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You guys should do a total fakeout and go the other way with the Christian name. You know why?

Nobody expects the Valparaiso Inquisition.

Chaminade did have that big win over Virginia one time...

I like this guy 

Murray or Belmont to the HL is a message board pipe dream, for Murray especially. Yeah, the Racers are totally going to make a lateral move to another one-bid league where the nearest conference mate *is further away from them than literally every OVC school*. I love Panther U's school spirit, but come on.

Given that they are the #7 basketball team in their own town, I fully expect LeCrone to jump on board the IUPUI train.

I want to point out that I freely admit, every time, the chances of bringing in Murray State and Belmont are slim-to-none. I'm just throwing ideas out there. A lot of the time, I'll throw and idea out and it misses. Sometimes, I'll throw out an idea and it sticks.

We'll probably add three schools that few will be excited about, then one or more of them will eventually do well.

If I was Detroit Mercy I would try for the MAAC.

What's funny about this is there's Iona fans on Twitter talking up moving to the Horizon League.

Maybe the grass isn't greener?

It's important to note that Media Milwaukee, the student reporters' online website, had their open records request for a very small window of AD Amanda Braun's e-mails for a couple weeks during March. If there's evidence of sabotage, it's almost certainly not in the blacked out sections of those e-mails - only referenced.

Blaming UWM's disappointing season on not taking an overseas trip is a bit over the top...

I'm not saying Milwaukee was going to win the conference or vault to the double-bye. I'm saying that the team would have gotten huge benefits from taking that foreign trip. That could have been a win or two or it could have been a bunch. You can't really quantify it, but our team lost a practice a week in 2014-15 and it showed. A summer trip adds five games against pro teams and a slew of practices.

Link: Mike Decourcy Story

"I think it's a huge advantage." - Mick Cronin, Cincinnati

Ask coaches how big it is.

Of course, there are a myriad of other things I can't talk about.

I wanted to say one more thing: you guys got affected by her sabotage. A lot of the stuff is under the surface, but take the foreign trip alone into account - you did it this year and you had probably your best team since 1998, as far as I know. Milwaukee's last foreign trip was in 2010, preceding our 2011 championship. Butler went to Italy in the summer of 2009 - how did they do in 2009-10 anyways? Cleveland State did it in 2008, and they won the 2009 HLT and were the last non-Butler team to win in the NCAA Tournament.

So what does this tell me? Summer foreign trips help basketball teams, and they help them a lot. The talent is there, and maybe Valpo/MKE/Butler/CSU would have been just as good without the foreign trips. But you go, you have an unforgettable experience. You bond, you play basketball, you get a bunch of games and double that amount for practices. Teams become better because of those trips.

We didn't take one in summer 2015. We were 20-13. We were within one or two possessions of winning 9 of our 13 losses. This team needed one or two breaks in 9 losses - with an average amount of possessions around 70 - to go 29-4 instead. We weren't as good as Valpo, but a foreign summer trip could have given us just enough of a boost to win a few more games.

Had we won, say, even 5 of those 9 games - where would our RPI have been? And in turn, where would Valpo's have been? Valpo was one of the first couple teams out - if we were, say, 123 in the RPI instead of 173 - it doesn't kick you up 25 slots, but it might kick you up enough. That 12-point win at the ARC is stronger. That overtime win at the Arena is much bigger. We had a 1.06 positive impact on your RPI, 5th after you, GB, Oakland and Oregon. Oakland's impact was almost twice of what yours was, and if we were 25-8 instead of 20-13 our RPI would have been comparable to theirs.

It's not a stretch to say Amanda Braun's decisions - even the ones that are already public - may have knocked Valpo out of the NCAA Tournament.

Austin had some personal stuff going on last year and spent much of the off-season off the court. While his points per game went up slightly, he obviously regressed from his sophomore to junior year of eligibility.

Bill Johnson barely skimmed the surface. There's a lot more that he didn't touch on, some of which has been reported and some of which has not.

What is going on at UWMilw?  The Twitter feeds need clarification?

What's going on is the program is being headed up by someone whose job since Day 1 has been to sabotage the men's basketball program to the point that she could fire the head coach.

Rob Jeter's contract has been the center of a lot of problems. There was no buyout; so when AD Bud Haidet retired in 2009, Rob was under contract through something like 2014. He had automatic renewals and got one that extended it to 2016 back in 2011-12, and Braun negotiated one more year to get rid of most automatic renewals. Without a buyout, the university would have owed Jeter the balance of the contract - at 452k per year by the end of it (400k in 2006 and 440k in 2010, I believe), it's a lot of money to pay someone to not do anything. Every AD has tried to do things to sabotage the program.

- George Koonce tried forcing Jeter to fire all of his assistants and only hire one back. This was in writing and done in February 2010 when the Panthers were headed out on a big road swing. Obviously this was designed to get Jeter to quit, and would have gotten our program blackballed. Boosters intervened and got the chancellor to jettison Koonce. There were some personal things that arose that actually made the fire-Jeter plan moot and got Koonce gone. This is mostly in the papers.

- Rick Costello was an empty shirt who didn't engage in direct sabotage as much as he didn't know what he was doing. He announced at the February 2012 basketball luncheon (donors, boosters, players etc.) that the team would not be going to the postseason if they didn't qualify for the NCAA Tournament. He probably meant NCAA or NIT, but he only said NCAA. Half the team was there and they were just blown away. The players had all but cashed out for the season by the time the HLT came around, and a bunch of them paid for spring break right after we got eliminated by Butler only to find the Chancellor making the decision to pay for the CBI. They came out flat and lost. He also got rid of academic staff (eventually helped with APR ban) and negotiated incorrectly with the Wisconsin Center District, announcing to the team that even if they win the 2011-12 regular season title that they won't be able to host the HLT because the WCD booked that weekend. The team was 8-1 at the time. Would we have won the HL that year? Doubtful, we didn't have the post presence of the year before. But these are college kids. They were dejected, twice, by things the AD said. Do you think for one second that Mark LaBarbera would have ever made mistakes like this?

- Andy Geiger moved us to the on-campus 'arena' without ever walking inside it. The guy was there to keep us in the Horizon League by all means necessary; in early 2013 he took a phone call from someone - I can't say who - and told them that UWM was happy with the Horizon League. You can probably guess what that phone call was. The arena move just killed recruiting for us.

- Then you come to Braun. When I say every turn, I mean every turn. I can't talk about a lot of it because she's still here and there are a lot of media and social organizations putting in the effort to investigate around here. Of what's already out there? She canceled our summer foreign trip for 2015 because she said "it wouldn't look good" even though the trip was privately funded. Then she turns around and fires Jeter and staff, who as of now we owe about 625k of university money over three guys through next June. At the same time the university is looking at $30 million in annual budget cuts - how does that look, Amanda? All when Jeter was going to end his contract next spring. Amanda has said in the media that coaches 'aren't kept in the last year of their contracts,' but basic research shows that's B.S. - at South Dakota State, Scott Nagy was on a one-year contract every year. He's not the only coach like that, but since he's in the HL I figured that he's the easiest example. She turned down invites to all three postseason tournaments this year (also she tried to say that CBI/CIT weren't "official invites" - well duh, they aren't official until you say yes) and then lied to parents, players, boosters, donors etc. about the reasons. We know now she was planning to fire Jeter, but even still she could have said "we didn't feel this was the right time" instead of lying to everyone.

She's pissed off a lot of people, and what I've told you there is basically some of what's been reported thus far. Obviously I know more, but there's no chance I can share those and compromise investigations both inside the university and without.

I will say this: stay tuned. This party is far, far, far from over.

Austin had some personal stuff going on last year and spent much of the off-season off the court. While his points per game went up slightly, he obviously regressed from his sophomore to junior year of eligibility.

Bill Johnson barely skimmed the surface. There's a lot more that he didn't touch on, some of which has been reported and some of which has not.

I guarantee that Vandy's PR person will have a hard time getting Bryce to kick his 'you know' speech habit.  I have to think that they will want a little more polish from his press conferences.

You know, I'd be astounded if they're really worried about it. These are minor details.

Scott Nagy is an absolute home run. I've been told his salary is north of $500,000.

Get ready to pay up for Bryce's replacement. Our next coach is going to make less than Rob - add in the clueless AD and our coaching pool is...um...questionable.

What I mean by that is there's no sure-fire winner like Nagy in there. Everyone has question marks.

This place is gonna be unrecognizable next year.

Jimmy had better be careful before her defenders accuse him of being phobic.

They know better than to do that. Supporters of Braun know that two gay people stood up in my wedding - the one donor (I know of) who supports her was a guest at my wedding, and he's in her inner circle.

The blog post where I equated Amanda Braun to Rachel Phelps (fictional owner of the Indians in Major League) barely scratched the surface. That was just me putting out stuff that was at least out there, if not common knowledge. You'll notice that Braun's people didn't threaten me with any action, although according to the aforementioned donor I have "alienated" the fan base.

Have I really though? Go look at the Eunuch board (the name a now former donor gave to the Freak board). That fascist, anonymous-for-his-own-good admin, tight-ass little priss that he is, shut it down for a couple days to clear out a lot of the anti-Braun rhetoric. Notice none of the angry posts in support of Braun were deleted, only those who called her out for her screw-ups. As soon as the admin put it back online, the members of the board revolted - with plenty of them saying they're migrating over to the PantherU Board.

I decided to even take new membership money this month (access to the private premium forum) and donate it to the General Student Scholarship Fund at UWM. So these piss-ant little jerks can't even say I'm making a profit off of that board's member exodus.

Publicly, this battle is being fought by me, Akeem Springs (and a couple other players), state senator (and alum) Lena Taylor, and #1 donor David Nicholas. There are plenty of supporters for us. I've been emboldened by support sent to me by alumni, students, season ticket holders, donors, players (great kids), even some legislators on both sides of the aisle in Madison.

Should we have moved on from Jeter? I think there's an easy argument to make in support of that decision. Even his biggest supporters knew that 2016-17 was likely his last year.

But the A.D., and incredibly 2 of her 3 most recent predecessors, has deliberately sabotaged the basketball program. Why? I don't think Braun - or Andy Geiger or George Koonce before her - really wanted to hurt the program. I think that she and Koonce both wanted their own coach, and were willing to go to pretty ridiculous lengths to make it happen. Koonce had an awful plan to fire the staff and allow Jeter only one assistant to hire, effectively forcing him to quit. Braun was trying to cut into the program at any place she could.

The idea was simple - make the team bad enough that she has the cover to remove the coach. But wouldn't the obvious, better way of doing it been to support the coach as much as possible, with everything he needed, and get him out that way? 5 of Jeter's last 7 years the team won at least 19 games. In 2012-13 the team was so disheartened from going to Kareem and Oscar's house to the on-campus Klotsche Center (makes the ARC look like a palace) that they went 8-24. In 2014-15 the team essentially played a season of exhibition games with the APR ban that had nothing to do with them and went 14-16 (and still won 7 of their last 9).

It is not a stretch at all to say that even general support of the program by the AD would have boosted a team from 19-21 wins a year to 21-24, maybe 22-25 wins a year - how does that affect the program? Hell, she could have gotten a new coach after the 2014 NCAA Tourney run!

But no, let's not allow transfers and redshirts to travel with the team, limiting their practice by as much as 35% during the season. Let's not try and fix the practice situation, worst in the country, even temporarily before the practice facility gets finished. Did you know that the team routinely gets practice ended early because the ultimate frisbee intramurals are about to start? Did you know the players can't shoot outside gym business hours because the policy is they have to have a coach present and only when the gym is open? Did you know the team doesn't have a private gym, but practices on a floor that is booked every hour of every day during the week? I know the Valpo practice situation is far from perfect because of shared-use facilities as well, but there is literally no adequate place for players to put in individual work whenever they want.

Braun says the program is "funded at the highest level in the HL," yet 2014-15 numbers reported to the federal government put the team 4th behind Detroit, Valpo and Cleveland State. There is exactly one place where UWM spends more money than the rest of the conference, and that is the head coach's salary. She's been caught in lies to parents in email, donors, etc. Our #1 donor, David Nicholas, was so incensed that he went on the record with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in Gary D'Amato's piece. He's said there's a much bigger story coming, and I think we can expect that one this week since he was with the Badgers in Philly and they lost, and he doesn't leave for the Masters until next week.

We'll see. It's all a tenuous situation. I'm angry. I'm far from the only one, I just happen to be the loudest, most obnoxious one (although a couple fans on Twitter are trying to challenge me on that last one hahaha).

Oh I definitely agree that we didn't meet expectations. But when they invite us to play, and we want to play - we being the coaches, players, donors, fans, everyone other than the athletic director - we should play.

You guys are coming at this from a different angle than us. You've been in a couple of these tournaments. We only had the one in 2012, and we never expected to do well that year. This team was the 22nd-unluckiest team (KenPom) in the country - they deserve to keep playing.

I mentioned this in another thread, but UWM fans seem pretty complacent with mediocrity, given where the program was at 10 years ago. It's amazing how big the meltdown is over a team that finished 5th in the weakest the Horizon League has ever been. This has been their 10th consecutive season where they weren't in the top 100 RPI.

I think Milwaukee should play in the CBI, but I don't think the meltdown is warranted.  I think Milwaukee had a disappointing season and played short of their potential.

I think you should venture over to the Freak board or onto Twitter to see how complacent they are with this decision to turn down the postseason.

Fans have been calling for Jeter's head for 9 years. There's a bunch of us who don't call for his head because we know what's been getting in his way forever. Donors, especially the big ones, know a lot more than us, and they're steadfast in support for him.

In any case, I think the Jeter era ends in 2016-17, since he's only under contract through June of next year. After all that came out today, I'm just hoping someone else hires his replacement.

the Horizon wasn't going to have 6 baseball teams and 5 cc/track teams.

I do think the baseball aspect is easily forgotten when talking about YSU getting kicked out of the HL.

I'm sure that's the excuse. It's also remedied very easily by bringing in someone who is on an outpost in their conference and would like to lessen their travel restrictions. I think the obvious answer would be Chicago State, if they weren't in dire financial circumstances. There also might be a school in Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri or West Virginia that would like to play one sport at the Division I level a la Dallas Baptist, where they can be an associate member. Also are we 100% out of teams to play baseball? CSU can't be talked into getting back into it? Detroit doesn't want to get into baseball? Any conference the Titans have talked about moving to when they're angry is a baseball conference - MVC, A10, MAAC.

But I'm not here to talk about YSU, which I just am dead tired on (in the podcast today I decline to talk about it haha). I'm here to say that I wish I saw this a month ago:

Jimmy you sound like some sort of creeper operating out of a windowless van every time you chime in with your initial greeting.

I just laughed out loud when I read this. Hank, you're the best.

Oh we beat Minnesota too btw

That's only because Minnesota really sucks this year----even worse than Wisconsin.

Yeah, a lot of our people said the same thing, but the fact is we never won these games, even against bad ones. We played DePaul four straight years and we only beat them once.

Our history against high-majors isn't good. We don't win many of those games. I think a majority of those high-major victories came in the NCAA Tournament, where we have three wins all-time.

So as crappy as Minnesota is, it's still an accomplishment for our program.

UIC's currently 0-13 in D1 games.  Can they manage to... what's the opposite of running the table?

"In Soviet Russia, table runs YOU!"

We should start a competing podcast, who's with me?

I'm with you. Those guys on that podcast suck something awful. 

The talk about recruiting internationally was mostly in jest. Paul Spicuzza (infinitely more knowledgeable than me on the Panthers and the Horizon League) and I would joke about Homer telling international recruits there's really no difference between UConn, Louisville, and Valpo. "You can pick UConn, Louisville, or Valpo - it's all pretty much the same thing!" Totally in jest, but if you're really bothered by it, know it's because Valpo recruits internationally better than about 98% of teams in Division I - truly.

I've never been shy about my status as a blogger - I'm no Paul Oren or Rob Demovsky or...any of the guys Wright State has had in the last decade. Paul was jokingly disappointed he wasn't a guest on the first episode, so

By the way, Episode 3 is up after we recorded the show yesterday. This one is a little less on basketball and a little heavier on CSU's problems getting people to games, but I still hope you folks give it a listen. Subscribe if you can and let's see if we can drum up some more interest in Horizon League hoops!

BTW a3uge, you're more than welcome to come on whenever you get a free Sunday. MAYBE WE CAN MAKE YOU AN INSIDER TOO!!!!

How does Kampe matchup with a 6'8, 6'7, 6'10, 6'9 and 6'8???

With a smaller, quicker lineup that can beat us down the floor. Unfortunately our big lineup isn't our best 3 point shooting or ball handling unit.

I'm going to guess that part of our stretegy tonight is to go big and force the outside shot.

I expect that we will try it, but I am less than certain of its success.

That's a terrible idea. Oakland's fast guards would shred the   out of Valpo's trees. On top of that, VU's post players would get tired far too quickly. There's a reason the "tallest team" idea hasn't been at Valpo since the 40's.

Big guys are the ones you want to keep fresh, not the ones you want to run the legs out of before the game is over. Having that lineup on the court for even 5 minutes will force Valpo to give up its size advantage for other points of the game.

I wouldn't want to have a point where Carter and the Walkers are on the bench all at the same time for longer than a minute or two. These are three of your top 5 minutes per game players.

Oakland's biggest advantage in this game is speed at the guards. You don't want to make that advantage a HUGE advantage.

Paul just had a good segment on Greg Kampe's coaches show, 1130 AM in Detroit. Homer Drew is on now.

If we were regularly a 2 or 3 bid league, then holding the tournament in Detroit's and Oakland's backyard (or anyone else's) would matter very little. Unfortunately, that's not the case. There is only 1 prize - 1 highly coveted, ultimate prize that separates 1 program from all the rest.

This being the case the HL tournament championship is simply too important to unfairly weigh it's outcome in favor of 2 programs "within walking distance" of the tournament venue.

It is time to move to a better league. I have a gut feeling our administration is thinking the same thing. We deserve better than membership in a declining 1-bid mid major league centered in Detroit Michigan.

The problem here is that there's nowhere to go. The MVC isn't going to 11 and I doubt they'd go 12. If Wichita State actually moves forward with that ridiculous football idea and leaves the MVC, there's your shot. But that's an if-and-only-if scenario. The Atlantic 10 is incredibly scattered and still has 14 teams.

However, I'll humor this discussion.

Perhaps the discussion should move away from which conference to move to. Perhaps the discussion should move towards looking for outside the box thinking. Here's my plan, if I'm the Milwaukee AD/Chancellor, on improving the conference:

Make one.

It's not such a crazy idea. There is precedence in the history of college sports, and there's a recent sort-of-example if you look outside basketball.

The latter example I'm referring to is the National Collegiate Hockey Conference, or NCHC. A few years ago, Penn State announced its move to NCAA D-I for ice hockey. This was incredibly important because up to that point, only five Big Ten schools played ice hockey (Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Michigan State and Ohio State). Once PSU added hockey, the Big Ten could field a conference. The Big Ten schools were divided among two conferences: Minnesota and UW in the WCHA, and OSU, U of M and MSU in the CCHA. All five schools joined PSU to create the B1G for hockey, which sounded like a death knell to the other conferences.

Except it wasn't. The best schools of the WCHA and CCHA got together and created the NCHC, a brand new league that got an automatic bid immediately to the NCAA hockey tournament. The leftovers of the CCHA folded into the WCHA, making what had been the WCHA and CCHA into the B1G, NCHC and WCHA.

Guess which conference was worst off? The Big Ten. They will build up eventually, but their hockey programs are split between national powers (Minny, UW, Mich) and also-rans (MSU kinda, OSU). The conference hasn't got its footing yet. The WCHA, made up of all the dregs, has been best or second best of the three conferences since the realignment happened.

In hoops, this has happened before, and it's happened in the midwest. The Great Midwest Conference, created in 1990, pulled schools from several different conferences to make a borderline high-major conference - Cincy and Memphis left the Metro, UAB left the Sun Belt, Marquette and Saint Louis left the MCC (Horizon), and DePaul, one of the last independents. Dayton joined in 93. In 1995, after a slew of more schools from different conferences joined up, the Midwest name no longer fit (lots of southern schools). They became Conference USA.
___________

Long story short, you can create a conference by taking the best of different leagues and running with them. I'd shoot for an 8-team League, but 10 would be all right and the most I would go for. These are the schools I would consider for such a conference:

Horizon: Valpo, Oakland, Wright State, Milwaukee. Those should all be for obvious reasons. In the next state budget round we'll get our advance money for the practice facility, a project that is said to cost about $13 million (better than the one Creighton just opened). Wright State already has the facilities, with a nice $9 million practice facility and still-solid Nutter Center. Valpo doesn't have the facilities but succeeds and can own it's metro area, which albeit small would be entirely yours if you had a solid conference. Oakland has a nice game facility and is a strong program, although I'd rank them 4th here because I think most of their success is due to Greg Kampe, and he's 60 years old. Besides these four? CSU leans entirely on students and no one has ever gone to games. YSU is YSU. NKU is too new to D-I for this conference. Detroit is a shadow of what they once were. UIC can't put anything together, but I'd rank them 5th in this scenario. GB has no room to grow their budget.

Summit: North Dakota State, South Dakota State, Oral Roberts, Denver. The latter exists in an air hub so travel isn't as expensive as flying most places and therefore they can be a bit far-flung. Oral Roberts is traditionally strong, but I do think their status as a bandit program would scare me away too much. NDSU and SDSU would be a package deal and IMO a strong package to take. They both have great facilities - in NDSU's case brand-new - and they absolutely own two states that are growing. Their football programs are profitable to their universities, which is more than can be said about most I-AA schools. They're strong publics. I don't think any other conference school is close or even worth mentioning.

Ohio Valley: Murray State, Belmont. You're talking about two schools that succeed and have done so for a long time. I'm not familiar with budgets, but I'm sure Belmont could stand to grow its budget for this new conference. Murray State owns its corner of Kentucky. Belmont's president doesn't believe the Horizon or MVC are strong enough brands to merit full membership. My guess is a brand new conference would change that. Morehead State may be successful, but I don't think I'd offer membership based on what Kenneth Faried did in school. Others are non-starters.

Atlantic 10: Dayton, Saint Louis. Both schools used to be in the Horizon League and got left behind in the major hoops-only shuffle. The thinking around Marquette was that they'd both get invited not long after the start of the Big East, but that hasn't happened yet. I believe the Big East thinking now is that 10 is a good enough number and there's no reason to keep adding. VCU and the east coast schools are too far; Duquesne is probably the only school I would consider, but they have no recent history and they're something of a bandit program (although not as brazen as Oral Roberts). Other schools are too far east or too crappy.

Missouri Valley: Wichita State, Northern Iowa, Illinois State, Missouri State, Loyola. I think the Ramblers' problems are the same as when they left us - yeah they have facilities, but the donor base is ancient and they have no recent success. They get you entry to the Chicago recruiting base, but so does Valpo/Milwaukee. Missouri State's gorgeous JQH Arena is a great facility and the basis for a good program. Illinois State covers a lot of that central Illinois ground and could be a strong addition. Northern Iowa and Wichita State are obvious picks; the question isn't would they be invited but rather would they accept?

Working just from those five conferences, you could build a pretty great 8 or 10 team league:

8 team: Milwaukee, Valpo, Murray State, Belmont, Dayton, SLU, Wichita, UNI. Obviously I'm biased in putting Milwaukee in there, but we're a couple years from breaking ground on a high-major practice facility, so you can see I'm not just paying lip service. Also the people in Milwaukee have come out for big regular season games - we had 6500 at a recent Valpo game, 7500 for Marquette, 8k for GB, 10k for Wisconsin...when students are surveyed and asked the question "why don't you come to games?", the most common answer is "level of competition in the arena." Of those teams, Valpo, SLU and UNI have brought over 6k fans to the Arena. If we had a conference full of those games, I think our attendance would skyrocket. Valpo may sell out the ARC all season.

That conference is also 4v4 Public vs Private. There's something like 35 NCAA Tournaments in the past 20 years there.

This is obviously just an exercise. I think booting YSU out of the conference in the summer rather than adding NKU would have been everything we needed for 2015-16. But WH has a point - something is wrong in this league. I just hope we can fix it before it all goes to hell.

Would Valpo be upset if the tournament was being held 1.5 hours away at the Rosemont in Chicago?  (also 30 minutes from UIC and  2  hours from UWM).  I still would be upset because it's not on campus giving the best opportunity to the best team.

The Rosemont is about an hour away from MKE, 45 minutes if you're SRT4Driver (actually I'm not sure if he's on this board - long story short, the guy races cars even when there is no checkered flag).

I'm not angry at Kampe. I initially was annoyed when I heard the comments, but when I sat back and looked at the big picture, I realized I was just angry that he's a gamer and played the conference and Olympia into this HLT and I wish our athletic department could have been that smart.

Oh we beat Minnesota too btw