Exhibition Game - UTEP 81, Houston Bobcats 73

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.

Moving Along the Exhibition Schedule

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.