#169 R.P.I. Cornell @ #116 R.P.I. Virginia Tech: 

Virginia Tech men’s basketball remains @Home over in the may snow on Tuesday nite/Wednesday day; yet, then should 60’s warm back up pre-Holiday weekend New River Valley.

The Hokies begin Finals later this week and there are mo’ things in play than just the roundball itself here on Hump Day nite. As things have been off a bit of late no matter how you slice it. As we just took a serial Wake-up-call upside our press-clippings O&M sleepyhead(s) lump. Now, a very shiny and unexpectedly shiny-looking 8 up and 1 down, 1st-place in the Ivy League Cornell tries to storm our very own P5 Cassell. And these red-bears did just maul all-galaxy: Keuka. No joke, and although Eye may not know what that means, Eye do know that Cornell has beaten everyone you can name small/medium school-wise up Nor.East. Tho’ what you wanna know is who is gonna win and by how much, rights? So, read on… to find, out!

Cornell Head Coach: Brian W. Earl: Age=, 42–73 (.365) overall, and @Cornell. Has a rep’ for: offense, (legacy) offensive tempo, and backcourt play.
$108,476.oo

Kiddo Earl grew up in Medford Lakes, New Jersey, and attended Shawnee High School in Medford where he was the 1995 The Philadelphia Inquirer player of the year. He is the younger brother of former All-Big Ten player Dan Earl. Dan became V.M.I. head coach the year before Brian became a head coach. Shawnee never dropped a home game during Earl’s first three seasons as a starter. Earl was two classes behind his brother at Shawnee and had hoped to join him at Penn State, but Penn State did not recruit him. Most major programs lost interest in Earl when his play was limited by injury as a junior. His only offers were from Princeton and UPenn.

Baller Earl claimed Ivy League championships with the 1995–96, 1996–97, and 1997–98 Princeton Tigers. Earl served as captain of the 1998–99 Princeton Tigers men’s basketball team. He was second-team All-Ivy for the 1997–98 Tigers and Ivy League Men’s Basketball Player of the Year as a senior the following year. His career totals of 113 games started and 281 three-point field goals are Princeton records and stood as Ivy League records until Ryan Wittman totaled 119 and 377 for Cornell in 2o1o. Following his Princeton career, Earl played professionally in Germany and England as well as in the United States Basketball League and Eastern Basketball Alliance. In 2003, he teamed with Kit Mueller, Arne Duncan, Craig Robinson, and Mitch Henderson to make the national 3-on-3 championship game. He served as an assistant coach at Princeton under former teammates Mitch Henderson and Sydney Johnson from 2oo7 through 2o16. In each of Earl’s first four seasons as an assistant, Princeton improved its win total. Earl, who worked mostly with the defense as an assistant, replaced Bill Courtney as head coach for Cornell in 2016 after the school endured six consecutive losing seasons.

Scholar Earl has earned his:  B.S., Economics, Princeton (1999), Tiger.edu love here.

Earl’s winning pedigree comes from a strong basketball family. His father, Denny, was a starting forward for Rutgers where he played under head coach Bill Foster and alongside the late Jim Valvano. His brother Dan played at Penn State and is the head coach at V.M.I. Brian and Dan Earl become the fifth active set of brothers directing Division I programs.

Earl and his wife Jennifer have three sons,
Dylan, Owen, and Cooper and reside in Ithaca.

Cornell at a glance:

• #1 in defensive rebounding!!!
• 2nd in scoring O!!! (91.2 ppg)!
• 2nd in assists!!!
• 11th in FG-percentage O!
• 34th in FG-percentage D!!
• 35th in 3-point FG percentage!!
• 17 of the 32 D-1 Team Metrics I track are 35th or better. wow!
• 294th in FT percentage, however!
• NO injuries listed. (“THX” @Coach God)!

Returning Starters=zero!

Cornell Strengths:

• One, #23, 6′5″, 195 lb., Junior year, S/F, Maxwell Jordan Jones is your leading scorer for this offensively bull-market Bears team. 14.0 ppg is your alpha here and 3.3 rpg with a decimal point of assists, steals, and blocks alike. This tells you how much this kid has to focus on his outputting end. He does have a history of dings and dents (Coach God Bless). Tho’ 46.4% from the floor with 76.2% from the line and 36.0% on distancing is not the worst productive work. And that adds up with Lindy’s calling this kid a: “pure scorer”. A Thousand Oaks, Calif. kid, who was the: NEPSAC single-A Player of the Year! Where this J.J. pretty well tore up the: San Fernando Valley and pocketed numerous classroom honors along the way and there you kinda recruiting coup Ivy League goes. His father (Max) played in the N.F.L. (Buffalo Bills) and the U.S.F.L. (Birmingham Stallions), while his uncle Sean Jones played in the N.F.L. with the Los Angeles Raiders, Houston Oilers, and Green Bay Packers, winning a Super Bowl title in 1997 with the Packers and twice capturing All-Pro honors. So, the Sporting Genome Project seems most willing to project here indeed.  Agriculture major up at Cornell and that seems to over in the San Fernando Valley fit to me. As Jordan has doubled his scoring output from two years ago… (more: below), and he is high-teens capable when he gets it going from deep. As this is a pretty good D-1 baller, and a neater kid with his future-map G.P.S.’ed and all laid out. Good on him.
• Keller Boothby is a medium-Red (like Bill Walton looking younger less drugged-out red) 6′7″, 19o lb., S/F, playing something of a Four look by way of: Plano, Texas. Did eye mention the “tuuuuurible” Walton -esque looks yet? As hommie is only one-headband and as many tie-died Tee’s removed from being Oct. 31st 1st-place ready! Anywho… 10.0 ppg with 4.8 rpg on: 58.3% from the floor, with a stellar 90.0% from the charity stripe and a likewise solar 56.8% when dialing-long-distance tells you where he shoots from and just how marksman he is at the same. This kid’s range is the gym, if he is in it; he’s open. Keller also hit for a state championship as a sophomore and then won a NEPSAC championship during his postgrad (Prep School) year. 2 blings with twice all-academic State Team in Texas does not suck! And neither do these digits from a kid NOT even mentioned by any of my pre-season preview mags. PROPs!

  

• 6′5″, 195 lb., Chris Manon, is a Jersey-shore Off-G who drops 9.7 ppg with 4.1 rpg on 48.4% from the floor, tho’ only 25% from deep. Interesting starter as his H.S. digits were only normalized at best/at most. Running beside him would be nearly numerically duplicating: Sarju Patel. Sr. season Patel has mo’ fanfare or preseason love from my magazines. Patel is a 6′3″, 17o lb., Daleville, Va. escapee by way of famed: Hargrave Military Academy. Patel is your Pt.Guard and yet his 9.7 ppg and 4.0 rpg with a couple of assists were thought to be higher pre-season-wise in most of my wraps. Team Captain, ex-Keydet with some nepotistic ties (as you saw above). And his Cornell personal bio’ part reads: “There is no related content available.” Coach God Bless on that. Tho’ Lindy’s did mention his perimeter scoring. As Patel was more than pastel with 39% shooting from range over in Lexington, Va. for v.M.i. So, this is prolly a better lead-One than he has shown thus far, pardon the sporting pun. As he does seem to have a few outburst typea games in him and he seems to like going after bigger names on likewise-stages at that.

Cornell Weaknesses:

• 0-o last year! God Bless… Cornell bagged the whole entire 2o2o-2o21 shebang and played as many D-1 men’s hoops games as you and I did (Pandemically) combined.
• Meaning: they are a year behind on the development/matriculation curve for it to boot.
• “da (red) Bears” are said to be… all-star free! As in zero of my preseason mag’s listed a likewise zero Cornell ballers for any pre-season honors of any sorting/leveling. Dang…

Big Red (bear) Den: (depth=4 to 6, ‘pends on the nite/match-up)

Kobe Dickson is a: 6′9″, 236 lb., final-year Forward1. Be that PF or S/F in relief, his 6.8 points are okay, and yet his 6.6 rebounds with 3.7 assists and 1.7 blocks all lead the triune Cornell way. 54% Free-throwing could use some work, and frankly, Eye did not think him his listed size on tape. However, he has improved his: ppg, rpg, and apg each and every season so far. So, there is that, and he recently became the first player in school history to record at least nine assists and nine rebounds in the same game! So, there is that as well. Beyond that, this Kobe put up some very decent scholastic numbers on the hardwood (and okay diamond/baseball digits as well). So, more may have been expected here.

6′3″, 19o lb., rookie voting season or nugget year Nazir Williams is your Pt.Guard2 off the bench. Where Nazir (cool name) nets you 9.0 ppg with 1.8 rpg and 1.7 apg on a nifty 44% from 3-point-land so far. The book says he is supposed to be something of a lockdown in-your-shirt defensive-stopper of sorts (1.1 spg). And momma-bear: (Nasir Gulifield) knows how to cook, what with 10 other bro’s and sisters. Or maybe it is daddy who is kitchenette handy? Either way, this Nazir tallied decent enough looking scoring-G H.S. metrics up in central N.Y. State. Might be an all-conference contest come 2024.

Illation, conclusion(s) and OPT digits:

Number of Big Reds who could get marooned @Tech=1, is it mo'?

the takeaway:
The takeaway here is…

…we needs to wake up; least we gets Alabama State or V.M.I. took.

Or up-tempo shook by a team that loves to score.

And frankly, a team that does not suit our apex style/speed of play ver well at all.

---

As Cornell does not seem like that much to me… nor did they to most of my preseason magazines. None of whom picked them better/higher than 6th best in an Ivy League race of 8.

As in… Cornell (8-1) already has more wins than it did in its previous season and will try to add to that with a victory over a Power Five team when it visits Virginia Tech (6-3) in a nonconference game Wednesday in Blacksburg, Va., at 9 PM.

Granted, two of the Big Red’s eight wins are against non-Division I competition, and yet so were two of the seven victories Cornell had when it went 7-2o in 2019-2o.

==—==

Older hoopologists… you can see the old-school Gay Elmore V.M.I. legacy tempoing here, rights?

So, something has gotta gearbox give here… and maybe their caffeinated higher octane-pace is just what this sleepy-looking set of post-Thanksgiving Gobblers needs to stop playing like, turkeys?

Maybe???

 ***

Our handy-dandy friend the so-called Forum Guide of Graham Houston fame is calling for an A.c.c. round-robin ask-back. Or, it is calling fo’ me to (unusually enuff) look at the St.Francis of Pa. Venn Diagram overlap. This tells us that we should expect a 17-point Tech Triumph.

The annualized year-to-date vitals say that… Cornell is up a very impressive +7% in shooting percentage margin overall (they beat us on both ends here; mo’ on O, tho’ they beat us on D too!); tho’ VeeTee is up +6% in 3-point percentage margin (all of it on halt-unit defense), and Cornell is also up a useful looking +8 in rebounding margin year-to-date in Windex Wipes! (More on the defensive glass, per a nearly a 29o-spot advantage here! Tho’ springy enuff at both ends).

The most recent 5-game metrics say that… the Big Red (bears) are roaring, up a mind-bending +20% in shooting percentage margin of late (hot team on O! And our D has really slipped); they also say that the Bears are up  +6% in 3-point percentage margin (nearly all on O), and “da beras” are up in a downright corralling +11 on the fiberglass as caroms go of late in rebounding margin! (wow!!!)

Armchair Pt.Guard’s:

PERFECT WHEN: Virginia Tech is a perfect 5-o when the team blocks at least three opposing shots. The Hokies are 1 fo’ 3 this season when they block fewer than three shots.

ASSIST DISTRIBUTION: The Big Red have recently converted buckets via assists more often than the Hokies. Virginia Tech has an assist on 43 of 68 field goals (63.2 percent) over its previous three outings while Cornell has assisted on 9o of 115 field goals (78.3 percent) during its past three games. (OBSERVE:… the hoops Qb’s or One’s or Point-F’s among yah see what Eye means, right? Something is outta sync here…)

PACE OF PLAY: The upbeat Cornell offense has averaged 76.1 possessions per game, the 12th-most in Division I. Virginia Tech has not been as up-tempo as the Big Red and is averaging only 64.4 possessions per game (ranked 33oth, nationally). wowzo!

SPEED KILLS: Cornell coach Brian Earl is pushing the pace this season because of a rotation that features 1o players averaging at least 12 minutes and five averaging at least nine points.

VeeTee is up +7% at the charity stripe for the year.
VeeTee is a .8oo host; whereas Cornell is .75o as a guest.
VeeTee is up a noticeable +7 in R&R in the last fortnight of runs!

The Call…

No.99 Net Ranking Cornell no.4o Net Ranking Virginia Tech:

https://www.espn.com/watch/player/_/id/16be3715-6c67-4831-9152-aacfc0282df0

So, Eye’ve done a baaaaaaad, hardwood job; of this of late, rights?

We got poked wide awake last time out.
We were kinda Gotham Tourney flat.
We mucked around @Maryland too.
…and Eye mucked most of dat up.

i.e., something is up or something is off here.
And the one science-fact objectivity is that it is NOT the Training Room.

This nearly nationally ranked and seemingly NC2A bound Hurrying Hokie hoops squad is in reasonable enough health.

–oOo–

So, we know what it is not… we do not yet know what it is.

Coach Donald Rumsfeld hoops or: “We don’t know what we don’t, know.”

Eye do still kinda think that big bad A.c.c. VeeTee can out-athlete Cornell here.

Tho’ eye do know that the longer this one stays closer the worse the closure may be.

💯🐻💯

 

(77% confidence interval)
Virginia Tech=74, Cornell=76

please support the VT F.C.A.!

“LETS GO!”

“Hokies!”

 bourbonstreet**