Statis Pro Basketball

The End...For Now?

2009-09-23T20:53:00.001-07:00

I've decided to close the blog for the time being.

One of the problems with Statis Pro Basketball is that you have to purchase the card sets, and if there are no manufacturers making card sets you have to make them yourself. This is a laborious process, and the return of enjoyment I'm getting on it is diminishing.

Second, I'm realizing just how many games I'm going to have to play to replicate a full college season. Not quite one a week, but fairly close to that. With my busy life, it's very hard getting a game in every week and I'm starting to resent the time the game takes out of my personal life. Once again, there's a diminishing return.

Third, there's the fear that I'm going to fall behind and when that happens, collecting these old statistics is going to become more and more difficult.

Fourth, the blog doesn't have many readers. A few people bump into the blog by accident, but in general, the number of readers - including accidental ones - I get in a day can be counted on the fingers of two hands - sometimes one hand - sometimes none. With all of the output and with so little "input", there's not really much to buoy this project during this down time - unlike with a much more successful blog I write.

Therefore, I have decided to stop putting so much energy into this project and just let it lie dormant. It might be picked up again in a new format if some of the technical difficulties can be solved. However, the project simply has too much going against it, in terms of its difficulty, in terms of the time it takes, in terms of the decreasing enjoyment and lack of interest others have in it.

I think I'm going to try something else for a while. If any part of this blog has amused you - thank you for reading.

Game 21 - UTEP 76, East Carolina 65

2009-09-20T13:41:00.001-07:00

"We look our longest road trip of the season. I'm writing this at the airport. The minute the game was over, we packed up our crap and headed straight for the biggest place in North Carolina that had an airplane.

Actually, I didn't feel lost in Greenville. Two of my friends came to see me from high school ball. We were all on the same team. It was about a seven or eight hour drive for them, and they'd both have to ride on the interstate all night, just to get back home the next day, but it was worth it to see them again. I hope my high school coach doesn't find out. Coach, just don't notice those "Brenda is the Best" and "We Love UTEP #13" signs if you have a secret TV feed to the game that the public doesn't know about. (I really didn't want them to drive that far, but I couldn't stop them.)

Coach Ballard told me all week, "watch out for Princess Abair", "watch out for Princess Abair" and I've heard so much about what she does that I'm sick. "You lapse on defense, Dean, and Abair's going to light you up!" We've really been working on defense, because the Pirates can put the ball up.

So I say hi to my friends, we meet for forty minutes before the game. (Until Coach Ballard calls me back into the locker room.) When we come out, it's a nice little crowd, but not so big that I could lose either of my friends. "Plenty of empty seats."

Anyway, Letell Hanson hits a 3-pointer to put us up 8-6 and for a long time we never look back. We come out hard in a pure zone and they look really tentative. They say a good zone looks like a man to man and we were doing all the right switches. We started to pull head, slowly, and had a 23-13 lead early on.

But East Carolina is dangerous. Abair steps back off that 3-point line like it was electrocuted. She doesn't make use of every inch of space; she'll take those shots a foot off the line, and she hit one that must have been from NBA distance. East Carolina closed back within single digits.

We had a 10-2 run at one point in the first half and at one point we led 41-25. We were playing well enough, but East Carolina was really pushing us off the boards. We had like 12 rebounds in the first half and they had 11. The Pirates closed to within 41-29.

Coach told us straight up. "You're not dominating. It's your free throws that are keeping you in it. (We were 10-for-13.) You're still reacting to them. You have to play your game and have faith in your game. It's UTEP basketball that's going to win this. The other team never knows what's coming!"

In the second half, our faith would be tested. We got cold on the court but East Carolina was still knocking them down and made adjustments, mixing up a pressure defense with a weak side trap whenever we tried to pass the ball. East Carolina started to close in. #12 (Serena Backes) hit a couple of 3-pointers. It was a 10-0 run I was told and the Pirates closed to 52-48.

Tia Ownby was pretty good out there. She hit a little midrange jumper that tied the game 56-56. We were now just hanging in there. "Have faith!" Coach said. "Spread them out, make sure you communicate, avoid the trap."

We were up 63-61, and East Carolina just fell apart. We went up on a 10-2 run, and led 73-63 going into the final few minutes. East Carolina looked busted. They failed the gut check. We passed it and got the win.

There were three pretenders. Now there are just two. There's us, there Southern Miss and there's friggin SMU. All 8-1 in conference. We're going back home feeling better about ourselves. Maybe I can turn this into a psych paper. Abair had 15 points, but I had 18 - not that I look at such things."

--Brenda Dean

This was a very tight game, and played out pretty much as our narrator said it did. UTEP's shooting sagged to 34 percent in the second half which gave the Pirates space to come back. But the Miners made a run as the game was down to the final minutes, and East Carolina just imploded.

Also: the head coach of East Carolina picked up two technical fouls before that final run. Maybe East Carolina didn't have a deep "coaching bench" and without the coach the team just fell apart. Whether Sharon Baldwin-Tener - the real coach of East Carolina - has ever picked up a technical foul is left as an aside.

Oh yes, and the final AP RPI rank and Coaches RPI rank.

API Poll RPI: 48
Coaches Poll RPI: 40

Up next: Marshall, back in El Paso.

East Carolina Card Set

2009-09-20T13:01:00.000-07:00

I wonder if I'm going to be able to keep up this project for much longer, so don't be surprised if it just disappears one day. The problem is that...well, real life is the problem. You know that. If I got paid for doing this, it would be great, but I'm not, so....

The game using these cards has already been played. One of the things I noticed about this card set - how well East Carolina was at shooting, particularly center "April James".

Game 20 - UTEP 79, UAB 59

2009-09-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

"Sometimes, there are games where you feel like you're going to win even coming in. We went to Birmingham, Alabama to play the Blazers. When we hit the court, the Blazers obliged us by picking up four fouls in the first two minutes. When I heard those whistles and counted the fouls, I turned to Toya (LaToya Lloyd) and asked 'do you believe this?' She said, 'I think the pressure just got to them.' And two minutes weren't up yet.

We couldn't really build a big lead on them, but we remained in control. Even when UAB worked it down to one possession, we still felt in control. We hit the half 31-28 and Coach Ballard just kept saying, 'Don't lose your focus. Play your game. They're playing quality ball, but heart is going to tell." I decided that I was just going to play with some heart, and I scored eight points as the second half got underway - a couple of threes, both from the top of the key helped.

The closest they got was 48-45. We began to pull away. We were up by 10 and Josina Costa helped us get a little run late in the second. The Blazers were gassed. They just couldn't handle our defense. We held them to like 30 percent. I even picked up four rebounds on them, and my defense sucks."

--Brenda Dean

Once again, I've forgotten to include assists-steals-blocks by half. If anyone at all is reading, my apologies.

As it turned out, Dream would score the most points of the game with 18. At some point in this process, I need to count up player stats. She had a 25 point game against SMU, a 25 point game against Tulsa...hmm, for some reason I thought Dean was fading but I think she's coming on strong. A good game all around.

With this game, we've ended eight games in Conference USA. I have a way of determining who wins the games I don't play out, but I don't think the method is working. Here are the Conference USA standings half-way through the season.

So how do you get four teams tied with 7-1 records? How do you have two teams with 0-8 records? It boggles the mind. It seems like the superior teams are just not being challenged.

The Blazers' 3-17 record, however, hurts UTEP in the rankings. They'd be ranked a lot higher if they played a tougher schedule.

AP Poll RPI: 50
Coaches Poll RPI: 41

Up next - the very tough East Carolina team, which is 7-1 in Conference USA - at least in my universe. In the real world, they were 8-8 for the year which proves that my system is broken.

UAB Card Set

2009-09-08T17:12:00.000-07:00

UAB means "University of Alabama at Birmingham". Not much to say about the UAB squad.

However, when looking up some information about UAB on Wikipedia, I found out the following:

The UAB Blazers, in effect, started their entire athletics program with the creation of a men's basketball team in 1978. Setting the standards high from the start, UAB hired former UCLA, University of Illinois and Memphis head coach Gene Bartow. Known to many as the "Father of UAB athletics", Bartow led the Blazers to almost instant success.

What I didn't know is that Bartow was the successor to John Wooden at UCLA. It's amazing what you can learn when you're having fun.

Game 19 - UTEP 67, Memphis 49

2009-09-06T16:27:00.000-07:00

"We flew into Memphis on Thursday to begin a big road trip. We play five out of the next six games on the road. Our next opponent is Memphis, and we know that Memphis isn't very good. But after we lost to SMU at home, Coach Ballard warned us about this road trip and to take every opponent seriously. So we do.

The new ESPN polls are out and I look at wherever UTEP is. I could be playing for Connecticut or Tennessee, and I wonder how things would be different if it weren't for the accident. That loss to SMU made us lose 16 votes in the Coaches' Poll. Only two coaches think we're a top 25 team. We're off everyone else's radar, and a win against Memphis won't impress anybody.

The upperclassmen say that every time we go to Memphis the coaches take us somewhere to see something important or fun if we have time. The university considers this part of a culture-building exercise. We went to see Sun Studios because it was relatively cheap - you don't think that the university is going to pay for that but the students could pay for it out of their pockets. (We had some, uh, "help" in paying for it.) Toya (LaToya Lloyd) said that she was tempted to cut a few records herself. Toya and Wilhelmina Moss started making up a blues ditty on the spot. I don't think the other tourists cared for their singing.

We got to play at the FedEx Forum. We were the first game of a double-header with the men's Memphis team. It was their last scheduled game there this year and some of the men's fans took the opportunity to watch us. I wonder how many were paying attention and how many were waiting for the men's game. (My guess: 5/95).

Seems that their coach must have told them to play hard defense and not take too many shots - to slow us down. Coach Ballard was telling us that she wanted more ball movement, and that Toya and I are were to try to find someone for the dime. So they were playing slow, we were playing slow and it was a slog.

I knew what kind of game it was #35 (Letell Hanson) hit a 3-pointer to start the game and picked up the foul too. We never lost the lead from the first basket and we charged out to a 13-4 lead. We led by 23 points at one time, 57-34.

That was when Coach told us to slow the game down even more. "Let's not blow these guys out." Coach said it because Memphis was just a bunch of slow girls. That roof would have to cave in for us to lose this game. She wanted touches after "1001, 1002". We tried to get a passing game going and Memphis scored the next 14 points because they knew we were still trying to figure it out. They closed to 57-49.

But Toya - who hadn't scored a field goal all night - woke up in the end when we were all in the bonus. She scored like 8 points in the last five minutes of the game, two baskets (one for 3 points) and some free throw shots.

Next up is Alabama-Birmingham. No plane for us, we get in a bus. I should have bought a harmonica to play on the trip so that Toya can practice her blues. How many notes can I learn before we get there?"

- Brenda Dean

Well, there you have it from the horse's mouth herself. Dean only ended up with 10 points in this game, but she shot 4 for 7 and had 3 rebounds and a steal. Letell Hanson's 20 point game was rather surprising. As for Memphis, they shot themselves out of the game - they only hit 14.8 percent of their shots in the first half and only hit 27.7 percent for the game. This game would probably lead to one of those perplexing interviews coaches give - really, what can you say when you've hit less than one of the five shots you've attempted. (Lyn Yeats had a 6-for-22 night, she took 22 of Memphis's 54 shooting attempts.)

Here are the final results in both polls - what each poll would look like if it included all positions instead of the Top 25, and if it were maintained on a game-to-game basis:

AP Poll Rank: 49
Coaches Poll Rank: 39

Not good enough quite yet to get in at-large in the NCAA Tournament. The Miners need to win a few more games to do that.

Memphis Card Set

2009-09-05T10:44:00.000-07:00

I've looked up the roster on the Memphis women's basketball web site, and it looks like a lot of the players represented on this card set (with phony names) are already gone. Some graduated, some just...disappeared. The big news about Memphis this year is Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir, a devout Muslim player who keeps her body covered. (Some Muslim sites argue about whether her dress meets Islamic standards. Some religious people love to argue about things like that.) Abdul-Qaadir will probably get more questions about her dress and her religion than questions about what she brings to the court in skill.

Anyway, Abdul-Qaadir isn't represented in this card set. Maybe next year.

P. S.: "Lyn Yeats's" free throw numbers are exactly what is represented on the card. She makes Shaq look like Steve Nash.

Game 18 - SMU 87, UTEP 74

2009-08-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

"Everyone has gone out to do something with the rest of their day. I'm sitting in front of a psych book at the laboratory looking up some stupid statistical program. No one really knows who I am. I know they don't, because no one said something like, "bad loss". No one here really cares.

SMU was favored to be the top finisher in the CUSA and they wanted to prove it. Coach Ballard said, "For the Mustangs, this is a statement game." Last year, we won the CUSA regular season title but the Mustangs won the tournament. They came out and they played us hard. Usually, we can outrebound a team but not SMU. The way they matched up against us - that game went by like a rocket.

I got matched up against Ashlee Schuch. She said, "so you're the hillbilly senstatation."

"Bite me, bitch." We went at it. Shit, you should have seen what she got away with. You should have seen what I got away with. I was both popping elbows, shoving from the back. She wouldn't even get riled. She would just come right at me, daring me to stop her whenever we matched up in the Zone. And she came at me a lot.

We were tied in the first halff and then they started a run and we we went down by eight points. That's what Coach said, I wasn't looking up at the score. I was trying to run coach's double wing trap but Schuch slid right out of it. I couldn't run it but everyone else could and we managed to make our way back to a halftime tie at 42-42. "Defense, #13. Defense!" was what coach was telling me but I was still thinking about Schuch."

I got caught tapping Schuch's elbow when she was getting the shot off. I said something to the ref that I wouldn't want my mother to hear. I got T-ed up. They hit the shot. I was so dazed by the technical that I double-dribbled, and I don't think I've double dribbled since I was in 7th grade.

I snapped out of it and I answered with the 3-pointer. It was sweet. We began to wake up and we took the lead but they came right back at us. One of their players, #14 (Gowans) went down but SMU didn't stop.

Then...we just fell apart. I think we were up 66-63 and they went on a 12-0 run. We couldn't shoot, and SMU spread the floor on us. They started to move that ball around and whenever we were one-on-one with someone, they just had a few more inches. They could either get the midrange jumper or find the open man for the shot. I looked at everybody, and we were all just fish-eyed.

We closed it to 77-71, but they were on a roll. With about two minutes left, I fouled out. "Why aren't you talking?" Coach screamed at everyone else while I walked back to the bench. She didn't even acknowledge me. "You better learn to help each other or they're going to eat you alive in the tournament!"

It was over. SMU was high-fiving each other and celebrating on our own court. I had 25 points. I shot 10-for-30. Schuch had 24 points - she shot 10-for-14 and went 3-for-4 in 3-point shooting.

Hardly anyone was there. Coach Ballard let us have it. "Don't you dare look at me. I wasn't the one out there who wasn't communicating. I wasn't the one who let SMU shoot 56 percent on us. I wasn't the one who was out there not fighting for possessions. You better look at yourself and find the answer for that."

We're all trying to blow it off and pretend that it doesn't matter. But it does. Coach will kill us tomorrow. The season goes on. We won't go undefeated in C-USA. And I'm here stuck in the psych lab, hurting all over."

--Brenda Dean

It was a tough game, and I was actually surprised to see UTEP lose a game. After you build up a 15-2 record with your cards - UTEP had won six straight until this game. It just goes to show you that even if you tilt the table in your direction, it is very hard to go undefeated at any level of college basketball.

UTEP now goes on the road for three straight games, playing the next four games against opponents from the eastern United States. If the tournament started today, UTEP would be in third place. Four teams in C-USA get first round byes; the rest of those teams have to play an opening round game.

Here are the new ranks:

AP Poll Rank: 50
Coaches Poll Rank: 35

Up next - the Miners go to Memphis. Memphis is 6-12 and is 0-6 in CUSA play.

SMU Card Set

2009-08-11T17:59:00.001-07:00

Still working on the season. UTEP faces SMU. This team - with the names changed that is - went to the postseason WNIT, so for a mid-major, they're good.

UTEP plays SMU twice this year. First at home, and then at both their and SMU's final game of the season. UTEP faces the daunting challenge of playing SMU during SMU's Senior Day, and I'm sure the game will be important for determining who goes where in the C-USA tournament.

Game 17 - UTEP 75, Tulsa 67

2009-07-28T18:16:00.000-07:00

"We figured that we weren't going to have very much trouble with Tulsa. Tulsa had a really good player named Jazmin Beddow who could ball, and sometimes I wondered why Tulsa wasn't better that it was. The problem was that their fronts couldn't play any defense. They played that 7-11 defense - you know, put your hands up and remain perfectly still. Coach Ballard said that Tulsa wouldn't set a screen if their lives depended on it and they didn't look sharp on tape.

So we got off to a 17-10 lead. We had 17 points and we were just keeping them right off the boards. Tulsa didn't have a single rebound, offensive or defensive - they'd shoot, we'd pick up the ball and then we'd try. We were making it look really good - we were up 26-12 before they got a rebound - and they kept sending us to the foul line. We didn't notice that Tulsa was sneaking up on us, but they had closed the gap to six points at the end of the half and we went into halftime 36-30.

But when they came out in the second, they rolled out. Marcie Palin came out strong and she scored two buckets early on. (Never trust that name, you know.) Tulsa tied it at 38-38 with a bucket by Palin and she got the And One. That put them up 41-38 but Letell (Hanson) hit the 3 at the top of the arc and tied it back up.

After that, we were in a fight for our lives. Tulsa smelled blood, an upset on our home grounds. The game was getting physical - Patty Clark went out when she hurt her hand and went back on the bench in the first half - and we were just throwing everything at Tulsa that we could think of. Tulsa was setting screens. I think it's sick when these crappy teams have a good run, and then all of a sudden they remember their fundamentals.

At one point, we were leading 68-61 when Palin closed it to 68-64 with the bucket and drawing the foul. She would score 25 points on us. Down 70-64, and with the clock running down, they were going to have to one of us to the foul lines.

"Put it in #13's hands," Coach said. Those were my hands.

So Tulsa put that press on at the end and they sent me to the foul line twice. They managed to close the game to four but I hit all four of my shots, including the last two shots of the game that gave us an eight point lead and killed a comeback.

We're 5-0 in conference. I'm starting to become very aware of that, and everyone else is starting to be aware of it, too." I dread this game with SMU coming up. Coach is going to work us like dogs.

--Brenda Dean

(* * *)

I think it's been about two weeks since I played this game, so I don't remember much about it. I don't keep a shot-for-shot record, but I do scribble notes. What you read above is basically recounted from the notes, and I can't vouch for its accuracy. Maybe Brenda wrote that diary entry after the fact, I don't know.

Okay, so it's been busy. I'll give you an idea of how the C-USA looks right now. UTEP leads 5-0 in conference, followed by East Carolina, Southern Mississippi and Southern Methodist, all of whom are 4-1. Memphis and Rice are both 0-5 in conference.

After the Southern Methodist game - the next game on the schedule - UTEP goes on a long road trip, playing five out of six games on the road, including the longest road trip of the year against East Carolina on the road.

The current rankings:

AP Poll RPI: 41
Coaches Poll RPI: 31

This was a slide backwards in the Coaches RPI. Obviously, there's no such thing as a game-per-game RPI. This just gives you an idea of where the team stands at any particular moment. There won't even be a new poll until after the SMU game.

(You know, maybe I'm too invested in this thing....)

Tulsa Card Set

2009-07-28T18:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, here's the Tulsa card set. I'm trying to catch up with some of my recordkeeping - this little side project isn't dead yet.

Game 16 - UTEP 59, Tulane 53

2009-07-06T18:38:00.000-07:00

"I was rooming with Toya (LaToya Lloyd) now. We were sitting in a hotel room in New Orleans, thinking about our first C-USA road game against Tulane. It's a long, long flight from El Paso to New Orleans, longer than I thought it was going to be. She said to me, 'So do you think Debra Rodgers will say hi to us?'

Debra Rodgers was a host of ESPN women's basketball. I said, "What, you think she'll fly in to see us?"

"Yeah. I think so. The game's gonna be on ESPN2."

Oh shit. Toya was right. I didn't even know! So I'm calling my family like crazy on Toya's cell phone, saying 'Turn on the game! Turn on the game! I'm gonna be on ESPN2!' I hoped I had a better showing in my second game than in my first one, because I want to play in the W someday. If it's still around, that is.

We drove by the football stadium. I remember when I was in high school, and I turned on the TV, and instead of a stadium there was one big pond full of water, its outlines marked by the stadium. The bus took us through some damaged parts of New Orleans. They still hadn't cleaned everything up. It was spooky, and knowing that we were going to be on national TV set me on edge. I like to drink a can of Mountain Dew and have a Snickers bar before a game; when we tipped off I was going to be caffeinated up.

We get to the basketball arena and Coach is telling us how important this is. 'You know that playing at UTEP is tough for other teams. Well, you won't be a championship team unless you can win on the road. They're telling each other, 'not in our house'! Well, you have to go out there and face that. Ladies, there are a lot of things that you can't control. But you can always control effort. I want to see effort."

So we go out there all fired up...and nothing.. We fall behind 6-0. Then 8-0. Then 12-0 and Coach Ballard calls time out. She looks at us and she says, 'Don't make me hickory switch you back to El Paso. You got yourselves into this mess, now go out there and get yourselves out of it. Don't expect me to call a time out for you every time you're facing adversity."

It didn't look like we were going to pull out of it. We were down 22-10 and we were in a lot of foul trouble. Going over the back. Being out of position to get the ball. Before we knew it, Toya was sitting, Patty Clark was sitting, and I was sitting.

Then, we went on a 9-0 run to close it to 22-19. We were way over the foul limit - we had 12 fouls in the first quarter - but we managed to fight our way back to a 24-23 game at halftime.

Coach held Toya out after halftime. She held a lot of us out, including me. Brianna (Neal) wasn't hitting any thing, but we had Antonia Martynau out there at shooting guard, and she pulled our bacon out of the burning fat. She hit a couple of back-to-back 3-pointers that had everyone on the bench on their feet and waving towels. Then she hit the next basket. Eight straight points from Marty, and we took a 10-0 run ot lead 35-26.

We were still having foul trouble, though. We were going to be over the limit again, and they brought it back to 43-41. I was back on the court, and my job was just to dish the ball to either #34 (Williamette Moss) or our designated second scorer. Tulane wasn't going to go away. Toya got hit with her fifth foul, and we were down our starting point guard.

Down 49-46, I managed to hit a 15 point jumper and drew the foul. I made the free throw to put the Miners up 52-46 and we were starting to edge forward. This was going to be close, because Tulane still wouldn't give up. We were up 57-53 and Tulane would get the next possession, but they were pressing us anyway. #34 drew the foul and hit both shots. Tulane couldn't make anything happen in the final 30 seconds despite two attempts at a long ball.

We did it. 59-53. We wouldn't have to play the Green Wave ever again - until we played them in the post-season tournament, and I hope we didn't."

--Brenda Dean

The jump Tulane got early in the game made me think that UTEP was doomed even before they started. Tulane had three Home Index points and UTEP was getting in a lot of foul trouble. So would the limitations on visiting UTEP be enough to win the game for Tulane.

Answer: No. I don't count offensive rebounds but UTEP outrebounded Tulane 38-29. Furthermore, despite going to the free throw line 26 times, Tulane could only hit 14 shots from the stripe. If Tulane had been more accurate at the free throw line and had a few more rebounds, they could have made a game of it. C'est la vie. Brenda's happy, and I'm happy.

Up next: UTEP goes back to El Paso to play Tulsa, which is 1-3 in CUSA - and 3-13 overall.

AP Poll RPI: 41
Coaches Poll RPI: 29

Hey, you look good when you're 14-2 on the year. But will UTEP ever crack the Top 25 in either poll?

Game Fifteen: UTEP 72, Houston 61

2009-06-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

"I had been looking forward to this game since they announced it. Coach Ballard told us that Houston would be tough. 'They come out and give it all they've got. You know how tough that game was when we played those former Houston players. They call them the Cougars because they bite and claw at you. If you want to be conference champs, you'd better beat them on your home court, cause they might be too tough to beat at home. They take it right to you.' Normally, that's just Coach talking, but I believed it.

This was going to be a nationally televised game. And we definitely had an audience for it. It wasn't as if we filled up the Don Haskins Center, but I can tell you that there were more there than at one of my sold-out high school games. This would be the first time my parents got a chance to see me play on TV, and I knew that my extended family would be watching. It would be on ESPN2. Two teams with at least 10 wins playing for position in CUSA.

I was still suffering from that poke in the eye I got from the Rice game. I tried out some of those clear goggles, but they don't do much for your peripheral vision. At least, my eyes would be protected this time.

Anyway, we hit the court and we get lucky because Houston gets into foul trouble early on. Their coach took a T straight up and I had no idea why. Someone said she stuck her tongue out at a ref, some said that she said something that the ref didn't like and we took a 1-0 lead...because I shanked the first free throw. I guess I was nervous, huh, but those goggles were ignorant.

We take a lead in the first half, but #35 (Letell Hanson) goes down. Brianna (Neal) was ready to hop right in there. I played pretty well in the first half, but I had problems with those goggles, and the doctor recommended that I play with some sort of eye protection. I couldn't see those Houston girls moving around me, and when we went into the 2-3 I looked pretty sorry.

We took a 35-25 lead at the end of the first. Early in the second, I almost collided with a Houston player, and Coach takes me out. 'Can you see in those things?' she said.

'Not really well,' I admitted. I almost ran right into a screen, and there was a lot that I couldn't see coming.

'You've had enough. I shouldn't have put you out there, but you wanted to be out there,' Coach said. 'So you sit.'

So there I was during the second, sitting next to Mackie (Immaculata Suarez), with who I've had bad blood. We didn't say a word to each other. All I could do was watch. Houston wasn't going to go down easily, and they stayed within single digits of us in the second half. They started closing back. Up 57-54, we gave up a couple of fouls and before we knew it, Houston had tied us 57-57.

We were on f***ing knife edge, because I didn't want to lose to nasty Houston in our house. We were leading 64-61, and then Tony (Antonina Martynau) sinks this off-balance shot, and #12 (Shanna Jetton) draws her fifth foul. We held her to two points.

That sparked us. We were on a roll and the Cougars didn't score another point all afternoon. Mackie got out there and Coach just told her to dish the ball, and she did what she was told. Tony was on fire. She scored 15 points. Our starters only scored 31 points, everything came off the bench in that game. Their monster center, Woelfle, tried one last shot with time expired and Patty Clark just f***king blocked it! Reject!

I wanted to score more than nine points. But that game was great. When we play them at Houston, they'll come with everything they've got."

--Brenda Dean

Some trivia for this game and a reference to one of the 1993 rules of Statis Pro Basketball.

UTEP only had 3 Team Index points. (4 Home Index for UTEP - 1 Road Index for Houston). Obviously, UTEP would have to conserve its points. However, the technical foul earned by the Houston coach in the first half took away an Index Point from UTEP! Why? According to the rules, a technical foul can be considered an attempt by a coach to work over the refs, and the refs begin giving the team the benefit of the doubt.

What happens when the home team has no Index Points left and the visiting team earns a technical? According to the 1993 rules, the visiting team gains an Index Point of its own! If you know that the home team is holding on to an Index Point, and if you're head by about five or more late in the game, I can imagine some player deliberately provoking a technical foul to strip away that Index Point.

So how is UTEP looking in the rankings?

AP Poll RPI: 46
Coaches Poll RPI: 34

UTEP has four votes in the Coaches poll, but is not ranked, obviously. UTEP isn't ranked in the AP poll, either.

In the next game, UTEP will be on the road against Tulane. See the previous card set if you want to look at the cards. UTEP killed Tulane 90-52 in their first meeting of the year.

The 3,680 attendance is UTEP's biggest attendance of the year - but you know in women's basketball that attendees sometimes masquerade as empty seats.

Houston Card Set

2009-06-13T16:58:00.001-07:00

UTEP invites Houston to El Paso, Texas for a game that will televised (in our little Imaginationland) on ESPN2. All of Brenda Dean's friends back home will get to see her.

Look at Racquel Woelfle's "Block = 13" rating. They also sort of have their Brenda Dean-like play maker in Debora Fehrenbach with a stamina of 24. Unfortunately for UTEP, everyone on the Houston roster is healthy. This ought to be "a good 'un" as UTEP is both teams are 2-0 in C-USA conference play, UTEP is 12-2 and Houston is 10-4.

Game Fourteen: UTEP 69, Rice 51

2009-06-04T18:00:00.000-07:00

"There are certain things I can't say. But this has been a horrible week. It's been a horrible week at school. These psych labs are just going to kill me, the coach doesn't like the fact that practice has to be rearranged to accomodate my psych lab. I am the only UTEP player majoring in psych.

It's been a horrible personal week as well. And I'm definitely not talking about that, no way, no how. Just to say that someone who I thought was a very close friend turned on me, and then tried to turn the team on me. I don't think it worked, but I know who my real friends are now.

I thought I could work this out on the basketball court. I don't think that we really took Rice all that seriously. #4 and I (Deborah Scheller) were matched up against each other. Well, she had a hair up her butt and she was out of control. Probably by accident, but she stuck her finger in my eye when she was waving those arms of her around.

The ref didn't see it, and I went down. I left the court with no points scored and 18:23 left on the clock in the first half. I didn't return to the game. They sent me to get my eye checked out later on.

I guess Rice got bold and they took an 8-4 lead. Coach Ballard let the team have it. "Get your asses in the game!" she said. We went on a 10-0 run and that put us in the lead again. We didn't look back.

But we couldn't blow out Rice. We should be knocking a team like Rice senseless, but they hung in there. We scored the first four points of the second half to lead 37-26...but Rice went on a 10-0 run to close the game to 37-36.

Then we got serious. We didn't blow Rice out by forty, but we kept the at length for the rest of the game. Coach Ballard said that was an ugly win. Ugly-ass win, and I could only see it out of one eye. But we'll take it.

So they managed to get in touch with an eye doctor, one special visit to the office later...and they checked out my eye. I had some swelling due to a tiny cut. Some antibiotics, and two days of ice packs and ibuprofen and my vision should clear up completely in time for the Houston game. I can hope.

Our next game is at home against Houston. I'm going to wear goggles. This game is going to be on ESPN 2. Everyone I know back home in Pulaski County will be watching that game. Just let me loose, God."

-- Brenda Dean

It's been a busy week and as you can tell, there haven't been any recent posts. The dramatic touches come from a book that I might write someday. So there you go, maybe it will be interesting.

Anyway, without Dean on the court no one dominated. Only four players broke the 10 point barrier, and the top scorer on each team only scored 14 points. However, UTEP picked up 40 rebounds and that did it.

I went ahead and used the secondary rating for Rice players when the Secondary rating was better than Field Goal rating. It didn't help Rice.

Brenda will be back for the Houston game just in time. (She had a Z Injury result, as you can guess.) Here are the current RPI rankings:

AP Poll RPI: 50
Coaches Poll RPI: 42

Playing the 4-10 Rice hurt UTEP's strength of schedule, but UTEP still gets two votes in the Coaches Poll. Houston is 10-4, so a win should raise all boats.

Rice Card Set

2009-05-20T19:11:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-05-16T21:32:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-05T19:12:00.001-07:00

"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

2009-05-02T08:52:00.001-07:00

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.

Game Eleven: #7 Baylor 73, UTEP 58

2009-04-21T17:29:00.001-07:00

"Everything I worried about happening happened.

It hurts even to write about this game. I should have known that it was going to be a crappy game when Toya (LaToya Lloyd) went down in the first 20 seconds. She twisted her left ankle and went off the court limping. That made it all the tougher.

So that left the rest of us to fight off Baylor. We were able to hang with Baylor - for nine points - then Baylor hit the accelerator and before we knew it, we were down by 11. They just knocked us off the boards like a windshield wiper hitting a fly. Without the boards, we had to shoot and Coach Ballard tried to keep Baylor away from me - my job was to kick it out to the guards. It didn't matter because I couldn't play forward, I still can't play forward, I feel like a fool at the post. Those Baylor girls play to your back and they put their elbows right into you when you back up into them.

I got frustrated. I fouled. I spent most of my time on the bench. Baylor kept taking swipes at me. I scored seven points. Seven god-damned points. It was a nightmare. #34 (Williamette Moss) didn't score in the entire game. We just had no power to score from close range at all.

First Baylor was up by 11. Then by 15. Then at one time they were up by like, what, 24 in the second half? I think they put it on cruise control, but even on cruise control, they were tough. There were four fouls on me and I came in the second half because we were desperate. Ten second laters, I had my fifth foul. Coach Ballard said a swear.

We walked off that court as whipped as a team can get, and in front of friggin New Mexico, which suddenly turned into the biggest Baylor fans in the world. I am beginning to hate the state of New Mexico with a passion. I still cried at the end of this game, but not as much. Those fans just got to me."

--Brenda Dean

Egad. This looked pretty much like a #4 vs. #12 game in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament. These games go like this:

a) #12 is coming off being the best team in their conference. They think they can hang.
b) They hang for about five minutes.
c) Reality sets in.

For UTEP, reality sat in and Brenda Dean was particulary ineffective. Without LaToya Lloyd, this left UTEP to rely on its reserves. The problem was that Baylor's starters were just so good that alone they scored 65 points against the entire UTEP lineup. (As you can tell, Baylor's bench players only score eight points.) Three Baylor players didn't even shoot.

To add insult to injury, Letell Hanson also was injured near the end of the game. Nothing serious: both Lloyd and Hanson will be out one game, and Idaho State will hopefully not be a formidable opponent.

It's very hard writing so long after the fact - the game is just a vague fuzzy memory. I can at least tell you how the ratings have changed for UTEP. It hurts UTEP that they lost the game but it helps that they've played such a tough team.

AP Poll RPI: 53
Coaches Poll RPI: 41

UTEP actually moves up in the Coaches Poll RPI, which puts more weight on strength of schedule. They actually move up one spot in the poll - whereas in the AP Poll RPI, UTEP drops five places.

In the alternate game, I have New Mexico defeating Idaho State. This sets up New Mexico vs. Baylor as the headline game (which I won't be playing) and puts UTEP vs. Idaho State in the consolation game.

An Update

2009-04-17T19:43:00.000-07:00

Just a word. I have not forgotten about my Statis Pro Basketball project. As a matter of fact, I've been regretting not having the chance to play. "Put me in, coach!"

Last week, I was in New York for a little while. This weekend, I'm in Kentucky. Work has been very very busy. But trust me, we will see UTEP play Idaho State. My desk is still dedicated to the game.

Maybe I'll have to take some desk pictures.

Neutral Courts

2009-04-05T10:55:00.000-07:00

Up next for UTEP - a game against #7 Baylor on a neutral court, this time in New Mexico.

First, Baylor's card set.

As you can see, Baylor's impressive stats look even more impressive when you multiply them by that 1.203 factor which signifies the strength of the Big Twelve vs. Conference USA. My rule of thumb is that anyone who is shooting in the "fives" - whose field goal range on the card starts with 11 and ends up somewhere in the 50s - is a force to be reckoned with. There are two or three good players on Baylor who have that kind of shooting ability. Add to it the fact that that 1.203 factor boosts rebounding as well and Baylor is a team well deserving of its Top Ten ranking.

The only hope for UTEP is that Baylor's shooters do poorly and they get a few forced rests to take them off the courts. Other than that, it might be a long game for UTEP. On the other hand, I said the same thing about Missouri and UTEP had no trouble with Mizzou.

(* * *)

The next thing for me to figure out was "how do you handle a neutral court"?

My first notion was to simply remove Team Index points as a factor. This way, neither team could call on its special and mysterious powers to ignore forced rests and fouls, to grab rebounds, etc.

However, if you look at the Baylor Card set above, Baylor has a Home Court Index of "9" and a Road Index of "7". UTEP has a Home Court Index of "4" and a Road Index of "-1".

The 1993 Statis Pro Basketball Rules introduced the idea of Home and Road indices. One subtracts the smaller of the numbers from the larger and the team putting pu the bigger number gets the index points.

If the game were at Baylor, Baylor would have 9 (Baylor Home Index) - (-1) (UTEP Road Index) for 10 Team Index Points.
If the game were at UTEP, Baylor would have 7 (Baylor Road Index) - 4 (UTEP Home Index) for 3 Team Index Points. Even though UTEP still keeps its home court advantage in setting assignments, Baylor gets 3 points.

Since Baylor is still dynamite against UTEP either at home or on the road, it's unfair for Baylor to be deprived of their Index Points. Hell, they have Index Points even when they play in the hostile environment of UTEP.

The solution: for neutral courts one splits the difference of Index Points. What is between Baylor +3 points and Baylor +10 points? That would be Baylor +6 Team Index points, rounding down (3 + 10)/2. Baylor gets 6 Team Index Points on a theoretically neutral court. If it were the difference between, say, Baylor +10 at home and UTEP +4 at home, Baylor would get (10 - 4)/2 = 3 Team Index points on a neutral court.

There is one more advantage home teams get in the game: the visiting team is forced to put its player cards on the table first, and then the home team decides how it wants to position its players against the visiting team's players. On neutral courts, each team will swap duties. For the first half of the game, one team gets to choose the most advantageous matchups and during the second half, the other team chooses.

More on the outcome of this game later.

Game Ten: UTEP 74, Missouri 60

2009-03-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

"We played our last home game of the season before going to New Mexico for their tournament. We know that Baylor is coming up next. We're not supposed to talk about it until after this game, so we wanted to get this game out of the way.

Missouri is around the bottom of the Big Twelve. If we couldn't beat the Tigers, we weren't going to beat Baylor, no way.

I don't know what it was, but I just had...swagger. I was c'mon-c'mon-c'mon-let's-play-this-game! I guess there was something really evil inside me because I caught the eye of #55 (Wanette Preus). Missouri was the opposite of Utah. A bunch of black girls and a few white girls. I said, "Hey #55! Mustache!"

She had a mustache. I can't deny it. She looked at me like, "say, WHAT?" And she walks toward me but the other girls pull her away.

I smiled. I got inside her head. #55 played about two minutes before they sat her ass right on the bench. She kept trying to find me and go after me, and her coach sat her down. We built up a big lead on Missouri, and we knew were were going to win. All of those Missouri girls went right after me, determined to teach me a lesson for hurting ol' #55's feelings. Bump and claw, bump and claw. #11 (Nita Clinger) said something to me before the half that I don't think I've heard anyone said. I was "#13! #13, you bleeding c__t!" The referee turned right around and slapped #11 with a big fat "T".

The second half we coasted. We were up by 20, but I shot for shit. 8-for-30 shooting. Those Missouri girls were wearing me out. We were up by over 20, Coach put me on the bench. Late in the game, Missouri turned on the press, and they kept it on. We sort of wore out at the end, but we were up by so much that the Tigers couldn't come back. We won by 14.

After the game, Coach looked at me and said, 'You better pick and choose your moments, Brenda.' I don't know what to make of that."

--Brenda Dean

I thought Missouri was going to be a lot tougher - Big Twelve team vs. C-USA team - but they proved to be surprisingly lightweight. Part of it was that Missouri got hit with two quick forced rests and one of them was Wanetta Preus, one of their better, high-stamina shooters. Missouri's lack of depth hurt them.

I remember a comment by Frisco Del Rosario when he wrote about an NCAA player that averaged over 6 turnovers per game. Unfortunately, Statis Pro Basketball does not factor a player's tendency to turn the ball over into the game. It sort of assigns turnovers equally, or at the least, turnovers are motivated more by opposing steal factors and random chance. Nothing inherent in the player's card tilts a player's chances of turning over in any particular direction.

The next team up is Baylor. In my universe, I have four teams invited to the fictional New Mexico Classic - UTEP, New Mexico, Idaho State, and some other low-ranked, unnamed team. However, the other team bailed out and there was a chance for New Mexico to get Baylor. So the question was: play the traditional New Mexico-UTEP game or give up the chance for Baylor.

Result: Baylor will play UTEP and New Mexico will get Idaho. New Mexico figures that UTEP will lose to Baylor, and then New Mexico gets to play Baylor after they beat Idaho. Win win for everyone - except for fans of the traditional rivalry game.

Next time, I'll build the schedule better and not forget that New Mexico-UTEP match.

As for the press, with UTEP up about 23 points, Missouri turned on the press late in the game. On the Fast Action Cards there is an option called "Press". If the defense calls for a Press, all Action and Advance phases are replaced with the results under "Press". Sometimes, the press fails and you get a result for the offensive called "Pass to choice, who scores". Other times, you get "Line Violation" or "Double Dribble", and you get the chance for a turnover. It was definitely true that UTEP was slowing down the game - UTEP doesn't run up the score - but that press really worked for Missouri.

AP Poll RPI: 48
Coaches Poll RPI: 42

UTEP will break into the next Coaches Top #25 poll - one of the 31 voters will put UTEP at the bottom of his or her list. One total vote for UTEP, to be listed in the scrap votes at the end under the 25th team. One vote, and hopefully, more to come.

Missouri Card Set

2009-03-25T20:05:00.000-07:00

Here is the card set for Missouri:

Since it's a busy week this week, no snappy comments. Gaze at the glory that is Mizzou. The multiplicative factor is 1.204 of Big Twelve vs. Conference USA, so even weak teams in the Big Twelve become potential powerhouses.

Game Nine - UTEP 80, Utah 77

2009-03-22T15:52:00.000-07:00

"I don't know how good we're supposed to be. I think we're very sloppy on defense at times - look who is talking! - but I was very happy to get that win in Salt Lake City. I had never been to Salt Lake City before and the team bus drove by the Mormon Temple. It was beautiful, it made me feel really religious.

Anyway, Utah looked like a bunch of Mormon girls. All tall blondes and only one black girl. We knew these guys were going to be tough and LaToya (Lloyd) was suspended and Marta (Jaworworski) was hurting. We hit the court and we start off with an 8-0 lead in front of the biggest crowd I've seen all year. So we're feeling really good but they catch up to us. They lead by three points at one time, and we're both racing back and forth. By halftime, we're in the lead, 42-39. They keep trying to slow the game down but Coach wants us to gun and they start playing our game. Big mistake on Utah.

The second half is just like the first. Sometimes we lead, sometimes they lead. It's going to come down to who has the last lead of the game. I get five fouls with about six minutes left and I'm sitting on the bench and praying. It's late and Utah is up 71-70. Annie Neal attempts a three pointer and #24 (Sharron Grogg) collides with Annie as she lets go. Annie misses the shot, and they call the Utes for the foul. Annie hits all three of her fre ethows. We're up 73-71.

We keep the lead. They put my roommate, Mackie (Immaculata Suarez) into the game and she finds Annie Neal's sister, Brianna under the basket. Bri hits the shot and gets the foul to put us up 77-73. Then Bri hits the free throw and I know that we've won this game.

Damn. UTAH AIN'T UNDEFEATED ANYMORE! We were all very happy for the win, and I named Mackie the Player of the Game for the way she dished to Bri when Utah was all over her. She doesn't get to play very much because she's a little shaky for being one of Mexico's best players.

I didn't need to see the Mormon Temple on the way back. The only thing I needed to see in Utah, I saw, which was a scoreboard that read 77-80. I don't know how we keep winning, but people better watch out for us."

--Brenda Dean

It was definitely a great outcome for UTEP. Not only did they manage to go to Utah shorthanded, but they managed a road win that really helps their RPI. Beating a team ranked 26-50 on the road is worth RPI bonus points. Therefore:

AP RPI Rank: #49
Coaches RPI Rank: #50

Not much more to say, except I'm sort of surprised how well UTEP is doing. The real UTEP was 4-5 at this time; it seems that Dean's presence has been at least four more wins. Two of UTEP's wins have come by three points or less - a 74-72 home win over Fresno State and this three-point home win over Utah.

There are three more games in the non-conference part of the season. In the first game, Missouri comes to UTEP in the last home game before the conference part of the season. In the final two games, UTEP attends the fictional "New Mexico Classic", where they play Baylor in the first round and the winner of New Mexico/Idaho State in the second round. If UTEP keeps winning, they might actually deserve an at-large bid.

Utah Card Set

2009-03-20T18:38:00.000-07:00

This is the card set for Utah, which is UTEP's next opponent. UTEP will travel to Salt Lake City to play the Runnin' Utes.

This is also a very worrisome team. We're going to play the next game shorthanded. LaToya Lloyd has been suspended for one game on recommendation of C-USA for a fight during the Jackson State game. Marta Jaworowski is out for one game for an injury. Therefore, both teams have 11 players they can suit up.

The multiplication factor for Utah was 1.04, due to the strength of the Mountain West conference over Conference USA. They have four players with killer stamina and Elnora Bastien's accuracy is just ludicrous. After that, Utah has very weak depth. If Utah gets some forced rests or is forced to resort to the bench, we have a good shot. If not, it's going to be a long game.

Furthermore, Utah has a full 10 Team Index Points - 9 - (-1). If things don't go Utah's way, Utah can just ignore the results. Once again, our chances of winning on the road depend on a lot. If Utah has to burn off points quickly, it could be an even game; if Utah faces no adverse results they can take a lead and keep it.

One thing: Utah will help our RPI. Just by random chance - the Running Utes won 70 percent of their games - I have them as 8-0 going into this game. An 8-0 team vs. a 7-1 team should help build up my imaginary excitement.

Game Eight: UTEP 94, Jackson State 52

2009-03-15T12:12:00.001-07:00

"This was our first game after final exams. Didn't do bad. Got two As and two Bs to make the Dean's List, but both of the Bs are in my major - psychology. Good Lord. What have I got myself into?

We were playing the Jackson State Lady Tigers. They managed to keep up with us for a little while, and led 6-2 at one point, and then tied 11-11. After that, we went on an 8-0 run and that was the end of the game. They hit a wall and #55 (Denita Ellies) couldn't do everything for them. She was the only good player they had.

How bad did it get? I was only allowed to score 12 points. Coach Ballard told me flat out that she wasn't going to let me break 40 points against these guys. After we went up 20 we started to pass it around, after we went up 30 we sat down #34 (Williamette Moss). Their guards couldn't defend and we were just pumping it into #54 (Brianna Neal). She scored 24 points and was the leading scorer.

We just crushed them. There were only a few interesting moments. Toya (LaToya Lloyd) got into a fight and they ejected her. Coach Ballard had a private discussing with her after the game. Toya said Ballard let her have it and I bet money she's going to have to miss the game against Utah. After the game we inducted her into UTEP's "Fight Club". It has five members so far, all players who have been ejected from games for fighting.

In the second quarter, Martie (Marta Jaworowski) went down with an ankle injury. It's not serious but she's probably going to miss the next game - I asked the trainer. Guess who Coach Ballard picked to play the five late in the game? Me! I never played center in high school. Hell, I never played forward in high school. And Coach says, "Go out there Dean and play the five." I look at her like "What?" and she just stares at me.

I went out there. Didn't do too bad. Had 15 rebounds and 4 assists this game. Thank God #55 has fouled out by that time, or I would have just looked stupid."

--Brenda Dean

Ah the glory of the box score. This was clearly UTEP's biggest win, and UTEP could have broken the 100 point barrier if they had tried. When UTEP goes up by twenty, I had UTEP deliberately use both ADVANCE phases. You could see what happened - UTEP had 23 total assists in the game, which is a rarity for a team that has players that create their own shots.

When UTEP went up by thirty, I pulled out a player. When they went up by forty, I pulled out another player.

And once again, you can see that there was another fight. I used my alternate rules. When the Z result called for fighting between both guards, I flipped the next card over and looked at the number under Foul Drawing. It was in the 80s, indicating that I would accept the fighting results. So new rule: If the result is between 85 and 88, I'll allow an ejection for fighting. Until then, we'll be shorthanded by two players for the next game with Utah, which is a road game: Lloyd will be suspended for one game and Jaworowski will sit out one game with an injury according to the new injury rules.

Note that in each of the two halves, UTEP had more rebounds than Jackson State did for the entire game.

Here is the RPI calculation for UTEP. UTEP moves up in the AP Poll RPI (because wins weigh more heavily) but falls in the Coaches Poll RPI (because quality of competition weighs more). Look at the Opponent RPI rank and you'll learn that UTEP's 7-1 win record is built on a foundation of sand.

Finding Statistics of Opposing Teams

2009-03-14T07:40:00.000-07:00

I tried to come up with Alcorn State cards. Honestly, I did. But if you go to their Alcorn State women's basketball website, you will find a link called "statistics", click it and find...nothing. I had nothing to work with.

This left me looking for an opponent similar in strength to Alcorn State. I wanted to find another SWAC opponent, so I chose the next strongest in RPI - Grambling. Unfortunately, Grambling's statistics are a complete mess, with a single player having two or three different lines of stats because the player's name was spelled wrong and wasn't corrected in the databases, leaving two "different" players whose names only differ by a letter.

This is part of the problem with having 340 or so "major league" women's college basketball teams. Some, clearly, are more major than others. Some are "big time" programs like Connecticut and Tennessee, with nationwide fanbases and dedicated websites. Others are at best afterthoughts to comply with Title IX, and are barely recognized on their own small campuses. Most likely, keeping statistics isn't a problem for these schools because no one complained about the stats - no one bothered to look up their stats anyway.

This brought me to the next school, one even lower down than Alcorn State - Jackson State. At least, Jackson State has stats, even though the page has large blue borders on both sides and the black text spills across the page, making it hard to read without highlighting. (I just copied and pasted into notepad.)

There was one problem with Jackson State's stats: there was an Aundrea Woullard and an Aundrea Johnson, who I suspect are actually the same person. Not in my universe, they're not.

Jackson State, however, is a much weaker team than UTEP. Realtimerrpi.com has them ranked at #327 out of #340 teams. The SWAC conference is the weakest conference in women's college basketball, even weaker than the 10 or so remaining women's college basketball independent teams. Therefore, the UTEP stats were adjusted by a factor of 1.1797, their biggest adjustment so far.

This is the first time we can see UTEP's Team Index Points. They get +4 at home and -1 on the road.

I sense that I'm going to win this game. But even if I win it, Jackson State's crappy record (1-6) coming into this game is going to play havoc with my RPI. As it turns out, I made an error in last week's calculation: I lose -0.0024 because my median non-conference rank is in the bottom half of Division I. I misread that as "median conference rank". I stay at #73 on the AP Poll RPI but fall to #89 on the Coaches Poll RPI - the latter gives more weight to the quality of your opponents.

I'll redo the calculations after the next game.

Game Seven: UTEP 81, New Mexico 75

2009-03-10T18:07:00.000-07:00

"This was our first road game of the year, and I suspected that this was going to be a mighty battle. The Aggies would have loved to sweep us in the season series, and they had a nice crowd. But there was a big difference between the crowd and the way the Lobos played. #33 (Elise Connery) killed us in that first game, but she was flat in this one.

Frankly, they really weren't much of a challenge. I think we were about five minutes in or something and we held them to no rebounds. We begin building a lead, but we can't get it above 20 points - I think it was 19 a few times. The final score was only because the Aggies got a little bit hot at the end, and because we had our second team in for a big part of the second half.

Toya (LaToya Lloyd) and I picked up four fouls after the second half and we sat out large parts of the game. I remember watching New Mexico slowly whittle that lead down in the last part of the second half, and there I am, squirming on the bench. I'm looking at Coach Ballard, almost screaming "Put me in!" but she just ignores me. LaToya goes in and I stay there. I could have screamed. Finally, with four fouls and late in the second half, Coach nods her head and I jump out onto the court.

One minute later, I have my fifth foul. Coach Ballard just give me a look that says, "See?" Hey, I'll just be happy with the win. Maybe that was the lesson. I don't know, I'm just so impatient."

--Brenda Dean

As you can see, Brenda had another good game. You can't laugh at 57 percent shooting. Look at the difference between this game and the first New Mexico State game and you can see the differences - not as many blocks, assists, or steals by NMSU.

I noticed the "Team Rebounds" stat on the "Pro Basketball Scoresheet", but I'm not keeping track of team rebounds consistently enough to make it a stat yet. Due to the fact that UTEP is performing better in the game in real life, I'm adjusting attendance by 2 percent upward, plus or minus a random factor of 10 percent. I also figure that Dean's high scoring ways should be providing some novelty.

(* * *)

With all of that, UTEP is now 6-1. This begs the question of how good is UTEP? With Brenda Dean are they good enough to be ranked for example?

How do we know? How can we know?

What we need is an RPI estimator. We need a mathematical formula that will let us plug in some simple inputs, then cross-check with one of the RPI sites and make some sort of comparison with other teams.

As it turns out, some people have done some mathematical analysis. Dolphin Sim came up with a formula in 2001. The formula is for men's basketball but we will borrow it. He provides two ratings formulas, and here they are:

RPI = 0.23*WP + 0.23*OWP + 0.54*OOWP

RPI = 0.27*WP + 0.46*OWP + 0.27*OOWP

where

WP = teams's winning percentage
OPW = winning percentage of team's opponents
OOPW = winning percentage of team's opponents' opponents

According to Dolphin Sim, the first formula is the more accurate one, as it is essentially a deeper analysis than the second one. The second formul is the more popular formula since the formula is more balanced towards what a team can control - a team can win its games and pick its opponents, but it can't pick it's opponent's opponents.

We'll use both. We'll call the first RPI formula "the AP formula" and the second formula "the coach's poll formula"

WP is easy. That's just .8571, or (wins + 0.5*ties)/games played.

OPW isn't easy. On the other hand, we'll estimate it by creating a list of UTEP's opponents and determine what a hypothetical W-L record for those teams would be based on the team's real-life records.

As for OOPW, unless you want to simulate the win-loss records of 340 teams...no? You don't? Me neither. What we do know that as we move down the recursion (opponents' opponents' opponents' opponents'....), this value approaches (all wins)/(all games), which should be around .500. So we'll just set OOPW = 0.5 by fiat and move forward.

We then

Here are the following adjustment values:

* +0.0024 if your median non-conference opponent's RPI rank was #50 or better
* +0.0012 for beating RPI #1-25 on the road
* +0.0009 for beating RPI #1-25 at a neutral site
* +0.0006 for beating RPI #1-25 at home
* +0.0008 for beating RPI #26-50 on the road
* +0.0006 for beating RPI #26-50 at a neutral site
* +0.0004 for beating RPI #26-50 at home
* -0.0002 for losing to RPI #170-255 on the road
* -0.0003 for losing to RPI #170-255 at a neutral site
* -0.0004 for losing to RPI #170-255 at home
* -0.0004 for losing to RPI #256-340 on the road
* -0.0006 for losing to RPI #256-340 at a neutral site
* -0.0008 for losing to RPI #256-340 at home
* -0.0006 for losing to a non-division I opponent on the road
* -0.0009 for losing to a non-division I opponent at a neutral site
* -0.0012 for losing to a non-division I opponent at home
* -0.0024 if your median non-conference opponent's RPI rank was in the bottom half of the league (#171 or worse in a 340-team league)

Note that we are talking about the median non-conference rank, not the average. The median is the RPI value that splits the conference into the upper half and the lower half.

Using the above, we calculate an RPI value for our UTEP team. We will use the RPI values provided by RealTimeRPI.com. You can use whatever RPI values please you.

The calculations seem to make sense. UTEP ends up ranked #73 using one RPI estimators and #82 in the other estimator. So far, with Brenda Dean, UTEP is probably the best team in Conference USA - but the league is strictly a one-bid league. Even so, at this level, UTEP should make the Women's NIT even if they lose the conference tournament. One big problem that UTEP has is that its opponents haven't done so well - even Iowa State is having a losing record!

UTEP's next team is Alcorn State - a team to which I'll assign a 1-6 record based on its 5-26 real life record. Alcorn State is ranked #327 out of #340 teams. It looks like UTEP might slip even if they win the game.

Game Six: UTEP 91, Idaho 60

2009-03-08T12:05:00.000-07:00

"It's another day writing at 2 am. Too excited to sleep, and I've let Mackie (Immaculata Suarez) go ahead and sleep. It was a great day, and I let Mrs. Dean know way back home in the hills that her daughter, Brenda, set two records today. Brenda Dean (me) is the leading single-game scorer in UTEP history with 46 points. I'm also the leading single-game scorer in Conference USA history with 46 points. Or, I have at least a tie with someone who scored 46 points in a game about five years ago.

It's all a blur. I had about 22 points going into halftime, and we led 51-25. It was clear that Idaho wasn't going to give us any trouble, although they played really hard. We began rolling it up and as I began to creep into the 30s the media director started talking to one of the assistant coaches, who spoke to Coach Ballard.

Late in the game, Coach made it clear. "Get the ball to #13. Let's give Brenda the record." So every time I had an open look, or a half-open look, I slashed my way to the backet. Idaho began to worry that I'd score 50 points on them, and they finally put two men on me to deny me anything easy. I just couldn't get that 47th point.

Letell Hanson said, "Great game, 'Bickie D'" after the game. She had scored 23 points in that game and I felt she got overlooked by what press there was. Someone from the El Paso Times (who are great about reporting our games) asked me a few questions. There weren't many people at the game, and it was only covered by the Times and by some tabloid press. I just said I was happy to be here, happy to be healthy and hoping that I could do it again sometime.

We're going on the road next for a rematch with New Mexico State in New Mexico. It's our first road game of the season. That loss to the Aggies at home is the only blemish on our record. I want to drop forty points on the Aggies in New Mexico, and I want to win by forty too. "

-- Brenda Dean

Yep, it's true that Brenda Dean finally got her record (tying) game. I had to find an old copy of a media guide from Conference USA to confirm the record. Hopefully, now that I know how to use Dean - make sure that she's not forced to rest and make sure to use index points to burn Defense Fouls at the right time and I can keep her in the game for long periods of time, long enough for some amazing outcomes.

It's also true that I decided that Idaho would double team Dean once she got to forty points, as she got there with a nice amount of time left in the second half and there was a chance that she could make fifty. For Idaho, the double team defense - which lowers shooting by 10 points (in base eight) for anyone double team but boosts the unguarded man's shooting by 10 points - seemed to work very nicely. Dean indeed had a much tougher time shooting and Wiliamette Moss didn't get enough passes to pick up the slack. Maybe if UTEP had been less particular about getting the ball to Dean then Moss would have had better looks.

I worried that Idaho would run out of players with a player depth of only nine players - but Idaho didn't do too bad. A couple of players ran into stamina difficulty but it didn't become too ridiculous.

I think that I might have actually exceeded Dean's stamina by a couple of points - note that she had a double-double. My record-keeping might only be about 95 percent accurate, but really - the point of this is to enjoy one's self. I'm going to do my best to be accurate but I refuse to beat myself up over not being 100 percent accurate. The point is to get some enjoyment out of this while making things as "realistic" as possible.

So much to write about. Next up: UTEP's first road game, a rematch with New Mexico. I expect Dean to fall victim to both fouling and to forced rests, so UTEP could very well be swept in the season series. I've got NMSU at 4 - (-3) = 7 index points, which will make NMSU a tough road opponent.

Idaho Card Set

2009-03-04T18:52:00.001-08:00

This will be the card set for Idaho when I play my next game. Since Fresno State, New Mexico State and Idaho are all in the same conference - the WAC - I'll just use the UTEP cards I created for Fresno State and used for New Mexico State.

I have some misgivings about this game. For one thing, there are only nine players on the Idaho squad with significant minutes. That means that there's not a lot of depth. A few forced rests, a few people running out of stamina and Idaho's in trouble.

I could have created a few other Idaho players that had minutes in the single digits...but I eschew creating those players. It's too much work to create a player with a Stamina of "1". I generally won't create a player at all unless their Stamina is two or greater.

Game Five: UTEP 82, Robert Morris 54

2009-03-03T17:43:00.000-08:00

"Thanksgiving! But there wasn't any rest for any of us. I just feel like I'm working all the time, between studying and practice. Even with Thanksgiving, we still don't have any time off. We ate Thanksgiving dinner at Coach Ballard's house. Some of the boosters brought food. It was okay, but no great shakes compared to Mom's cooking. I'm extremely homesick.

So why am I writing about food and not the game? Well, the game was a laugher. Coach Ballard cracked the whip on us again and we took it out on Robert Morris. We went through them like wood through a wood chipper, and we could have led the game by forty points if we wanted to, but Coach Ballard made us cool our jets. Toya (LaToya Lloyd) and I spent time on the bench to keep it from being ridiculous. We were up 45-20 at halftime.

I didn't get a lot of looks. We concentrated on passing the ball around before finding the open man. I only took 14 shots in this game, but I got fouled a lot, and I got 29 points, most of them on the free throw line. I don't know how good Robert Morris is supposed to be, but that was a cake team.

Coach Ballard finally had something good to say. She said it was the best basketball we played all year.

We were looking forward to playing Stephen F. Austin, a team on the other end of Texas, but Idaho upset them in the opening game. We play Idaho in the final game of our mini-tourney. I know we can't overlook Idaho. But everyone knows that after the Idaho game, the next game is on the road. In Las Cruces, New Mexico. A rematch against the damned Aggies. We want revenge."

--Brenda Dean

Ever have one of those games where you know the outcome from the opening tip? UTEP led 15-2 to start out the game, and they just kept extending the lead. The biggest lead was 51-22 in the second half, a 29 point lead.

I began moving starters onto the bench and forced myself to take two ADVANCE cards whenever rational. It really could have been a bigger win, but there wouldn't be any joy in that, and Dean already had scored 39 against a team. She scored 29 in this game, and was 9-for-11 at the free throw line. That was really enough.

Note Robert Morris's ball movement stats for the first half. Four assists, no steals, no blocks. It was like the reverse of the UTEP-NMSU game. UTEP hit 49 percent of its free throws and the Colonials only hit 29 percent. UTEP was dominant. Nothing to do but make the cards for the Vandals and play the conclusion.

(* * *)

So how did I determine that Stephen F. Austin was upset by Idaho? More on that later.

(* * *)

Figuring out injuries is going to be hard. In all versions of the game, players have an injury rating. Generally during the game, a Z Result will occur, and you'll get a reading like "Home G1 is injured. Consult player card for injury rating."

In older versions of the game, there was a card that told you how many games the player would miss - they would miss the rest of the game in which the card had been drawn, plus X number of games. The value of X would depend on the player's injury rating. I believe - but can't be sure - that later versions of the Fast Action Deck would determine a variable number of games depending on the player's injury rating.

So not only do my cards not have injury ratings, I don't have the little card that tells you how to determine injuries. All I have is a section of the Cardmaker Spreadsheet, namely a small section of data on the "Work" tab to give me a clue as to how to treat injuries.

So here's the version I'm using. This version is based on 30 games = one college season.

Games Played By Player - 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.

Also note: The 1993 version of the Statis Pro Basketball rules states that a player cannot be forced to miss more games in a season than she missed in real life. Let's say that you have a player who played 28 games in real life. She's played every game in the season except two - one where you left her on the bench and another when she drew an injury result. If there are more games left in the season, and she were to get injured again, the expected result would be "miss current game and the next game". However, that would cause her to fall below 28 games. You can simply ignore the injury result and have her miss the current game only.

Of course, due to individual use, you might use players less than they were used in real life. In those cases, I think that the above still holds true: the player misses only the current game, because they've already missed more than their real-life number of games simply because you've chosen not to play them as often. The player should not be further penalized.

Game Four: New Mexico State 76, UTEP 68

2009-02-28T08:08:00.000-08:00

"I should have known better. We win three games, two against good teams and I think this is going to be easy. Coach Ballard finally lets up on us after all those punishment practices, but she tells us that we're playing New Mexico State, the friggin' Aggies. UTEP hates the Aggies. We play two games with them every year, and they're not even in our conference.

All week long, it's 'New Mexico State this' and 'New Mexico State that'. It's in the Prospector, 'come see UTEP against the hated Aggies'. So we come out of the shootaround, and what kind of crowd is it? The same old sorry-ass crowd we always have. When I played in high school, we had bigger crowds that this for some games. If this game is so goddamned important, how come we can't get no love?

We see the Aggies. They don't look like much. Then they come out and they are on fire, they are beating us up like a bowling ball beats up pins. Everyone's trying to find me open, and I can't hit anything. I went, what, 9-for-35 for the game. I got 20 points, but -- hell, I should have had 30. Coach Ballard just lets me have it. Oh, she doesn't say anything in the locker room to me directly, but she's shouting at halftime in the locker room "Why don't you stop looking for #13! (me) She's not hitting anything!"

We're down by 23 going into halftime. The crowd is just quiet. The Aggies know they can win, and the only thing that kept us from losing by 23 was that the Aggies just ran out of gas. That, and that everyone finally stopped looking for me and found #55 (LaToya Lloyd) instead. Toya had 22 points. But it wasn't enough.

Their bigs just crushed us. #33 (Elise Connery) was knocking balls out of the sky. They got thin and matched #3 (Apryl Fieldson) against me and she just lit me up. She scored 11 points on me coming off the bench. I couldn't stop her. I was gassed. If I could have defended her we'd have kept it close. Our bench sucked. We sucked.

I go into that locker room and I'm crying. I've got a towel on my head. Everyone else is just staring into space, and Ballard hits that locker room like a hurricane. She said, 'if you cared as much as #13 does, you'd have won'. Great coach. Thanks for nothing. Make everybody hate me.

It's the march of the dead out of the locker room. No one is saying anything to anybody. Mackie (Immaculata Suarez) and I don't talk much back in our dorm room. She didn't even come off the bench, but she feels just as bad as I do."

--Brenda Dean

Agh. What a stinker of a game. For quite some time, I didn't believe that I got the balance between teams right and that UTEP was destined to win every game this year. Well, I guess that theory has been disproven. Even with 12 Team Index points, UTEP was awful.

I would say that the game fell apart in three directions:

1) Pearlie Kalis and Iorrie Molinero from UTEP both have secondary ratings that are higher than their field goal ratings. To me, this indicates a player who is a lot more comfortable with taking her own shot - shooting right after the action phase - than with waiting for the ADVANCE. UTEP's guards have poor defensive ratings, and that gave Kalis and Molinero all the more reason to light things up.

2) Dean shot very poorly. I don't think I've seen so many numbers in the 60s through 80s in my entire life. It seemed that everytime Dean put something up, it ended in disaster for UTEP.

3) Elise Connery of New Mexico State. Her block rating is "12", which means that any ball coming even close to her is going to get batted out of the sky. She led NMSU in rebounds with 13, assists with 5 and blocks with 9. UTEP doesn't have that kind of blocking power, and only blocked two shots the entire night.

4) Bench points. 29 for NMSU vs. 13 for UTEP. Apryl Fieldson went 5 for 6 against Dean, and the only time she missed was when Dean fouled her during the shot.

During the first half, NMSU shot 58 percent. UTEP shot 32 percent. That was the game right there. The hole was so deep that UTEP couldn't dig its way out of it. All of UTEP's Index Points were spent fending off defensive fouls and forced rests in the hope that Dean could find her way back into the game. But she couldn't. NMSU went up by 25 at one time in the second half, and that's when everyone started heading for the exits.

Up next. The UTEP Invitational. UTEP vs. Robert Morris. Stephen F. Austin vs. Idaho. I won't play the second game, but I will play the first one.

The Lord Taketh Away....

2009-02-23T17:58:00.000-08:00

...after the Fresno State game, my initial schedule had Winston-Salem State scheduled as UTEP's next opponent.

How good is Winston-Salem State? Well, they don't even belong to a conference, and the list of independents in women's basketball is a pretty poor one - after Utah Valley and CSU Bakersfield, the quality bottoms out into #258 and below. Winston-Salem State is ranked #334 out of #341. They are 3-22 so far this year. I was looking forward to having UTEP whup up on someone.

Then, I found out about New Mexico State University. The football battle between the schools is called the "Battle of I-10" and it's so important that unlike most football rivalries, they award two trophies. The schools are only 38 miles from each other.

Even though NMSU and UTEP don't belong to the same basketball conference, they play each other twice a year anyway. I had NMSU down for a visiting game, and I'd have to pencil in a home game for them. Goodbye, Winston-Salem State.

On the other hand, I've learned a little bit more about the new Statis Pro Basketball rules that came out in 1993 or so. The game set that I've been using has a Team Index that's strictly based on home winning percentage. The 1993 rules, on the other hand, have two indices - a Home Team Index and a Visiting Team Index.

Let's take a look at UTEP. UTEP, under the old rules, has six Home Team Index points. No matter who their opponent is - whether it's Connecticut or Winston-Salem State - UTEP always get six points.

However, under the new rules, UTEP gets 4 Home Team Index points and -1 Visiting Team Index points. We look at New Mexico State's numbers - 4 Home Team Index points and -10 (minus 10) Visiting Team points. (As it turns out, New Mexico State hadn't won a game on the road all year until their last game, but I created the card set before NMSU got its first home win.)

We now use the formula:

Home Team's Home Index Points - Visiting Team's Visiting Index Points = Game Team Index Points.

If the Game Team Index Points are positive, they belong to the home team. If the final result is negative, the points belong to the visiting team.

Therefore the Game Team Index Points are equal to: 4 (UTEP) - (-10) (NMSU) = 4 + 10 = 14. All of which, in theory, belong to UTEP.

However, teams can only have a maximum of 12 points. UTEP will therefore have 12 points to play with - six in the first half, and six in the second. But I'd rather have 12 Index Points than six any day of the week. The Lord taketh away, but the Lord giveth.

New Mexico State Card Set

2009-02-23T05:08:00.001-08:00

Before I post anything else, we have to get the next set of cards up....and you can't write about UTEP without writing about their rivals down the road, New Mexico State.

The great thing is that New Mexico State is in the WAC conference, and since recent opponent Fresno State is also in the WAC, I can just use the adjusted UTEP cards from the last game.

1981 vs. 1993

2009-02-22T15:04:00.000-08:00

Frisco del Rosario, a basketball writer and Statis Pro fan, pointed out that the game doesn't give you the option of ignoring a foul on some players and letting the player take the foul on other players - once you get a drawing of "Defense Foul" against your team, you can't decide, "oh, I'll see who took the foul, and if it's someone good, then I'll burn the Index Point, else not". You either have to spend the point to ignore the foul regardless of who the foul belongs to, or you take the foul.

I didn't see this rule in my copy of the rules or written on the game board. The game board lists how Team Index points can be spent:

two points: call for a steal
two points: ignore a forced rest
one point: rebound to high player on your team
one point: ignore a defensive foul (what we're talking about above)
one point: ignore a charging foul

..but it says nothing about how to ignore a defensive foul.

Then I realized...there are actually two sets of rules for Statis Pro Basketball. One came with the first version of the game, and the second comes with the game versions sold after 1993.

As it turns out, I have both versions of the rules stored as .pdf files. And sure enough, in the 1993 rules, it states that when spending points to burn off defensive fouls, you have to burn the point without finding out which player was fouled.

Frisco also pointed out that the team index points have to be proportionally spent for each half - if you have six total home index points, you need to spend three in the first half and three in the second half. (This is an alteration of the NBA rule which states those points have to be divvied proprotionately per quarter.) As it turns out, this rule isn't in the '81 rules, but it is in the '93 rules.

In the future, I'll be using the 1993 rules for both ignoring defensive fouls and spending team index (home field advantage) points.

I'm wondering if I should be altering UTEP's team index to create a Home Index and a Visitor Index. There was only one index in the 1981 rules; there are two (a Home Index and a Visitor Index) in the 1993 rules. I'll be posting about trying to determine the right amount of Home Index points for college basketball in a future post.

Game Three: UTEP 74, Fresno State 72

2009-02-21T17:33:00.001-08:00

"What a game. It's 2 am and I'm high. I'm stoned on basketball. Fresno State came to El Paso, and they were tough. They could shoot, they had a lot of energy, and #22 (Amie Havener) could really rush the basket.

They played us close. It was touch and go the whole first half, and we were up by one, 38-37 at halftime. I was in a zone in that early part of the game, and I was just under 20 points. Everyone was simply looking at me and I knew that if I was open, someone was going to find me. I went wild. I got 36 points against Fresno State. Had nine rebounds. I wanted 10, because a double-double would be cool but I got beaten up enough under the basket. Move me to the #2, coach! Don't make me play forward!

Patty Clark got suspended for fighting in the game, and Martie (Marta Jaworski) was playing center. She wasn't hitting anything, but she kept getting those rebounds for us - she ended up with 13. We kept trying to fight Fresno State off, and we led by ten at one point in the second half, but they caught up with us and put that press on us. Forced a couple of turnovers, and I was to blame for one of them. #44 (Iesa Blumenfield) hit a shot with six seconds left to tie the game at 72-72 and Coach Ballard is drawing up this play which is as confusing as hell. I'm just nodding my head, trying to pretend that I know what was going on. I just don't want to go into overtime, because I'm out of gas, chucking up bricks near the end.

So we have the last possession and Josie (Josina Costa) takes the inbound and passes the ball to Marta. Marta is looking for Josie again under the basket but can't find her. So Marta, who hasn't hit a shot all night, fires a mid-range jumper with like half-a-second left and she just plants it! Everyone jumps right off the bench. The pep band starts playing "Shadows on the Mountain" and Fresno State's coach is challenging the shot, saying that time expired when Marty hit it.

The band keeps playing "Shadows" while the refs look at the video. Marty took the shot with 0.7 seconds left. The basket is good and the band breaks into "Miners Fight". It was great to have such a great game, but I don't think I was the star. When Marty hit that last second shot, she was the star."

--Brenda Dean

My wife asked me what I got out of playing a card game when video games existed. The above is what I get out of a card game.

I've played very few Statis Pro Basketball games like this one, where the game is very tight all the way through and you feel as if you're slogging you're way through the game. With UTEP up by 10 late in the half, Fresno State began to come back.

There is an option called "PRESS" in the Fast Action Deck. The defense can state they are pressing, and for that offensive possession, the offense must read under the "PRESS" option. Two out of three times, UTEP lost the ball and Fresno State began to turn it on. With just a few cards left, Iesa Blumenfield took a shot off the secondary and hit it, tying the game with just two cards left.

The first card was "Pass to Center" under the ACTION phase, so Marta Jaworski had to shoot off the SECONDARY phase. And with the last card of the game...the shot result is "22". Two points. Game over.

I needed all of my six Home Field Advantage points. I decided this time that I would use those points to keep Brenda Dean from fouling, if a foul ever indicated that Dean got the foul. Dean was hot in the first part of the game, scoring like twelve of the first thirteen points. Down at the end, with two Home Field points yet, Williamette Moss got a forced rest. I could either ignore the forced rest or lose my points or sit her down.

I sat her down. Smart decision.

I had started the game and played it early in the morning during the week before work. By the time Frisco Del Rosario commented on Amie Havener's ability to shoot the three and get the offensive rebound, I was in mid game and I started back up with an offensive possession. I gave her a 3-point attempt, and she missed the shot, I flip over the card, and under rebound, it said, "Offense F1" - Havener. Is that weird or what?

If you look over the box score, you'll notice that both sides took a lot of field goals. I was really trying to give everyone as many 3-point shots as possible, something I've been a little weak on in past games.

Furthermore, Dean got very close to a 40-point game. You don't see 36-point games much in women's basketball. However, playing as the UTEP coach, the great part of the game wasn't Dean's 36 points - it was Jaworski hitting that shot with the final card. That was just sweet.

Fresno State vs. UTEP Card Sets

2009-02-20T04:40:00.000-08:00

I'm going to post the card sets for the next game, a home game against Fresno State.

Fresno State's cards are based on their current stats in the WAC conference. All player names have been changed.

As for the UTEP cards, all the "good stats" (except free throws) are altered by a factor of 1.104, as Conference USA is about 10.4 percent better than that WAC based on RPI conference strength.

This should be a good game. Fresno State comes from a weaker conference, but they're the best team in that weaker conference. Furthermore, they shoot better than UTEP does but they are only 10 players deep. A lot of factors - team defense, shooting accuracy, forced rests - should come into play. I'm hoping this is a good game.

Game Two: UTEP 82, CS-Northridge 56

2009-02-16T17:35:00.000-08:00

"We were just glad to have everyone back on the team. We were waiting for a team from California, and it took us a little while to get warmed up. They were up like 7-6 before we started to pull away. We were up ten, then twenty. It felt kind of good, like we were back in high school again and playing one of those schools that didn't care much about basketball.

My problem was that I was cold getting started - but I got warmed up. I dumped 15 on them, and I could have hit them for more if I didn't have foul trouble. Me and Martie, we fouled out. The only bad thing about the game was that Patty (Patricia) Clark got in a fight and got thrown out of the game. Why do they always want to pick on us? I don't get it.

Coach is pissed off again. We get into too many fights. She's going to make us suffer. I'm already exhausted."

-Brenda Dean

This is the second time I've had players ejected for fighting. These kind of results are just...ridiculous. I'm simply going to ignore the Z result that says, "Fighting between F1s - each ejected." From now on, I'm going to read this result as "F1s are forced to rest for the rest of the game. If next card is 81-88, players are ejected for fighting."

How many fights can you remember in women's basketball? The answer is not many. Clark will be suspended for the next game against Fresno State. Hopefully, these kind of results won't cause problems.

'Forced Rest' is a card result that forces the indicated players to rest for the rest of the quarter. (In the college games's case, for the rest of the half.) The result is supposed to mimic those cases where a coach is dissatisfied with the player's performance, and forces them to sit on the bench.

UTEP shot 43 percent, and CS Northridge shot 35 percent. However, the real edge came in rebounding firepower. UTEP could just get the ball whenever it wanted to. The game stats at least looked like college stats, and that counts for a lot.

Or did they? My bookkeeping was okay, but I wonder if I used all of the cards I needed to. The problem is that a standard Fast Action Deck has 180 cards, but a college half needs 300 cards. Which means that after you go through the 180 cards one time, you need to reshuffle that deck and deal out 120 cards to finish the half. This should leave a mini-deck of 60 unused cards - and when you have multiple decks running around (discard deck, drawing deck, and cards-not-to-be-used deck), confusion is easy.

I really need to purchase Phil Graham's 300 card neck. No. I really, really need to purchase Phil Graham's 300 card deck. But until some money can float by, I'll avoid spending it on minor hobbies.

Adjusting Teams Down...and Up

2009-02-15T15:52:00.000-08:00

I began to prepare cards for the next game on my schedule, when my imaginary UTEP team took on the Matadors of Cal State Northridge. Here are the Cal State Northridge cards:

The other set of cards is my UTEP set, which has been adjusted up by a factor of 1.104.

Why did I adjust UTEP's set up by a factor of 1.104? I looked at the relative strengths of the the Big West Conference - the conference to which CS-Northridge belongs - and the strength of Conference USA. Take the average RPI of Conference USA and divide it by the average RPI of the Big West. At the time I created the cards, the result was 1.104.

Therefore, all of the good stats of UTEP get adjusted up by 1.104 - field goals made, 3-point goals made, rebounds, offensive rebounds, steals, assists, and blocks. Personal fouls are adjusted down, but it doesn't matter all that much as the foul ratings for any team - who has the highest foul drawing scores, what is the foul range, etc. - depends only on the team in question. The only stat that I don't adjust upward is that of free throw shooting.

Why do I adjust UTEP's scores up and not adjust CS-Northridge's scores down? If there's a blowout, the score is more likely to be 90-50 than 50-10. Making UTEP the standard and dividing anything CS-Northridge does by 1.104 makes it very hard for the Matadors to score.

Next up: The results of the second game, comments about UTEP's schedule, etc.

I have a goal of putting all of this wonderful information into one spreadsheet that creates both sets of cards. That, however, is a long term project.

Game One: UTEP 74, Iowa State 62

2009-02-12T16:28:00.000-08:00

"Our coach got a one-game suspension from Conference USA for letting all that fighting go on in our last game. So she said that if she was being punished, we were going to be punished even more. I don't want to tell you what we did before the Iowa State game, but she worked us so hard we almost puked. She wasn't even going to come to the Iowa State game, saying that she had to work with Mackie (Immaculata Suarez) and Martie (Marta Jaworoski) - they got a double dose of suffering.

So Coach Goldsmith was going to be our coach for the Iowa State game. What Coach Ballard did to us during the week must have toughened us up, because we jumped out to a 14-2 lead to start the game. And those girls were big girls! Their center got hurt early on, so she came out of the game and we could keep up with them on the boards. They caught up with us a couple of times and even went up by one point in the second half. However, the other players decided to play like individuals instead of a team. I could hear their coach yelling at them from our bench.

In the second half, we pulled out again, they got into foul trouble, and it was all over. We're still playing in an empty arena, but the people who showed up screamed their hearts out. We upset the mighty Iowa State! I got seventeen points. Good times, babee!"

- Brenda Dean

This was the first game I played where I thought I had it all right. I was recording assists, steals and blocks even though it looks like there were few assists on the Iowa State side - did I miss something? I managed to keep track of who was substituting for whom, which is pretty difficult in the Statis Pro Game. I knew how to deal with players forced to play that had run out of stamina points. (There will be another image later.)

I regret the fact that there's no way to record turnovers. Turnovers, along with shooting percentage, rebounds (I don't distinguish between offensive and defensive boards) and field goal percentage are the real keys to the game.

So what happened to Iowa State? Three things:

1) They lost their center. Iowa State's starters are rather dominant over their bench,
2) They had a player get a "forced rest" result on a Z result in the ACTION phase, and
3) They just didn't shoot very well - UTEP shot 43 percent to Iowa State's 35 percent.
4) Foul trouble - three Cyclone players would foul out in a foul-laden game.

Add the six Home Factor points, and we were able to steal a win. In general, you want to use Home Factor points to avoid forced rests when they concern your best players. I ignored two first rests in the first half. At the end, they lost players due to fouls and they had more than one player playing with no stamina. A player who has no stamina (at least in my game) cannot shoot, and therefore Iowa State had to move the ball around more.

The next game is against Cal State-Northridge. As it turns out, CS-Northridge comes from a weaker conference than Conference USA, so UTEP will adjust its stats upward for the next game. More on that later.

Deck Randomization and Ejections

2009-02-10T07:17:00.001-08:00

All right. Let's go to the boxscore, and the most interesting part of the writeup.

Fights. In the ACTION phase, you occasionally get a result which is like "Consult Z on Next Card". There is a Z Category that deals with not only forced rests ("Home Team G1 Must Rest") but with technical fouls and occasionally, fights. Z is the "weirdness category". Statis Pro Baseball also has a "Z" table to deal with rare events as well; for some reason Avalon Hill loved the letter "Z".

Early on in the game, I got a result that read "both players at F1 ejected for fighting". This removed Dean and her counterpart at F1 from the game. You can't use Home Factor points to ignore the fighting result the way you could ignore an early defensive foul or a forced rest. Whenever your player gets ejected for fighting, there's nothing you can do about it.

Unfortunately for this game, I drew the same combination three other times: "Consult Z on Next Card/Both Players at F1 Ejected For Fighting". I thought I had been cursed until I realized after the game - I wasn't shuffling the cards enough. This is why the same result kept cropping up.

SHUFFLE THE DECK WELL! I can't emphasize that enough.

Mind you, Statis Pro Basketball cards are small, thick little things that don't want to be shuffled. You really have to break down the deck into about 15 or 16 mini-decks and shuffle those decks thoroughly to get good gameplay. My further advice is that if you get a bad result from "Z" - a fighting result or a technical foul result which the coach of the Bobcats suffered twice in the game - you should take the offending card and shove it somewhere in the middle of the discard pile, moving it out of sequence and "unpair" it with the offending Z card to minimize the chances of it showing up again.

If it shows up again, there's nothing wrong with that - as long as you know the cards have been randomized enough. If not, you have no one to blame for yourself.

(* * *)

This is also the first time I've tried to calculate assists. I think I might have simply missed a few of them. The overall number of assists doesn't seem quite right; I'll have to look at more college box scores.

(* * *)

And now, a mini essay about fighting in the women's game.

The "both players ejected for fighting card" always seemed a little fishy. I had once played a full season with the old NBA cards - I think I played the 1987-88 Golden State Warriors, with Ralph Sampson as center - and occasionally I'd draw that fighting card.

But how often does fighting occur in the NBA? How often do fights really happen? Did the guys building the game at Avalon Hill do any statistical studies? Or did they think that fighting would be a cool result to have pop up every now and then.

Furthermore, I rarely - if ever - hear of fighting in the women's game. It's usually something very serious when it happens, and at the college level, it results in suspensions.

So my next question was "do I suspend everyone involved in the fight? and if so, for how long?" I decided to let the projections of player usage at the top of the cards guide me. Brenda Dean and Brianna Neal have an effective injury rating of "0", so they will not be suspended. Marta Jaworski and Immaculata Suarez have non-zero injury ratings - they missed games - and I decided to suspend them for the opening regular season game against Iowa State.

This might be a self-serving decision - it means that I get to use Brenda Dean in the next game instead of benching her - but I think the above justifies it, or at least gives me a plausible excuse.

Exhibition Game - UTEP 81, Houston Bobcats 73

2009-02-09T18:34:00.000-08:00

I can't believe that last game. We were playing the Houston Bobcats - a bunch of big girls who had graduated from college. Most of them had graduated from Houston. They were a traveling exhibition team, and coach told us not to underestimate them.

So I'm under the basket playing the two with this big Houston girl and I'm trying to work my way under the basket. She keeps bumping me off and then she just sticks her hand out and like mauls me in the face! She just puts her fingers right in my face, so I grab her hand so that she doesn't poke my eyes out.

Referee blows his whistle. Ejects her. Ejects me. Coach tells me to sit my ass down again. I was embarrassed. I didn't want my Mom or Dad to see this.

It kept getting worse. Then there was another fight under the basket. Then another. Then another. There were eight players ejected, four of theirs and four of ours and the Houston Bobcats coach is just riding the referee so hard that he should have put a saddle on her. He gets a T. Then he gets another T.

It was a joke at the end. They kept fouling us and we kept going to the line. They were big and tough but we got the win 81-73.

Conference USA is supposed to look at this game and decide what they want to do with us. Coach was absolutely friggin furious. It's going to be a really hard week. I wonder if I'm ever going to have a breakout game. And we have Iowa State after this! God help us.

-Brenda Dean

I'll write more about this game and what I learned about Statis Pro gameplay later. I just wanted to get the boxscore up.

Houston Bobcats Cards

2009-02-05T16:46:00.000-08:00

Here are the Houston Bobcats cards. Next post: how the game went.

Moving Along the Exhibition Schedule

2009-02-05T11:39:00.001-08:00

The next task was to play the second exhibition game. I figured that playing it would help me to knock off my rust in actually playing the game itself. And this next time, I would remember - 300 Fast Action Cards per each college half.

The next team I decided to create was one called the "Houston Bobcats", which would be related to the real life exhibition squad known as the Houston Jaguars. The Jaguars are a team of ex-college basketball players who play exhibitions against current college teams.

If you go to the roster page, you find nothing but pictures. (Clicking the pictures just gives you...larger pictures). So my next task was trying to find something approaching an active roster for this squad. The advantage was that if I couldn't find stats for some of the players on the roster, I could just mine old team statistics and pick other players from the older teams.

I ended up with a list of players from all over the place. Most of them were old University of Houston players. One was a former NC State player, the other was an ex Texas A&M player. One was from Houston Baptist. Another was from Linsdey Wilson college in Kentucky, of all places!

I had the stats for each player, but how much weight should I put on each player's stats? I simply used the weighting system I mentioned in the previous posts. A player's stats were weighted by the strength of the conference from which she came from. For conferences off the scale like the NAIA Lindsey Wilson player, I can't remember what I did exactly, but her stats were devalued appropriately.

The next task was typing the data into the Cardmaker Excel sheet, making the multiplications, determining home game winning percentages and points for and points against in an NBA-type season, entering the data into the Cardmaker Excel spreadsheet, and coming up with the result.

I'll post the fictional Bobcats next.

Exhibition Game - UTEP 42, Central Oklahoma 40

2009-02-03T17:23:00.001-08:00

I can remember that very first time I put on the uniform in college and played in a real game. God, that was a slog fest. I started, but it had been a long time since I had played in high school, and I guess I was a little tenative. I looked way ugly out there, and finally coach screams at me to sit my ass down.

She kept me there the who first half. That was the slowest damn game. The score was like 16-15, which had to set some kind of a record. Finally, coach puts me out there again. I looked a lot better and scored 10 points. Coach said that Central Oklahoma would run the fastbreak. I didn't see it though. That's the kind of game I'd be embarrassed to talk up, but we won it and I'll take it. It's a shame it doesn't count.

- Brenda Dean

(* * *)

One of the most important questions that has to be answered is "what would be the right number of cards to use in a college game?"

The pace of an NBA game goes through 180 cards in the Fast Action Deck - per quarter. So here's what the answer should be....

***180 cards per 12 minute quarter equals 300 cards per 20 minute half.***

The difference between a 24 minute shot clock and a 30 minute shot clock should be ignored - we'll assume that college players simply use the extra six seconds setting up the offense.

For some reason, however, I came up with 192 cards per half. I'm trying to retrace the way I came to that number and I can't figure out how I came with 192. But I went with it, and you can see the results - a very low-scoring game.

Furthermore, I bumped into some record keeping issues. There is a result on the ADVANCE card that says "Use Passer Assist Rating for Shot". Here's the big question: do you count assists only when they come off the 'use passer assist' result, or is an assist given to the person who had the ball before the last shooter took the shot?

Since I couldn't land one way or the other, I didn't count assists for this game. I counted everything else, though. You can take a peek at the boxscore:

As it turned out, the "300 cards = one half" figure was confirmed by another source. Have you heard of Phil Graham? Phil Graham is a creator of Statis Pro Basketball cards and card sets and his website is right here. On his catalog page, he happens to mention that he has a special deck of 300 Fast Action Cards to be used - the advantage is that the 180 cards that come with the game don't need to be reshuffled.

I made a note of that. The next game, I would use 300 cards per half.

As for Brenda Dean's performance, it was not bad despite that I picked up a "Z Result" on the ACTION phase of the game. "Z Results" are all the out-of-the ordinary occurences in the game. The game forced her to rest "for one quarter" - I read "quarter" as "half" - and Dean would sit for the remainder of the first half. The best shooter on the team, she got the ball a lot during the second half and led the team.

Okay. Lessons learned. Next up for UTEP: a team I'll call the "Houston Bobcats" which is an all-star team of former players.

The Finishing Touches: Home Court Factors

2009-02-03T10:31:00.001-08:00

We're all set to begin a game between UTEP and Central Oklahoma using the new cards.

If you're curious, you might note that there is a special card with the name of the team, something called a "Home Court Factor" which is equal to nine, a "Fast Break Offense" equal to "A" and a "Fast Break Defense" equal to "A".

First, we have to determine the Home Court Factor. The Home Court Factor is designed to influence any games played on a home court in favor of the home team. The factors range from "1" to "10", so "9" is very high. Central Oklahoma did very well on its home court and the high number reflects that.

At the beginning of the game, Central Oklahoma will be alloted nine Home Court Points to influence the game in various ways. They can:

* ignore fouls when they come up
* call for steals when they need them
* ask for their high rebounder to get the ball automatically

...and so forth. These points are "spent" by the home team as needed. A crafty home team could save some points for the end of the game and use them in critical situtations, turning the tide for comebacks in front of a riotous crowd.

So how do we determine the correct number? We have to adjust the college teams wins and losses to 82 games, since the Cardmaker spreadsheet is designed for creating NBA cards. Next, we determine the percentage of home wins and multiply that by 41 to get a home won-loss record:

11-30 or worse at home: 1 point
between 12 and 14 home wins: 2 points
between 15 and 17 home wins: 3 points
between 18 and 20 home wins: 4 points
between 21 and 23 home wins: 5 points
between 24 and 26 home wins: 6 points
between 27 and 29 home wins: 7 points
between 30 and 32 home wins: 8 points
between 33 and 35 home wins: 9 points
36-5 or better at home: 10 points

Central Oklahoma has nine Home Court points, which is excellent. However, they are playing on the road, so they can use none of those points. UTEP has all of the Home Factor points, and they use six points for their Home Factor.

The next part of the "team card" deals with Fast Break Offense and Defense. Each team has a "Fast Break Offense" ranging from A to D and a "Fast Break Defense" ranging from A to D. A special chart on the playing board is consulted to determine which Fast Break chart to use when one of the forwards gets their hands on a rebound. A team that has a great fast break offense which is playing a team with a poor fast break defense might decide to use the board's Fast Break chart if the numbers favor a basket with the fast break as opposed to moving the ball down the court.

The Fast Break values are determined by the spreadsheet - but the spreadsheet needs two values: points scored per game, and points allowed per game.

If we know a college team's points scored per game - which is easy to look up - we just multiply by 48/40, or 6/5 or 1.2. (An NBA team plays 48 minute games; a college team plays 40 minute games). We do the same with points allowed and enter them on the proper place in the spreadsheet.

That's it. We've determined the teams. We've created the cards. Now it's time to actually play a game....

Cardmaker

2009-02-02T18:16:00.001-08:00

The important links for any Statis Pro Fan are at tabletop-sports.com.

The most important of these important links is CardMarker by Bob Standage (Warning: Download). This is the Excel spreadsheet that I use (with slight modifications) to create the card sets.

Central Oklahoma Cards

2009-02-02T18:12:00.001-08:00

Here are the final Central Oklahoma Cards.

The next post will be about Home Court Factors, and then I'll post about the first game.

Adjusting College Stats to Statis Pro Basketball

2009-02-02T13:56:00.000-08:00

Suppose we have two teams in Statis Pro Basketball - Team A and Team B. We have two different sets of stats, but we know that Team A is stronger than Team B. How should Team A's stats be adjusted?

First, we need to know the answer, "how strong"? The site I prefer to use is Real Time RPI.com to determine the relative strengths of conferences.

Note that I said conferences, not teams. Teams play within a conference, and their stats already reflect relative strength within a conference - a team can play up to 1/2 of its total games as conference matchups. If Team A and Team B are within the same conference, use the unadjusted stats.

If Team A and Team B are within different conferences, we will look at Team A and Team B's relative RPI. Let's assume that Team A is a Big East Team (like Rutgers) and Team B is a Colonial Athletic Team (like James Madison).

Go to the Conference RPI page of Real Time RPI. Let's look at how strong the Big East is to the Colonial Athletic

Big East: 0.6000
Colonial Athletic: 0.5194

Adjustment: 0.6/0.5194 = 1.1552

The 1.1552 becomes the factor we will use. In general, the Big East is 15 percent better than the CAA.

For Team B, we use the regular stats
For Team A, we use adjusted stats.

Multiply field goals made by the factor.
Multiply 3PG made by the factor.
Multiply FT made by the factor.
Multiply all rebounds by the factor.
Divide personal fouls by the factor.
Multiply assists by the factor.
Divide turnovers by the factor.
Multiply blocks by the factor.
Multiply steals by the factor.

If you need to know the new adjusted points per game, determine how many points the player would have scored for the season with the adjusted numbers and divide by games played. In general, the rule is that we want to reward the player by making good things better and making bad things not as bad.

At least, I know how to adjust Central Oklahoma's stats. Problem: Central Oklahoma does not play in a Division I conference. What should the conference multiplier be?

There are all sorts of ways to answer this question. My way was to determine what conference the #202 team was in and consider that as Central Oklahoma's conference.

Central Oklahoma's proxy conference/Conference USA (the one UTEP belongs to)

= .5051/.4952 = approximately 1.02

Note that these numbers have changed since then. But the conclusion has been decided. Central Oklahoma is 2 percent better than their statistics indicate. We adjust the stats of the Central Oklahoma Bronchos by 2 percent, and go from there.

Why do we adjust Central Oklahoma's stats up? Why not adjust UTEP's stats down?

My reasoning has to do with how the first round of the NCAA tournament concludes, with very strong team playing very weak teams. The score is usually something like 90-50, and not 50-10. I would expect something like 50-10 if the weaker team were rounded down and the stronger one unchanged. Changing the stronger team should create a score something like the typical first-round blowouts of the NCAA tourney.

Next: we'll take a peak at Central Oklahoma's card set.

How Strong is a Division II Team?

2009-02-02T08:57:00.000-08:00

In 2007-08, the UTEP Miner's womens basketball team started off their season with a game against St. Mary's (Texas), a high-ranked Division II school. I decided to have my fictional UTEP Miners play the Central Oklahoma Broncos, a real life Division II team ranked #16 among Division II teams at the time.

If both of these teams were pro teams, card creation would be easy: load in the statistics, print out the cards, and play the game. However, one would expect that the two teams wouldn't be on an equal basis. So how do you alter the cards? And which set of cards do you alter?

I figured that at least for now, I would let the UTEP cards alone and make alterations to UTEP's prospective opponents. We would look at Central Oklahoma's statistics, but we also know that Central Oklahoma's statistics are derived from playing other teams in Division II. How do we change the cards to reflect the difference?

The first question was: How strong is Division II compared to Division I? We really don't have an answer for this question in basketball. Division I teams don't play Division II teams that often, and when they do, the sample of Division II teams probably isn't a representative sample. This might be an insurmountable problem.

However, there is a division that is similar to Division II - the football division that was formerly called "I-AA" before they changed it to some convoluted name. I-AA teams play BCS teams all the time, usually at the beginning of the season. Was there a way to rank the I-AA teams compared to their BCS counterparts?

As it turns out, this has already been done. There are sites on the internet that rank Division I and Division I-AA teams together in the same table - after all, if you're making bets, you want to know exactly how strong that unknown Division I-AA team is. I managed to locate such a table and found that the strongest Division I-AA team was ranked about #50 overall.

There are about 120 BCS-type football teams. I came up with the calculation: 50/120 = 5/12. The strongest Division II basketball teams should be 5/12 of the way down the table of Division I basketball teams.. This puts that team at about #142 on the total ranking of 340 or so Division I women's basketball teams.

However, the I-AA teams, when they appear, did not appear in close order. There was an average gap of about four places between appearances among I-AA teams in the BCS/I-AA table. I came up with a new rule:

The #1 Division II women's basketball team would be ranked about #142 overall in Division I women's basketball,
The #2 Division II team would be ranked about 142 + 4 = #146 overall in Division I,

and so on.

Central Oklahoma at the time was ranked about #16. This put Central Oklahoma equivalent to about #202 on the scale of Division I women's basketball teams.

Meaning that Central Oklahoma is, believe it or not, better than UTEP. I don't find that too implausible. Central Oklahoma was nationally ranked at the time, and UTEP was sitting around .500.

The next question: Now that we know the team's relative positions to each other, how do we adjust the stats? More on my next post.

Card Sets: The Player Cards and Brenda Dean

2009-01-30T08:26:00.001-08:00

As you can see, the cards look pretty good. Brenda Dean/Pete Maravich has been added, and is surrounded by her teammates at last.

If you've never played the game, I'll point out what makes Dean so special.

The first fact is her field goal rating of 43. In a base-eight system (11-18, then 21-28, up to 81-88), her 11-43 rating makes her the one of the best field goal shooters on the team. There are only a few players that have a better rating than she does, and each of those players is handicapped in a particular way.

The second fact is that her line in "secondary" is blank. "Secondary" was created in the game to account for the fact that there are some basketball players who have great field goal accuracy (look at Immaculata Suarez's amazing 62 field goal rating), but don't take a lot of shots in real life.

In the game, there is an "ACTION" phase and (up to) two "ADVANCE" phases. The "ACTION" phase puts the ball in someone's hands. The "ADVANCE" phase moves the ball - up to twice, after which whoever is holding the ball must shoot it. Players can shoot any time they want, they just flip over the next number and see if it falls in the field goal range.

However, if the player decides to shoot directly off the ACTION phase - the player gets the ball and immediately decides to shoot - the "secondary" rating must be used and not the "field goal" rating. This provides a disincentive for most players to shoot immediately vs. handing off the ball to someone else. When getting the ball through an "ADVANCE", a player can shoot.

Result? Immaculata Suarez is dynamite only if someone sets up a shot for her. But Brenda Dean, since she has no "secondary" rating scores just as well off the "ACTION" phase as she does off the "ADVANCE" phase.

(Perversely, LaToya Lloyd scores much better when she creates her own shot than when someone else creates it for her. I wonder what's up with that?)

Now, note the 31 in parenthesis. This is Dean's 3-point rating. If she decides to shoot from behind the arc, her range is cut down to 11-31. Other players have better 3-point ratings than Dean does, but it's the (+) that's important.

Dean can shoot five 3-pointers a game (actually, she can shoot 13 if she wants to - the cardmaking machine doesn't account for Maravich-like superproduction). Other players have "iii" or "**" or nothing next to their number in parenthesis - they can only attempt one, two, three or four 3-point shots per game.

Dean's rebound rate of 25 is exceeded by only two other players. When determining who gets a rebound, the card might read "High at F1". Whichever player has the higher rebound rating at the Forward (#1) position gets the rebound. So Dean has a good chance of getting rebounds.

Stamina: This is the monster advantage. Dean's stamina is a ludicrous 53 (the next highest is Moss's 18). What keeps a player from just keeping his starters in the game perpetually? Stamina. Players that run out of stamina only shoot with the secondary rating and their defense rating goes to "+5" - they add five points to the shooting accuracy of their defenders.

Stamina gets used up with each field goal attempt, each rebound and each foul. Dean's superhuman 53 in stamina means that she could stay in for the entire game without rest under optimal conditions.

Also of note: Dean's foul drawing rating of 43. Once again, ridiculously high. There is a high chance than anyone defending Dean will be tempted into fouling her to stop her. And when starters are in foul trouble, the scrubs have to come off the bench - and scrubs generally have high defense ratings.

Dean's defense rating is +1: she's not a great defender. No one ever recruited/drafted Maravich for his defensive skills, and the same goes for Dean. "Zero" is average, and the range goes from -5 (an All-Star defender) to +5 (all offense). These imaginary UTEP miners aren't much of a defensive team - the starters have the highest stamina, and most of their ratings are positive numbers.

So what does that final card mean? The one with the nice UTEP Miners picture on it? More later.

The UTEP Cards

2009-01-30T05:07:00.001-08:00

The cards for UTEP, stored as a large .gif image. I bet you can tell this was made with Excel.

More later.

Creating the UTEP Miners

2009-01-29T07:01:00.000-08:00

I decided to base the UTEP miners on the current miners of the 2008-09 season. I avoided using the 2007-08 miners because I believe they had some sort of horrible record. In hindsight, my reasons were good, I just couldn't remember what they are.

The next step was to get rid of one of the Minerettes and create Brenda as a member of the team. This led to a little bit of difficulty.

First, I had an abbreviated version of Pistol Pete Maravich's stats from the LSUsports.net website. Unfortunately, it was partially incomplete. We had no information on his steals and blocks. Therefore, I had to borrow from the basketball-reference.com profile on Maravich to get an idea of how well Maravich stole or blocked.

The next problem was that while Maravich was playing at LSU, there was no offensive rebounding. Only overall rebounds were counted, and I needed offensive rebounding rates to create my new player's card. Good thing for most of Maravich's NBA career that offensive rebounds were totaled (they started differentiating between offensive and defensive rebounds in the 1973-74 season).

Finally, there was the problem of Maravich's (theoretical) 3-point shooting rate. If Pistol Pete was to be reincarnated as a female college player, we'd have to know what his/her 3-point shooting rate was. Basketball-reference would be no help, as the 3-point shot only entered NBA history when Maravich was at the end of his career and playing limited minutes.

All I had was that "57 points a game" statement to work with. After some mathematical finagling, I came up with a 3-point shooting rate for Maravich - .280.

That's not a very great 3-point shooting rate. For a modern WNBA shooting guard, you'd expect her to shoot better than .300 from outside the 3-point line. I decided to work with the limitation anyway. Brenda Dean would be a real point scorer, but would only shoot .280 from beyond the line - let's just say she was never really accurate with her shots until she could work her way in close.

I had Dean's statistics. I had the statistics of everyone else at UTEP, and I projected their current stats out to a complete 29-game schedule. All that was left were some name changes - the UTEP players would go under assumed names. It would be as if Michael Jordan were renamed "Jordan Michaelson" for copyright purposes on some XBox version of NBA Live 09.

Next up: creating the cards.

The Setup

2009-01-28T07:06:00.000-08:00

So who is Brenda Dean? How did she get created? What does she want from us? This involves the story of a wonderful game called Statis Pro Basketball.

I'll give you some background about the game itself. Back in the days before the personal computer reigned supreme, there were people who wanted to take their sports fandom to the next level - immersion. A company called Avalon Hill, which produced pencil, counter and dice wargames created a game called Statis Pro Basketball, a part of their Statis Pro line of products. (Statis Pro Baseball, Statis Pro Football, etc.)

Each player in the pro game would be represented by a card with a range of numbers for field goal shooting, fouling, etc. Instead of dice, something called a Fast Action Deck would move the game forward. Players would consult this deck of playing cards and look at the numbers on it if they wanted to pass to another player, make a shot, etc.

It was a game well adapted to solitare play. If you didn't have a friend, you just set whatever strategy made sense for the opposing team and had at it. It was probably the best of the sports based board games.

What happened to Statis Pro Basketball? Two things. First, there was a change in the system from "base eight" to "base ten". Without going into detail, this upset the purists, and other rules changes took a lot of the strategy out of the players' hands. Second, the death of the board game companies (including Avalon Hill) as the PC could do things a lot better and smarter than it could be done with boards and paper.

So why, Pet, are you resurrecting this tired old format? The answer is simple: PC games don't give me what I want.

What I want is women's basketball. The WNBA. Women's college hoops. The problem is that PC games cost money to create and are market creations. There are a lot more men's basketball fans than there are women's basketball fans, so the attitude of the computer gamers to fans of women's basketball is a big raised middle finger. If I want NBA Live 09, I can get it in a thousand places; if I want a similar version for the WNBA, I can get a handful of WNBA players from the Wii version of NBA Live 09. No teams. No leagues. No franchise mode. That's it.

I want more. And if I can't get what I want, I'll figure out a way to get it on my own.

Frisco del Rosario wrote about his experiences with Statis Pro Basketball, which sparked memories of an experience where I played out the entire season for the Golden State Warriors as a young adult (it was the 1987-88 season). I managed to get 40 wins out of the Warriors, namely because Ralph Sampson stayed healthy. So I thought could I do women's basketball with Statis Pro Basketball?

The answer was "yes". I could. As it turned out, there was a man named Phil Graham who loved SPB (which I'll call the game from now on) and had made his own cards. He not only had all of the WNBA sets which he had made himself, but he had a Fast Action Deck suited not only for WNBA play, but for college basketball play as well.

I wanted to avoid my dependence on Phil Graham's largess for the time being. I would create my own imaginary universe of players based on real life players - only the names would be changed. If the game didn't work right, I could simply say, "well, that's how basketball works in the imaginary universe". I would become the umpire of my little world: whatever I said happened, happened.

Why college basketball and not the pros? I happened to bump into an article written about "Pistol" Pete Maravich which stated that he averaged 40 points a game while playing for LSU. The hook was that one of his coaches had done a chart of his shot selection, and estimated that if the 3-point goal had been part of the rules when The Pistol was playing, he would have averaged 57 points a game.

Then the lightbulb went off: if there were a women's basketball player that averaged 57 points a game, could she lead her team automatically to the NCAA championship?

I had found a card-creating spreadsheet that, with a few tweaks, would print out entire card sets for any basketball team I wanted to put into the data. I could therefore follow the premise to its logical conclusion - create a player with Pistol Pete's stats, put that player on a college basketball team, and watch what happened.

There were some hurdles, obviously:

One was which team? If you put this Pistol-Pete-In-Drag player - which I decided to call "Brenda Dean" - onto a team, how do we know the team wouldn't have won without Maravich/Dean? Furthermore, if you put Maravich/Dean - I'll just refer to her as "Dean" from now on - on a crappy team, what's to keep Dean from being double and triple-teamed all game?

She had to go to a team that was not very good, but not abysmally bad. I decided on the team in the #226 position of the RPI Women's website at Real Time RPI.

Of course, I had to get a copy of this out-of-print game first. EBay solved that problem. About $40 later, I was in business. I just had to wait for the game to show up. So while I waited, I'd visit the RPI and see what kind of teams ended up in the #226 spot - the spot where the bottom 1/3 of women's basketball begins.

Each day, the team would change. Wright State. Lafayette. Northwestern Louisiana. Massachusetts. And on the day the game finally showed up at my door, the team was....University of Texas at El Paso.

Mighty UTEP. Hail Miners.

Brenda Dean was going to be a Miner. But there were other hurdles to overcome.