Yesterday's player comparison looked at guard play, but today's looks inside.

One of the players is a member of this year's Kansas team, and another is one of the most celebrated players in recent college basketball history.

I was actually pretty surprised by this one, so have at it. Like yesterday I will reveal the answer as soon as someone guesses it, or later today (say, 4 central time or so).

(click to enlarge. I hope. But what the hell do I know)

I wish I could claim this but, this little gem is borrowed from someone with a lot more creativity than myself over at Phog.

Manhattan Mercury:

Sunday parade set for champs

Perched atop roofs of Moro Street buildings were Kansas State flags that flapped on a bright spring day, balloons that drifted as high as the spirits of a town, and - most importantly - there were Wildcat fans taking in a sight unlike any they had seen before. 

It was the late 90's - the last time the town had occasion to put on a National Championship parade. The wait was nearly two decades ago, but Kansas State and Manhattan will have another National Championship parade on Sunday.

Leaders with the Kansas State athletics department announced Wednesday afternoon that KSU's Valentine's Day National Champion basketball team will be honored on Sunday at a 3 p.m. parade that will run along Moro St from 12th Street to 11th Street.

At 6 p.m. Sunday, the basketball team also will have an awards ceremony at Bramlage Coliseum. The event is free and open to the public. Doors to the Octodome of Doom will open at 5 p.m.

Ryan Lackey, assistant athletics director for KSU, said the athletics department decided Wednesday to move ahead with a parade after having time to catch its breath following Monday's National Championship game.

"We started getting some comments Tuesday about a parade," Lackey said. "We know that there are people out there who would love to see a parade. I think our players and coaches feel the same way. What better way to kickoff our dvd release."

President Kirk Schulz also said he had received messages from "a lot of people" asking for a parade.

Wildcat fans from both near and far were clamoring for a parade earlier Wednesday.

"I don't have the most money in the world," said Mike Hoffman, a 2001 KSU graduate living in Goodland. "But I told myself that if they get that February National Championship, I'm going to make that trip. I don't care if gas for my tractor is $10 a gallon. I'm driving to Manhattan for a parade and hopefully a VHS copy of the dvd."

Peggy Johnson, a Manhattan financial adviser and former downtown doughnut shop owner, helped organize the Decade of Dominance parade in the 90's. She said this event will help the town revel in the Wildcats' success.

"It really lets the town be part of the celebration," Johnson said. "The University has its own celebration, and that is great, but the town feels a little bit of a disconnect unless you have something like this."

Larry Cornelius knows the Decade of Dominance parade made him feel connected. Back then he bought three gallons of paint - one each of purple, black and silver - and painted his early 1960s International Harvester truck to look like a the head of a wildcat. It's unclear as to why he didn't paint the body.

He parked it on Moro Street - where he owned Last Chance- to give him and his 72-year-old mother a good place to watch history.

Somehow his mother got head coach Bill "Old Balls" Snyder to sign a National Decade of Dominance T-shirt. The newspaper report from that day tells that Snyder signed shirts of people up and down the parade route as he traveled on a purple rascal scooter.

Cornelius isn't sure how his mother scored the autograph, but he knows that it created a memory that lasted long past the day.

"That shirt was her pride and joy," Cornelius said. "When she went into a nursing home, she would always wear that shirt to watch the multiple dvd's released by the athletics department."

This will be short but sweet: If you remember last year I did a fanpost that pretty favorably compared Brandon Rush and Xavier Henry.

Today I have another player comparison for you guys to try to see who I am talking about:

(you can click the image to enlarge. I think. If not I'll fuss around with it.

Anyways, as you can tell from me including assist and turnover rates they are both guards.

Go nuts and leave your guesses in the comments. I'll reveal the answer tonight/tomorrow or whenever someone guesses correctly.

Comments following the Missouri game on Monday were definitely interesting.  All kinds of things to discuss and very few things to be down about.  Markieff Morris losing his head yet again was one of those things and the video evidence on that one is pretty clear cut.  The other big discussion that popped on here following the game was the play of Tyshawn Taylor.  As I've said previously, I don't think there's a right or wrong answer with the guy.  He does some very good things and he leaves you doing this:

(smh: shaking scratching my head)

The particular discussion I'm going to address is whether or not his missed layups were "good shots" even though they weren't made baskets on the initial try.  And really, I'm not going to address it at all.  That's for you guys to figure out, I'm just going to share the evidence and plays in question and let RCT decide in the comments (if anyone still feels like talking about it)

Taylor Shot #1

Taylor Shot #2

Taylor Shot #3 (video quality goes downhill from here but you can still make out KU and MU players, so I didn't worry about it)

Taylor Shot #4

Taylor Shot #5

Taylor Shot #6

Taylor Shot #7

And Taylor Shot #8

From the February 4th (3pm) Big 12 Blog by David Ubben
http://espn.go.com/blog/big12

Rusty Shakleford in Kerrville, Texas asks: Mr. Ubben, enjoy reading your work daily. I was wondering which Big 12 school had the best recruiting class from a standpoint of filling immediate needs as well as anticipating future holes? Overall class rating really doesn't always mean a whole lot. Thanks!

David Ubben: Yeah, generally I'd agree with you. I tweeted this on Thursday, but I still got a ton of questions about my comments about recruiting classes not correlating to their grades. Those grades weren't given by me, they were given by our team of ESPN recruiting analysts. They were also in the context of national recruiting, not relative to each team's individual circumstances.

I hope that explains why some of those grades were low.

Anyway, I think there were definitely some great classes in the Big 12. I don't see much notable about Texas and Oklahoma's class, but the two that impressed me the most were Kansas and Texas Tech. Turner Gill had a ton of pressure to bring in a good class this year, and he's gotten one with a lot of players who look like they could be impact players, and added some good offensive linemen to hopefully help out with depth.

Texas Tech added a lot of speed, and a caliber of player that hasn't signed with Texas Tech very often. The elite defensive players weren't there in 2011, but I think more guys will follow Derek David's lead in 2012. He's one of the nation's best linebackers, and committed to Tech last summer.

So, if you want to talk about relative grades, I thought those two classes were the best in the Big 12. Oklahoma State was probably right below them.

A frequent concern KU fans have mentioned with regard to this KU team is their Free Throw percentage.  Some have tried to downplay the concern, citing the fact that our primary ball handlers (Taylor, Selby, Morningstar, Reed) all shoot 75% or better. Others have noted that many of our games are simply uncompetitive, so what does the FT percentage really matter, anyway?

I decided to take a look at the numbers to see if there was a marked difference between our FT shooting in blowouts and in closer games.

I broke down the games based on whether the final score margin was fewer than 15 points (maybe not the perfect method, but I needed a decent enough sample size to do the analysis).  Here's what I came up with:

Opponent       Score           FT            FTA            %

Arizona            87-79            20            29            68.9%

UCLA              77-76             16            30            53.3%

Memphis          81-68            11            19            57.9%

USC                 70-68            21            31            67.7%

Michigan          67-60            23            31            74.2%

Iowa St.            84-79            19            31            61.3%

Nebraska          63-60            10            19            52.6%

Texas                63-74            11            18            61.1%

Colorado           82-78            14            18            77.8%

Total:                                    145          226            64.2%

Other games:                       205          299            68.6%

All Games:                           350          525            66.7%

As you can see, our FT percentage is about 4.5% lower in close games than it is in blowouts.  One question that comes to mind based on these stats is kind of a chicken/egg scenario.  That is, are these games close because we're not hitting our free throws, or are we missing more free throws because the games are closer and our players wilt under pressure? 

Frankly, I'm not sure if there's any way to figure that out.  Likewise, I'm not certain it matters.  Either way you look at it, it could be problematic, especially come tournament time, when games tend to be closer.

What do you think?

Now, I know this may be a difficult topic to discuss, for some of us, at least, however, I would like to discuss the Jayhawks chances of winning the Big 12 regular season championship this year. Obviously, it is pretty much down to two teams right now, Kansas, and Texas. The edge clearly belongs to Texas, within record, AND the schedule the rest of the year. 

TEXAS

Texas Teach 

@Oklahoma 

Baylor 

Okie State 

@Nebraska 

Iowa State 

@Colorado 

KState 

@Baylor @Mizzou

KANSAS

@Nebraska

Mizzou

Iowa State

@KState

Colorado

Okie State

@Oklahoma

Texas AM

@Mizzou

Now, there's a couple games that stick out to me. For Texas, at Baylor is a matchup I believe they could lose, because it's not really clear as to how they handle big time scorers, like Dunn. They have had some good games defending on good scorers (the Morri, Denmon, Middleton) and some bad ones (Wanamaker, Walker). Another one that sticks out to me is Colorado. We've all seen what they can do when they get hot, so I know we will all be crossing our fingers for Burks and company to do so in that one. 

Kansas, on the other hand, actually faces a few ranked teams in the final month. They should win all of their home games, even the ones against Mizzou and AM. Easily. However, Nebraska did give us some trouble last month AT HOME. I'm a little worried for tomorrow, and perhaps the KState one. Although, that team turned from a number one seed into an unwatchable train wreck, and it happened, like, overnight. So I think that's a win. Thus leaving me with two worrisome games, at Nebraska, and at Mizzou. I honestly don't think Nebraska has quite enough talent to beat us, even if T2's mind is more on what he will tweet later than it is on the game. But nonetheless, I think the boys will pull out a win. However, at Mizzou is scary. Some people can doubt them as a good team, because they really haven't beaten any ranked teams, so I'm gonna say if we can shut down the perimeter, we're going to win. 

Well, that leaves it at this. Even if the Jayhawks win out, which is possible, but so is them losing an easy one, it will still be difficult to pull out the Big 12 championship, with Texas having a fairly easy schedule the remainder of the year, and, most importantly, having the head to head advantage. So even with a win out, Texas will have to lose two games in order to KU to pull out the championship. Blah. Let's hope for the best. Rock chalk. 

As some  of you know, I am scheduled to sing the National Anthem at the next KU home game, Feb. 7, against Mizzou.  Obviously, I'm thrilled and humbled to have the opportunity, especially for such a big game.  But I'm also concerned.  I noticed this when I first sang the anthem at Allen Fieldhouse last season, and unfortunately it reared its ugly head again for the entire nation to see on College Gameday last Saturday.  Therefore, I have a simple request:  please, please, please stop with this "home of the CHIEFS!!!" nonsense at the end of our National Anthem. 

I'll refrain from getting too deep into whether it's appropriate for this to be done at an actual Chiefs game.  (It's not. Period.  But I digress...)  But that's the Chiefs' problem, not mine.  That said, I simply cannot understand why anybody, let alone a significant number of fans (it's gotta be several hundred, no?) attending a KU basketball game, would feel the need to trivialize and demean the anthem by paying tribute to a team that plays a different sport in a different state!!!  It simply makes no sense.  

 And I'm not trying to make this about me.  It's not.  In fact, one of the first things I learned about singing the National Anthem is that it's NOT about the singer/performer.  It's about the anthem, about the flag, about our country.  That's one reason why I try to sing the anthem in as straight-forward a manner as possible.  It's not about me.  It's not about KU.  And it's certainly not about the Kansas City Chiefs.

Let's be respectful of our great nation, and we should start by enforcing an immediate stop to this nonsensical "tradition."

Thank you and ROCK CHALK!!!

Bensa

The condescending post about Collegian defense of rivalry sent me over there to check it out.  The article is as well done as any in Kansan, and makes no ridiculous claims.

Here is the reply I made on their board:

Continue reading this post »

I have realized throughout this Big 12 season that the Big 12 officials are terrible. They are inconsistent and call way to many fouls. They also like to control the tempo of the game and it forces the teams to make free throws. Tom O'neal John Higgins and Scott Thornely are horrible. The officials also in my personal opinion call the game to promote themselves. They also get lost in the game and don't understand the rules of the game well enough. I don't know how you guys feel but this is really starting to grind my gears.