Winning By Numbers (It's like color by number, with a basketball!)

Shhhhhhhhh!!!!!! I'm not supposed to be doing this!!!! But I'm simul-posting.

Simul-whaaaat?!?

Simul-posting.

When I submit a blog or particularly a column for Sidelines, I'm not really supposed to post it here as well.  However Sidelines' editors have me a bit peeved because apparently they can't handle my whit, humor, and occasional use of first person, and since a can't play whack-a-mole with them, I'm simply getting my revenge this way.  So ha!

Thus here is Monday's column, uncut, unedited: full of whit, humor, and the occasional word "I" (scandalous!!!!).


Winning By Numbers


As the famed poet, Sean Carter says in his epic, “Reminder”:

"Men lie. Women lie. Numbers don’t."

Ok, so Sean Carter is actually Jay-Z, meaning he’s a multi-platinum recording artist not a famed poet, but the point should be taken. 

The numbers the Lady Raiders are putting up recently are sending a reminder of why they were ranked in the top 25 to start the year and the overwhelming favorites to win the Sun Belt Conference.

The Lady Raiders last loss was on January 9th at University of Arkansas-Little Rock.  It was an ugly game for Big Blue in which they didn’t hit a 3 point basket for the first time ever under Head Coach Rick Insell, and Chastity Reed controlled the game completely with her passing to the tune of 10 assists.

Apparently that was the wake-up call the Lady Raiders needed.

Since that point, the Raiders are on a 9 game winning streak, and that’s the least impressive number.  Simply put, the stats put up in this winning streak are staggering.

Remember how the girls didn’t hit a three in Little Rock? They’ve hit at least 9 in every game since, and are averaging 12.2 triples per game.  For those of you that struggle with math, that’s on average 36 points per game from the great beyond.

Which brings us to the next number which is nearly three times that: 91.  That would be the Lady Raiders scoring average over the 9 wins.

Typically in conference play, games get closer because the opponents are familiar.  However because the Raiders played such a difficult non-conference schedule (including three top ten teams, and the defending national runner up), conference games have seemed easier for the team.

In the words of freshman point guard Kortni Jones “We’re rolling right now.”

But she’s a person. So she could be lying. So let’s have some more numbers!

On top of scoring oodles and oodles of points, the Raiders daunted full court press is working its magic.

Teams can’t get the ball across half-court and when they do they can’t score. 

The Raiders are turning teams over 30.3 times per game. There isn’t a way to quantify how absurdly large that number is, so for comparison just know the Raiders are only turning it over 15.1 times per game.

Once again for those of you that struggle with math, that is indeed less than half as many times.

The key to the Raiders’ success with their press is that a large percentage of those 30+ turnovers are “live-ball” turnovers, meaning blocks or steals, so the Raiders can get out in transition as opposed to “dead-ball” turnovers (ball knocked out-of-bounds, charges, etc) where the ball is taken out of bounds.

The teams that are able to hold on to the magic bean haven’t been able to score it.  The ladies are only giving up 60.4 points per game.

This means their average margin of victory is a whopping 30.6 points per game. Simply put, that’s insane!

MTSU hits the road for a game at Troy Wednesday, before returning home for the final home game of the season Sunday.

On top of it being the annual “Pink-Zone” game to raise money and awareness for breast cancer research, it will be senior night, and there won’t be a dry eye in the glass house, including Coach Insell’s, the players’, and yes, mine.

To have a team with a consensus First-Team All-American (Alysha Clark), the reigning conference Defensive Player of the Year (Chelsia Lymon), the player who should be this year’s recipient of that award (Jackie Pickel, if she doesn’t win it it’s a complete crock), and the school’s all-time leading three point shooter (Brandi Brown) just doesn’t happen very often.

However that’s another article for another day (and that day would be Thursday!), so for now simply enjoy this team one more time in the Murphy Center, and bask in the numbers that they are putting up.

In the meantime I’m going to take a nap. My head’s spinning. Math and I don’t get along.

Craig Hoffman is a sophomore EMC-Journalism major. He can be heard on the Weekend Sports Bash on 88.3 WMTS and WMTS.org Fridays 8-10 pm and Saturdays 8-10 am.  (And since it's my blog you can find my YouTube channel here and the radio show archive here or you can just subscribe to the radio show archive via iTunes (fancy!) here)