Game Two: UTEP 82, CS-Northridge 56

"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.

Deck Randomization and Ejections

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.