Idaho State Card Set

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



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



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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 Five: UTEP 82, Robert Morris 54

"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.

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

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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.