A bleak night, matching the weather, for MACA

The winter blahs weren't made any better by how the MACA boys basketball game turned out Tuesday (1/20). The opponent was BOLD at the home gym. There was no home court advantage as the Tigers were dealt a 68-52 defeat.

Glum, yes. We trailed 37-22 at halftime. It's not as if BOLD is a world-beater. The Warriors are in fact a .500 team. So are the Tigers, even though we were one game over .500 coming out of Tuesday (at 8-7). In conference we're a modest 3-6.
Click on the permalink below to read about the MACA girls' 73-52 win over Yellow Medicine East on Friday, Jan. 16, here. This post is on my companion website, "Morris of Course." Thanks for reading. - B.W.
http://morrisofcourse.blogspot.com/2015/01/wins-in-maca-girls-hoops-mahaca.html
 

The MACA boys will play at Benson on Thursday.
Against BOLD we made 12 freethrows while BOLD made only four. Still, BOLD was able to show its superior sheen. BOLD made 29 of 58 field goal attempts.
Ethan Weis paced the BOLD scoring with 18 points. Plus he had the team-best rebound total of ten. Nick Kubesh had nine rebounds and Austin Weis had five. Ethan Weis had four assists and Thomas Meyers had three.
Two Warriors each scored eleven points: Trent Athmann and Kubesh. Meyers put in seven points to help stoke the winning BOLD effort. Brad Wolff put in six points and Max Buchtel five. Mason Mages had three points. Breckan Ebnet, Austin Weis and Chris McRell each scored two, while Alex Pietig put in one.
Three-point shooting was a factor in how BOLD pulled away. The Warriors looked quite in the groove from beyond that arc. Ethan Weiss made two long-rangers. These Warriors each made one: Meyers, Mages, Athmann and Buchtel.
Let's move on to the Morris Area Chokio Alberta data. Here we see coach Mark Torgerson's crew making 19 of 52 shots from the field. In freethrows the numbers were 12 of 17. Noah Grove made a pair of 3-pointers. Eric Staebler snared 14 rebounds. Eric also stole the ball twice.
In scoring, the duo of Staebler and Grove were at the fore like they usually are. Staebler scored 17 points and Grove scored 16. There's a dropoff after that, as we see Riley Biesterfeld with six, Jordan Arbach and Phil Anderson each with four, Sean Amundson and Ian Howden each with two, and Robert Rohloff with one.
 

"Deflategate" a serious matter

We learn this morning (Wednesday) that eleven of the 12 balls used by the Patriots vs. the Colts were under-inflated.
Some are disposed to laugh-off this episode. They'll say "the Patriots would have won anyway." Well, besides being beside the point, this assertion may simply not be true. Why do you think sports handicapping is so difficult in Las Vegas? It's because a handful of breaks or special advantages can truly create the decisive momentum for a team. Andrew Luck is not chopped liver.
I'm not holding my breath, but the NFL ought to mete out serious punishment for this. Maybe coach Bill Belichick should be suspended immediately, which means he'd miss the Super Bowl. So what? The assistants could take over the team, like we saw with the U of M Gophers when Jerry Kill had to leave the sidelines for a time.
We still remember "Spygate". The punishment should have been harsher for that. Advertisers for NFL football telecasts do not like blow-out games where presumably a large portion of the audience tunes out. Money will talk, or it ought to. Does the NFL stand for anything else?
And then, we have the Seahawks/Packers game to reflect on. Here's what Spencer Yohe, long-time "famous" Packers fan associated with West Central Minnesota, had to say:
 
The Packers gave it away. I can't understand why Peppers told him to take the slide (on the interception). It looked like a six-pick. They just showed how much green he had in front of him! Game over then. They played not to lose and made so many critical errors in a four-minute time slot! You go with what got you there. McCarthy's conservative approach cost them big time. That's how they got there - run out the clock against the Lions, Patriots, and Cowboys. Just doesn't make sense! Then rush three people instead of four and drop back into a zone on third and 19! A comedy of errors and the biggest Packer collapse ever! The percentages of a team ahead by 12 with four minutes to go, winning, is 98.8. Maybe it was fixed (ha ha). Nobody to blame but themselves! Why the tight end didn't do his job and block is beyond me. Jordy was supposed to get the ball! I'd make the special teams coach and that player find their own way home, or tell them to pack their bags and give them a pink slip when they got back to Green Bay!
 

A final aside re. Tigers

I recently overheard a well-known fan of MACA boys basketball say of this year's team: "They only have three basketball players." I won't type the individual's name. His point was that there are only three Tigers with appreciable talent, enough to be considered a real "basketball player."
My reaction? Well, let me assert this, as someone who once worked with a coach who said the only requirement of his players was to have "two arms and two legs": no top-notch coach would ever look at his roster and say "we only have three basketball players."
One can argue that MACA basketball hasn't made any special mark for quite some time. Maybe we're due. Or overdue.

- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com