WTKA Roundtable 6/22/2023: Himalayan Peach Pie
Things Discussed:
- Craig responds to Spath re: his fandom and player movement. Craig tells the Tamakwa "Will Peach Pie Do?" story.
- NBA Draft: Not surprised that Kobe Bufkin is ahead of Jett Howard because he's the better basketball player. Kobe is actually what they call 6'6"—calling him 6'4" is doing him a disservice.
- John Thompson: Start with something you can do elite first. Counterpoint: Every coach thinks they can build a great player.
- Jett has an elite skill, needs the right team, would LOVE to go to Miami, would be another Duncan Robinson.
- Beilein to WVU? Lol no. Seth: He's one of those retired guys that people think can still coach because he still has his hair. Like remember how they kept bringing up Chuck Daly?
- What happened with Reeves? What does MBB do now? Go full Rutgers?
- Jim Knowles: There are several DCs around this league who would have been better ideas.
- What happened vs Michigan? Not Illinois because they had a high safety and disguised things. Knowles lost the thread of the rivalry. Michigan-Ohio State is about two great teams being the best version of themselves. Ohio State got too used to having the better players. Does he have the better players on defense?
- Cam Martinez: Not supposed to be over Cornelius Johnson in the slot on an all-way go.
- Lathan Ransom had the worst hypothetical UFR game we've ever seen. Involved in most of the big breakdowns. Brian's had a tennis game like that before.
- Hockey's new assistants: Smart and young.
[Hit the JUMP for the player, and video and stuff]
You can catch the entire episode on Michigan Insider's podcast stream.
I came on 5 minutes early to talk Pistons here. Segment 2 is here. You can watch the video here:
MGoBlog Roundtable https://t.co/YCdDW0oJd8
— Sam Webb (@SamWebb77) June 22, 2023
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Knowles has called some stupid defenses; he didn't call that.
It's Chuck Daly not however you spelled it.
Have some respect for the legend 😉
I wonder how clearly Ryan Day is thinking about how/why they were so unprepared on defense to face us last season. I agree that Knowles gets one more chance to figure it out but we're going to be even better on offense this coming year than we were last year.
My guess is that Day senses there is a fundamental problem with Knowles but doesn't want to admit it was a failed hire; meanwhile if we score 40-50 points on them again this time around (and win, of course) it might be too late.
I guess I don't know, was the problem Knowles, or the assistants (i.e. player development)? Or some of both? I mean his defense did pretty well bottling us up, until it didn't (though when it failed, it failed spectacularly). I'm not sure what you're supposed to do with such atrocious secondary play, and the three long passing TDs were definitely a result of just horrendous plays by the DBs. I guess you could try to leave back more safety help, but it definitely seems that Knowles was under a mandate to not let us just pound them down the field like we did the year before, and would have been perfectly content to do again (plus making us try to beat them over the top wasn't the worst idea in the world given our struggles to do so throughout the season).
I dunno. I do worry that if they are able to get the developmental issues turned around, his defense could be a lot more successful. So I hope they continue to struggle getting their guys to play up to their recruiting rankings, and/or that Knowles does turn out to be in over his head...
I have no idea how one might divvy up the responsibility for those failures in the secondary b/t the DC and his subordinates. But I'm not sure it matters externally because it's Knowles' responsibility to manage the assistants that work for him. And ultimately it's Day's responsibility to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
As they said on the podcast this morning, it's unlikely that this coming season/Michigan game are make or break for Day. His track record of winning a higher percentage of games than any previous OSU HC except Urban Meyer will certainly buy him more time, assuming he wants to stay in the crucible.
But if he's sticking with Knowles, which he obviously is for at least one more season, he better be doing an honest assessment of what went wrong, how to fix it and whether or not Knowles is on track to do so as they move forward.
I have no idea how one might divvy up the responsibility for those failures in the secondary b/t the DC and his subordinates. But I'm not sure it matters externally because it's Knowles' responsibility to manage the assistants that work for him. And ultimately it's Day's responsibility to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
I guess I give Knowles a little more leeway on the player development front given that it was his first year, so a lot of his problems there were inherited (though quick turnarounds can happen; Hoke/Mattison in 2011 and McDonald in 2021 completely turned around two of the worst defenses I remember us ever fielding in 2010 and 2020). If it continues to be a problem going forward, that's definitely on him as much as anyone (and Day bears plenty of responsibility too, this is all under his watch).
When you are born on third base, do you have enough experience to accurately diagnose problems in scheme or personnel?
Knowles may suck as a DC, but probably adds value as a consigliere, because he provides that experience. If Day is smart enough to listen.
I don't think they had a terrible plan. They sold out to stop our run game. Remember when, in the pregame show, Urban Meyer said "we're" going to stop the run? They did that by loading the box to stop it at the line of scrimmage. That worked well except when it didn't and there was no one back to make the stop.
"They said he couldn't throw the deep ball."
UM had 155 yards on two (2) plays.
Other than that we had 103 yards on 33 other rushes.
Knowles: "60% of the time, it works every time."
That converts to "4th and less than a yard" every three rushes. Or "Third and 3ish" for every two rushes. Leaves a lot of options open on third downs.
Well factor in Blake's 2 carries for 4 yds in there.
I think the yd/att just might have been better if he'd been healthy!
IMO, they were as prepared as they could be on defense. When they tried to bottle us up and stop the run no matter what, we passed on them. When they stopped that in the 3rd Q, we paved them. But for all the talk of their defense, it's amazing to me how relatively little serious media critique there has been of why Day's vaunted offense could only put up 3pts in the entire 2nd half.
It was
vs.
EDIT: Aaron and Bryce, it's about getting to the League and being the best version of yourself, both on and off the field. Which S&C program is better? Which coaching staff is better? It's not about family fandom. That should NOT be a consideration. Fans in every city want you to come to play for their team.
This is about YOUR development, as a person and as a player, PERIOD.
As the bullet point said, Cam Martinez over slot Cornelius Johnson with no help anywhere is awful strategy. And as the gang has said before, this was the equivalent of pulling your goalie. I get that 42-27 was a humiliation that could not be repeated, but it's remarkable that all those 5-stars couldn't be lined up in a responsible defense that could prevent another 42-27.
They did prevent another "42-27". They lost 45-23.
I thought it was apple pie?
Craig flipped the fruits from the way I learned it, but it's the same joke. Guy tries to get Himalayan Apple Pie, restaurant says Will peach pie do? or vice versa.
Who is this Chuck that they bring up daily? Is that up from a weekly mention?
Him-uh-LAY-uh is the British/American pronunciation.
Him-MALL-lie-ya is the Indian/Nepali pronunciation.
I didn't know that.
MGoBlog is educational and tastes great.
Not exactly, it depends what region. I used to work with (with several direct reports) a few dozen people born and raised in Nepal, and they all pronounced it Him-uh-LAY-uh. It may have technically been Hee-mall-LAY-uh, but it was so subtle there was virtually no difference to the untrained ear.
Just go with what you read.. Hi-ma-la-ya.
There are idiosyncracies in various Indian languages that's very difficult to capture in English.
In my language it is -> Hi-ma-loy.
Going with what I read?! I'm so confused.
Is the ostensibly obvious "Hi" pronounced "high" or "hih"?
Is "ma" pronounced "mah" or "may"?
"la" = "lah" or "lay"?
And "ya"? "Yah" or "yay"?
Sincerely, Blue Vet (pronounced "blooey vete"?
Good point. I am not a native English speaker, so when I see a combination of English letters I am pronouncing them as sounds from my mother tongue.
Hi -> He
ma -> ma(h)
la -> la (as in La La Land)
ya -> ....
We would write it -> Himaloy. The last part is "loy" as in "boy", rather than "laya".
p.s. Blue Vet -> I am pronouncing these as Blue (the color) Vet(eran).
English is a pain in the ass language to spell because we had a great vowel shift between the 1300s and 1700s but that was too late to be captured in our spellings. And some vowels didn't shift. And some entire sounds (like the gh sound in laugh or enough or through) went away entirely but weren't removed from the words. So if you learned to spell in any other Latin or Cyrillic language and see the standard vowels that usually make the same sounds wherever you are, you have to remember that English changed all of them:
For the monolinguists, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we have it wrong.
- a should be "ah" or how a Michigander pronounces a short-o.
- e should sound like our long-a.
- i should sound like our long-e.
- o should be long-o.
- u should be long-u.
And if you come to Michigan, we kept shifting those vowels. Our 'a' is now so far back in the throat that we've almost made it glottal. And lately our long 'o' before another vowel is shifting towards a 'u' sound* so it's only going to get worse.
But you can sort of recreate old english if you teach yourself the standard vowel pronunciations.
* [Moana sounds like Mooana. Oddly, it's more prevalent among women--my wife and kids have it but I don't].
Ghoti is pronounced /fish/.
The irony of the ghoti meme is when we see a word like ghoti we treat it as foreign and use standard pronunciation, putting a little extra breath after the hard-g or even rolling it, and treating o and i like /oh/ and /ee/.
Nobody would say it like /gottih/
Craig, kudos to being the first American I’ve heard pronounce Himalayas (which comes from Sankskrit) correctly. Your pronunciation is how I’ve heard it pronounced in various languages from the South Asian subcontinent.
I stayed out of the conversation because I wasn't sure I had my facts straight but when he pronounced it that way I thought he was natively correct.
Pronunciation is weird--it's only recently that we started trying to re-match English versions of placenames to their native pronunciations. We also only do this with placenames that haven't been Anglicized beyond recognition. Nobody's saying "Japan" or "Germany" with Japanese or German accents. And we still say "France" instead of "Frrrahnse" unless we're being particularly pedantic.
I personally think it's fine to stick with English pronunciation if you're speaking English. When I'm speaking French I say les Etats-Unis not "The United States".
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