-conference game of the regular season ends. After this, it's all CUSA teams, and then the CUSA tournament, and then (hopefully) a spot in one of the two postseason tournaments.

Yes, Idaho State had two players foul out, but only in the final part of the game. The Bengals lack of depth didn't seem to hurt them very much. As for the Miners, the points and rebounds were spread around quite nicely. Five players scored in double digits, and three players rebounded in double digits. Williamette Moss and Marta Jaworowski each had double-doubles.

A big help for Texas-El Paso was the fact that they only had four personal fouls in the last half. Then again, UTEP won by 26 points, so maybe even if UTEP had fouled 14 times they would have still won the game.

Here are the poll results, if polling were completed after this game:

AP Poll RPI: 52
Coaches Poll RPI: 41

UTEP's next game is a home game against Tulane. I have Tulane as 8-4; their real-life record was 8-5. Hopefully, a win over Tulane might get UTEP closer to a Top 25 spot, at least in the Coaches Poll.

The great thing about playing the conference part of the schedule: no longer will opposing schools need to be adjusted by strength of conference.

Idaho State Card Set

Here are the Idaho State cards. Idaho State is UTEP's next opponent, as UTEP lost the first round of the tournament semi-finals to Baylor and New Mexico beat Idaho State:



The adjustment factor for UTEP's cards is 1.0860 - the ratio in conference strength between UTEP's C-USA conference and the Big Sky conference of Idaho State. Here is the resulting UTEP card set:



(* * *)

A few facts about the game and the rosters:

a) Note that Idaho State's roster only has 10 players on it - and in order to give them as much as a 10-player roster, I had to allow a player with Stamina = 1 (which I suggest that no one do, because it violates the spirit of the game).

b) I now have to write a little bit about injury. With both LaToya Lloyd and Letell Hanson suffering one game injuries, they won't be playing for UTEP. Annie and Brianna Neal will be starting as a sister duo at guard. The question becomes, "How do you determine injured players for the other team? After all, if you're allowing your own players to be injured, who's to say that the other team isn't suffering from injury problems?"

I've noticed that the Z Result - Injury result seems to affect at least one of teams on the average of every other game. That means a 50 percent chance of drawing the card (*) during any game, which means that a team has a 25 percent chance of having an injury affect their roster.

Since the current injury chart I'm using looks like this:

Games Played By Player During Season: Injury Result

5 or less: Current game + 4 games
6-14 : Current game + 3 games
15-19 : Current game + 2 games
20-28 : Current game + 1 game
29-30 : Current game only.

This means that we only have to look at the last four games or so. Any injuries before the last four games would have "healed". Therefore the procedure is

1) Find something that can generate a number between 0 and 100. Each number is associated with a time period associated with the opposing team: "four games ago", "three games ago", "two games ago" and "one game ago".
2) Generate a number four times.
3) If the number falls between 01 and 25, that means that the opposing team had an injury during the assocated time frame.
4) Allocate the injury.

It's #4, "allocate the injury" that I'm going to leave up to you. Frankly, I list all players of the enemy team by stamina, add up total stamina, assign each player a percentage, and then use that 01-100 generator. My random generator is a BA II Plus Texas Instruments calculator, you might decide to use 10-sided dice, or use an Internet random generator.

Once it's determined who had the injury - if any - cross reference the table above to see if the injury is long enough to affect the player during the current scheduled game.

As is turned out, no Idaho State player suffered an injury. What a pity.

c) Index for UTEP at home: 4 - (-3) = 7 points
Index for UTEP away: -1 - (-1) = -1 + 1 = 0 points

We will divide by two and round down on the neutral court. UTEP will receive 7 / 2 = 3.5, rounded to 3 Team Index points.