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Thank you so much! ?

The title was a little misleading. He was just saying that the run of four straight championships was going to end, which it did, and that the immediate future after Stewie wasn't going to feature the same dominance as the Stewie era. He later predicted a return to titles and dominance with...

I tend to be a bit confused by the argument about whether to attribute a team's success to the coach or to the players. We all agree it's both, right? First, the players. Geno himself has said (rightly and hilariously, in my view) that "there are two kinds of coaches: coaches who have great...

UConnCat, I'm a huge fan of yours, so please forgive me for expressing the tentative view that you might be a bit too hard on these Slate articles. Over the past 30 years, one of the biggest developments in sports journalism is that some of its top practitioners had no access to inside...

You must have a high opinion of the average piece by journalists who cover the sport. If their real reporting usually tells you valuable things you didn't know, that's great. I personally think it's too bad you'd decline because people could learn a lot from what you have to say.

Serious question: What would you have written if Slate had asked you to write this article about the current state of UConn women's hoops? You probably know more than most if not all of the people who write these articles, so what do you think they should say?

This is a fair critique. One note: The article doesn't exactly say that Walker hasn't developed -- and you're right, she definitely has -- but rather that she "has continued to fall short of expectations as a sophomore." That statement is probably true considering her expectations as not just...

Is the article really as negative as most are saying? It calls Geno "maybe the greatest coach in the history of not just basketball but any regularly televised American sport." And it ends with this: "Give it two or three years, and most fans will have forgotten that Geno Auriemma’s Huskies...

Thoughts? The UConn Women Didn’t Get a No. 1 Seed in the NCAA Tournament. Huh?

You said that Bo Jackson would have been a Hall of Famer in two different sports if he hadn't gotten injured. He actually would have been a Hall of Famer in neither pro football nor pro baseball. He wouldn't have made it in baseball because he simply wasn't good enough. It had nothing to do...

Those are totally fair things to say, and I apologize for being curt in my responses to your post. My early posts in this thread were more measured in tone, and then when the same strong statements (which I believe were misleading) kept being made, I decided to try a more terse approach. But...

That's true. :) As fans of sports, it's thrilling to see certain types of awe-inspiring plays. And if someone wants to value those plays in terms of their own preferences in how they appreciate sports, more power to them. However, in the context of asking who was the best multi-sport...

No they don't. Really? Do you mean in high school competitions? Lots of people were champions in all sorts of things in high school competitions. Sort of. Bo's record is unofficial because it occurred before they started using electronic timers. * * * Look, Bo Jackson's actual...

Not even close. Bo never scored more than 6 touchdowns in a season in the NFL, and there was only one season in which he accounted for even 800 yards from scrimmage. In baseball, his greatest achievement was once finishing 10th in the AL MVP voting -- a feat from which he regressed the next...

A good case can be made for Brown. It really comes down to how lacrosse gets valued. If you treat it like the major sports, that helps him a ton. If you treat it very differently (on the ground that its relative lack of media attention means that fewer great athletes choose to play it as...

Bo was awesome and definitely belongs in the discussion, but there are no easy answers here. Although Bo was a superstar football player in college, his stats in pro football and pro baseball were unspectacular (albeit solid) -- and that's before he got injured. He did have a couple of strong...

I know! Your post was great: I "liked" it at the time. The track and field stuff is why I chose my words carefully in saying that only in basketball did he "produce meaningful accomplishments in national or international competitions" -- which I do think is the primary measure of success in a...

Wilt is in the Volleyball Hall of Fame for his off-court contributions to the sport, not for his on-court ones, which were insignificant. Although he was a super-extraordinary athlete who almost certainly could have been great at multiple sports, basketball is the only one in which he actually...

There's obviously no comparison between what they did after college, but if we're just comparing what they did before the NCAA tournament in 2010-2011 (the basis for NPOY voting), I think Jimmer's selection is understandable. Both had great stats, but Jimmer scored more points with better...

If Jimmer had gone on to have Ainge's pro career and also played baseball in the bigs, we'd be talking about him here too.

Thanks! I was tricked by this website, which wrongly says he was a 3-time AA in football. However, I think it's fair to call him a two-time AA in football. He was a consensus pick in 1926 and a 3rd-team AP selection in 1925. Another indication of how good he was is that he's in the College...

As I look up the achievements of the major names that have been mentioned here, I'm actually liking my original pick of Vic Hanson. He might not have been as good as some others in his best sport, but he may well have been better than anyone else at his second-best and third-best major sports...

I'm not sure this is true. Thorpe had limited opportunities to show how good he was or wasn't on the pro level because there wasn't much of a pro level in football at that time. In college, he was a truly awesome football player, but so was Ainge in basketball (NPOY). Overall, I certainly...

Vic Hanson should not be forgotten. He's the only member of both the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and the College Football Hall of Fame -- he was a three-time All-American in both football and basketball -- and he was also the captain of his college baseball team and signed by the Yankees...

That's a very fair point. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I think that 2011 was a vastly greater challenge than this one. But even so, your views have made me question my previous confidence about next year. I still think UConn will be far better than #8 and a contender for the...

Slu makes two main points: (1) We'll lack paint protection because Collier is our only big; and (2) Gabby was so good in 2017 that next year's team will be much worse than that team was. Let me address both: 1. Paint protection We have a center in Collier, as well as two players -- Megan...

You make many smart points, as usual. But here's the key thing: In order to be much better than #8, UConn doesn't need to get the kind of improvement next year that it got from KLS and Collier two years ago. Two years ago, UConn needed that improvement because all its best players were...

Slu, you are one of the most indispensable members of the Boneyard and I admire you greatly. So I'm just really, really surprised to see you say this. With huge respect, I have to say that I think you're way more pessimistic than necessary on this. In the fall of 2016, UConn was preseason #3...

What a great post! Thanks, Alydar.

Milford, thanks very much for your posts. You and others have totally convinced me that my Ezi/Brunelle speculation was wrong -- which is great! Unfortunately, the other explanations are ruled out by Dolphan's claims. As you say, it would make sense for UConn not to visit Sam this year if...

Don't forget Megan (for two years). I think it's fine, though. Megan could play the 2 and Christyn the 1, or else we could have more than 5 "starters," like we do now.

Yes, I know: Ezi is a traditional 5, and Sam is a 4 who can play outside. Here was my thought process. As of two months ago, we had ONO but not Ezi or Sam. So it made sense to recruit Sam to play the 4 alongside ONO, who would play the 5 in that scenario. Then when we got Ezi -- if that's...

Nice!

Coco, I would love to believe there's nothing to this. But some credible BYers seem to be taking Dolphan seriously. Arguably, it's corroborated by Geno's recent increased recruiting of Haley Jones (though that could be unrelated). Again, I hope all this about Brunelle is bunk, but others...

If you're right about that, then everything's fine. Are you sure, though? She sounds like a 4 to me. Yes, I know that UConn plays positionless basketball, but the question is whether Ezi, ONO, and Brunelle could all play at the same time for most of the game. If so, then there's no problem.