Quick Notes:
1. I hate Notre Dame.
2. I love John Flowers.
3. I love John Flowers Riverdancing after WVU beat Notre Dame in the Big East Tournament in 2010.
4. I’m not looking forward to tonight’s game, one in which we’ll inevitably get cheated by referees who look the other way when Notre Dame’s players are manhandling us.
5. But seriously: I love John Flowers.
Last week, I wrote asking for more information about Morgantown’s City Manager Terrence Moore. I specifically wanted to know more about rumors that some City Councilors were talking about replacing Moore with somebody more to their liking. Here is one example of a letter from a nervous citizen. This concern has come from various residents around the city.
While waiting for responses, I sat around thinking about what I do and don’t know of our City Council. The answer is: I know a little and I don’t know a lot. Take this forthcoming analysis then with a grain of particularly coarse salt.
Let’s Do The Math
There are seven city councilors: Jim Manilla, Wesley Nugent, Ron Bane, Linda Herbst, Jennifer Selin, Marti Shamberger, and Bill Byrne.
Three of those people came to their seat in the last election: Manilla, Nugent, and Herbst.
Four of those people voted to hire Terrence Moore: Bane, Selin, Shamberger, and Byrne.
That means there are three obvious suspects here: Manilla, Nugent, and Herbst. Why? Because they were just elected. They weren’t on the Council when Moore was hired to replace Dan Boroff and all three were supported by the local Fraternal Order of Police (Manilla mentions his endorsement here, who didn’t appreciate Moore’s decision to hire an outsider to helm the city’s police department.
There is a fourth suspect: Ron Bane. He cast the one vote against Moore when the City Manager was originally chosen. Bane backed another candidate for the job.
That’s four possible candidates, the majority on our City Council. If they were to turn against Moore they could either fire him or let his contract expire. That’s where the concern came from, especially given the hostility that potentially exists between the Council’s old guard (Byrne, Shamberger, and Selin) and these four new(er) councilors.
What To Do
So I emailed three of the four*: Nugent, Manilla, and Bane. I wanted to know what was going on. I’ve emailed them before and have gotten responses from (some of) them so I figured I’d try it again. I received replies almost immediately, which would seem to suggest that all three at least found the issue worthy of response. All three said that the rumors were unfounded. More specifically:
Manilla said simply that the rumor was, “Not true.”
Nugent said that the rumor wasn’t, “credible,” and maintained that his working relationship with Moore was ongoing and productive.
Bane said that the rumor was upsetting to Moore and his wife and that his continued professional approach would give him every opportunity to succeed.
Now What?
So now we have a problem. People believe that the City Council is plotting against Terrence Moore. We have three City Councilors maintaining that this isn’t the case. What is going on? Where did the concern itself, which I have no reason to doubt as being genuine, come from? I’m still throwing the question out there, hoping for replies.
(*I didn’t email Herbst, because from what I saw of her campaign, she believes only that the City Council is a vehicle to force people to do work that she herself doesn’t want to be responsible for, like maintaining cleaner properties.)
(If you’re wondering, the fact that Bob Huggins got a technical called against him for screaming, “Truck!” is evidence enough of the rank bias.)
One of my favorite jokes: “What can be said about X that hasn’t already been said about Baghdad?” It is overwrought, ridiculous, and properly frames our immediate although not entirely important concerns as Americans with a place that has real troubles and real challenges. Let’s take that joke for a spin though:
What can be said about Saturday’s game against Syracuse that hasn’t already been said about Baghdad?
Sports are a fleeting, largely unimportant thing. I think we can all agree on that. And yet, there I was Saturday, screaming at my television immediately after the goaltend, and even more furious that the referees were looking the other way. This anger grew throughout the afternoon as I read recap after recap which seemed to suggest that Deniz Kilicli had simply missed a potential game-tying layup, rather than having it stolen from via absolutely unconscionable refereeing. If you’d like to see my breakdown via Twitter, it is available here. Here is the article that was so infuriating although I note that it has been edited to include mention of the goaltend. On Saturday, it didn’t.
Being a Mountaineer fan is being used to this level of utter malfeasance by referees. So far this season the basketball team has lost two games to Top Ten teams after referees decided that they should be the ones deciding winners: Syracuse was the second, Baylor the first. Against Baylor, a referee called a ticky-tack foul against Dominic Rutledge that kept Baylor in the game. It was an atrocious call and it decided the game.
This though is bigger than basketball (although WVU has constantly been on the short-end of terrible refereeing on the basketball court); against Syracuse this season in football, referees incorrectly told Dana Holgorsen that he couldn’t ask for a review of a too-many-men-on-the-field penalty which should have gone against Syracuse. That’s within the last few months. Diving deeper into the Mountaineers history is to reveal a litany of examples of what might be gently described as outright misconduct.
I have no way of knowing if calls this bad routinely go against other schools. I do know that, as of recently, WVU has been on the receiving end of far more injustice than it has benefited. In fact, the only example that comes immediately to mind was a terribly botched call against Louisville, calls that Louisville fans should still rightly object to. But note what that story says: the Big East apologized.
I doubt highly that the Big East will acknowledge that its officials stole a game from WVU. We certainly received no apology for the call from the Big 12 officials who kept Baylor’s season perfect. We didn’t receive an apology after a horrid out-of-bounds call at the end of the Connecticut game in Storrs earlier this season. And chances are, despite widespread acknowledge of the terrible call Saturday, the Big East just won’t find the time to either mention the mistake or punish the offenders.
Such is life as a WVU fan.
(For more: this from Mike Casazza.)
Gotta be honest here: I don’t know City Manager Terrence Moore. I’ve never met him. I wouldn’t know if we walked past each other on the street. All I do know about the guy is that I’ve never heard a bad word about him. This may be a function of my limited social circles; perhaps I’m not hanging out with the right people.
So imagine my surprise when, so soon after being hired, I heard that various city officials were planning to get rid of Moore and begin again a search for a City Manager. Moore has, according to the sort of small town rumor and innuendo that dominate political life here, run afoul of these city officials in some way and has lost their support. They want to cut anchor and move on. It does seem early in the man’s tenure for something so drastic but perhaps he has screwed up that badly.
I’m not here to say whether this is or isn’t correct, not because I am incapable of having a position on this issue, but simply because I don’t know. Do you? What are the allegations against him and who is doing the accusing? I would love to know, if only so I can better understand the aforementioned rumor and innuendo.
If you do know anything about this (good or bad), please get in touch, either in the comments below or at our email address: thecityofmorgantown@gmail.com Thanks in advance.
I love playing basketball. I still play when I can. Playing it as much as I have makes the game fundamentally easier to understand when you watch it. Which brings me to Saturday’s great win over a Cincinnati team that probably deserved to get a shot at a victory at the end of the game after Kevin Jones’s phantom time-out call. No matter. Every couple of years, the officials blow a call in the Mountaineers’s favor. Considering how often those calls don’t go our way, I’ll accept it when it does.
You can read plenty about the game in plenty of places – here’s a great live-blog if that’s your thing, and here’s a proper recap if you’d prefer that instead – so instead, I simply want to talk about Deniz Kilicli’s no-look pass to a cutting Truck Bryant. You can see it here.
That is, simply stated, the best pass I can ever remember a Mountaineer player throwing. I’m certain there have been other great assists; I won’t doubt that for even a second. Kilicli has always been a bit of an enigma. Never quite what we thought he’d be, even when he has shown flashes. He gets dumb fouls. He doesn’t get angry enough. He doesn’t control the game in the way that we imagine he might be capable of. Frankly, we’re waiting for the Joe Alexander moment, a phenomenon of Bob Huggins coaching in a which a player suddenly recognizes how good they can be. We already had one of those earlier this season, when Kevin Jones seemingly murdered Kansas State all by himself. Since that game, Jones has brought the pain against everybody, crashing the boards and restraining his shot selection to the ones he can reliably make (the put backs, the baby-hooks, the open threes, the baseline jumpers). The notion of two players in a single season having the same epiphany is almost too much to imagine.
But in that one play Saturday, Kilicli seemed to instantaneously realize that he was going to draw a double team on the high post and that somebody was going to be open. The response was immediate; it was similar in a way to what Pau Gasol did yesterday against the Pacers. It was similar to passes Arvydas Sabonis used to throw. (Sabonis was so good.)
The point isn’t that Kilicli is comparable to either of those two players, but knowing enough to know that somebody is open somewhere on the floor is as useful a weapon as I can imagine. And Kilicli, for all of his faults, has always been a better passer than he’s gotten credit for. Which starts the dreaming…
Suppose it dawns on Kilicli that the double-team is coming whenever he gets the ball on either the high or low post. Suppose he realizes that he can be just as effective throwing beautiful passes to cutting players as he is with his occasionally deadly baby-hook. Were he to more aggressively get position and the ball, and then have the ability to keep defenders worrying that he was either going to take a makable shot or pass to an open man, he would become far less easy to guard. That he can shoot those baby-hooks with either hand is simply bonus.
It is more likely that Kilicli realizes what he is capable of next season; players seem to have this revelation in their last year at the school. Both Alexander and Jones have fully realized their potential during final seasons (Alexander left early). I’d obviously like Kilicli to figure this out now. But whenever it does happen – and I’m relatively certain that it will – it’ll be exciting to watch.
Postscript
This is a point I wanted to make somewhere else in the post. I have played a lot of basketball in my life, and I remember great passes more than I remember any great shots. They’re that pivotal to the game.
Post-Postscript
Sabonis was so, so good.
Today, Dick Vitale listed his top three choices for national coach of the year at this point in the season. He listed Jim Boeheim, Steve Fisher, and Mick Cronin.
I can’t (or rather, don’t want to) argue a bit with the first two choices. But Mick Cronin?! Are you freaking kidding me, Dickie V?
First of all, Dickie V explains away what I maintain is the number one reason to yCronin is undeserving of such an award. In regards to the Cincinnati/Xavier fight he says:
Cronin made sure his team learned from it. He took charge right away after the game, saying how disgraceful it was and that actions like that would not be tolerated. Cronin talked about putting on the Cincinnati uniform being a privilege and the athletes involved would not be back unless they really gained from the experience.
I have to admit, Cronin talked a big game in the post game conference and I was very impressed. (Read the transcript here) Then he took a big crap on his promises when he suspended Yancy Gates for six games. Six games. LaGarette Blount was suspended for 75% of his season for his cheap shot against Boise.
Even if you think six games was fair or more than fair allow me to provide the strongest case against Cronin, actual on-court data
Cronin’s team is 85th in the RPI and so far has played the 167th strongest schedule in the country.
Bob Huggins’s Mountaineers are 14th in the RPI and have played the 4th toughest schedule in the country.
Cronin’s team is returning 59% of its minutes from last year, and so far this year, 21% of its minutes have been played by newcomers.
Huggins’s team is returning only 39% of its minutes from last year, and so far a whopping 46% of its minutes have been played by newcomers!
(In case you’re curious, Syracuse returned 82% of its minutes and only 12% have been played by newcomers. Could certianly have a lot to do with their success)
So in short, Huggins team is playing better against a tougher schedule, all with a much greater dependency on younger talent. Cronin shouldn’t even be discussed as Big East Coach of the Year without mention of Huggins, let along be mentioned with Boeheim as a possible National Coach of the Year.
Frequent critic of Bill Stewart, then a frequent skeptic of Dana Holgorsen? These things are true of me. Disillusioned fan who occasionally wondered why I kept returning to the well? That’s true too. But the truest thing about me is a lifetime spent being a fan of the Mountaineers, and all it took was one idiot saying one dumb thing to remind me that no matter what matter what the situation is here in Morgantown, I’ll always back the team who plays us-against-the-world.
Brad Nessler’s the idiot. He said, “The only team to beat Virginia Tech this season, the Clemson Tigers, champions of the ACC, they’ve got another team from the state of Virginia, West Virginia, in the Discover Orange Bowl…” Dude couldn’t even get it straight that we’re our own place, our own people, our own team. That’s the degree to which the disrespect flows in our direction. Here’s more of it: the entire nation picking against us. As if Clemson came into the game with a 2-0 record in BCS games, as if Clemson had put up two undefeated regular seasons in the last 30 years, as if Clemson had 5 double-digit win seasons in the last 30 years. The media before the game had a field day too. Kirk Herbstreit said that WVU would get destroyed. Ditto Mark May. Everybody agreed that WVU was an also ran who had no business being in a bowl game of this magnitude against an opponent of that magnitude.
WVU crushed Clemson. It was close for a few minutes, a back and forth game that turned when a Clemson player got near the goal line, the Clemson players celebrated, and a WVU defender didn’t stop, taking the ball away and sprinting 99 yards in the other direction to score a touchdown that ended up being a heartbreaker for the Tigers. At that point, a game that was about to be 24-21 Clemson turned back into one that was 28-17 WVU and the Mountaineers never looked back. But you knew that. Because you watched.
What matters to me though isn’t the victory so much as the scale and the size and the scope of it. What matters to me is the fact that for once – and I mean literally: for once – WVU didn’t take its foot off the gas, didn’t back off, didn’t settle for the points that it had. It didn’t play the role of the also-ran, the happy-to-be-there, the grateful. It played the role of the bully.
There are plenty of people opposed to running up the score. I’m one of them. I get disgusted when I read stories about basketball games that finish 150-5 because one coach just wouldn’t stop. But last night? WVU could have scored 100 and I would have wanted 107. We were throwing there at the end of the game and I heard booing; presumably it was coming from Clemson fans convinced that this was poor sportsmanship. But those fans weren’t acting that way before the game. Neither was anybody else. In fact, it was everybody else that assumed that Clemson would be cruising by the fourth quarter. I wrote above that I don’t like it when one team beats up on another; but if the other team getting beaten up on had acted dismissive and disrespectful? If the other team had assumed that the game was theirs?
I’ll put it one final way: my favorite WVU wins are always the ones in which bigger, mightier schools are put in their place. WVU-Georgia in 2006? WVU-Oklahoma in 2008? WVU-Duke in 2008? And now Clemson in 2012. WVU is at its best and my most favorite when nobody believes in it. Last night was just such an occasion and the Mountaineers, predictably, rose up and demolished the world.
You can say everything you want about Kevin Jones’s performance tonight. It was a sublime 35 minutes of basketball (he finished with 28pts and 17rbs), which was incredible given that he received absolutely no help from his frontcourt mates. Deniz Kilicli was injured and didn’t play in the second half and Kevin “Hot Dish” Noreen was Kevin “Hot Dish” Noreen. (He did get help out of nowhere from Dominic Rutledge, who scored ten beautiful points which only show up as eight in the box score, for reasons we’ll shortly discuss.) Jabarie Hinds too re-emerged after disappearing for what felt like five games. Truck Bryant was extra Truck-Bryant-y, scoring 16pts on a woeful 4-15 shooting, but having confidence enough through it all to keep shooting (and getting important points at the end of the game).
Whether or not Baylor is a Top Ten team is really no concern of mine. Based upon their ranking, it seemed as though they assumed tonight’s game was a foregone conclusion, which explained their play for the first ten minutes. Then the game became a foregone conclusion for the second ten minutes of the first half, as Baylor turned on the jets and whooshed by the Mountaineers like a Ferrari past my Subaru. And then, in the second half, the Mountaineers wouldn’t let themselves be put away. Which brings us to the last few minutes of the game, in which Hinds drove the lane and got fouled, giving him a 1 and 1, which he missed the front end of. Had he made it, WVU goes up four, game over. But he missed, and Rutledge was whistled for a push off in which he simply outjumped the Baylor player that lazily attempted to rebound a badly missed free throw. Had Rutledge’s points counted, WVU is up five, game over.
Baylor scored on the ensuing play, tying the game. The referees then missed two easy foul calls on Truck as he was in the act of shooting, giving the ball back to Baylor to try to win, something they almost did before the game went into overtime. And on it continued, as the referees continually and repeatedly delivered calls to the Top Ten team at the expense of the Mountaineers. Nobody would have blamed WVU for simply losing the game. They’d embarrassed themselves against Missouri State the night before, squeaking out a win in overtime thanks to a missed layup. But the referees weren’t content with an exhausted Mountaineers team that was likely to lose; they had to ensure it. And they did by handing Baylor a victory that the team didn’t earn.
There is no loss more infuriating than the ones that come at the hands of the referees. Yes, last second shots and poor performances are heartbreakers of their own, but when the referees decide that one team is going to win come hell or high water, the game becomes almost impossible to enjoy. I’m never certain why it is that they make these decisions but in retrospect, the calls largely went against WVU for the entirety of the game. It only looked worse at the end because things were so painfully close. (And to be fair, WVU absolutely squandered what chances it had from the line, barely shooting fifty percent in a game in which seventy-five percent would have been the difference.)
One last thing – we shot one more free-throw than Baylor did. This doesn’t mean that WVU got the advantage. This is an argument that teams that are gifted games frequently make; I remember it happening against Duke in the Final Four game two years ago. Duke fans howled that we had the advantage, but their players fouled us four times as often. Tonight, Baylor shot one less free throw than we did but fouled twice as often. That they were rewarded for such behavior is disheartening at best and infuriating at worst.
Here’s hoping the Mountaineers have a great holiday. They’ve earned it. They played out of their shoes tonight. That they didn’t win says nothing about them as players or as a team.
I’ll be honest – I figured that WVU’s game against Kansas State last night would break down the way our losses this season have: competitive gameplay for 25-30 minutes before running out of the steam and experience necessary to hang around. It’s what happens with young teams. It’s what is reasonable to expect with this team.
Which made last night’s 85-80 double-overtime victory against Kansas State all the sweeter. I don’t think many fans, if they’re being honest, expected to win last night’s game. But the team hung around and hung around and hung around and geez Kansas State doesn’t seem to have many scorers and hung around and on my god Kevin Jones for a three and oh my god Aaron Miles for a three and the 1-3-1 and then Kevin Martin’s eyes were bugging out of his head and the Mountaineers had won. I can’t sum the game up any better than that.
So instead, let’s briefly discuss the fact that our two seniors delivered hugely. Kevin Jones’s numbers were ridiculous: 30pts and 12rbs and no turnovers. It genuinely seemed as though every time the Mountaineers missed a shot, Jones was there to grab the rebound and put it back. He also stopped chucking from the three-point line. He took his usual baseline jumpers and repeatedly got the ball on the low block where he’d execute a lethal little jump hook. I loved it. I loved it so much that I hope it never again dawns on him that he should take eight jumpers from near the three-point line. He looked absolutely unstoppable and not like the player who has occasionally frustrated us with his attempt to add a long-distance jumpshot.
Speaking of frustrating players, Truck Bryant scored 24 and only turned the ball over once. He shot 9 for 12 from the line, which made him better than the rest of the team by an incredible degree. This is literally Bryant’s ceiling in terms of simultaneously helping the team without hurting it in some other way. We’ve all become accustomed to Bryant shooting the ball too much, turning the ball over too much, or doing both at once. The only thing he’s consistently delivered to the team is his free throw shooting. Last night, we got all three and at least a brief hint of the player he could potentially be.
All of that said I continue to believe that this isn’t a team that will amaze us for the rest of the season. The grim reality is that it is a team with a lot of really young players, guys that need time to develop and better understand the college game. We might have watched the team’s game of the season last night. But if it in fact was as good as the team is going to be this year, then so be it. It was a fantastic victory.
News and Notes
-Kevin “Hot Dish” Noreen was playing with what appeared to be a chip on his shoulder. He is noticeably bigger than he was last year and last night seemed very Thoroughman-y, which isn’t actually a word, but which is high praise indeed.
-Oh Aaron Brown, your silky shooting stroke excited and entices me, especially your sudden willingness to shoot a jumper off the bounce.
-Deniz Kilicli deserves credit for his 12 and 6 but…6 rebounds in 29 minutes when you seem to be as tall as everybody else out on the floor and seem to be physically bigger than everybody? Come on!
-Finally, three cheers for the successful implementation of John Beilein’s 1-3-1 defense at the end of the game. Kansas State figured out its weakness (the baseline) relatively quickly, but seemed to struggle to get good shots against it despite knowing where to go.
Monongalia County’s Assessor’s Office recently sent out property valuations that will have the end result of raising taxes for thousands of property owners. Those property owners have absolutely freaked out about this. They’re both wrong. Here’s why:
Monongalia County Assessor’s Office
The more I stop to think about the Monongalia County Assessor’s Office valuation strategy, the more incensed I become. How could this group not think to assess property on a regular basis, thus ensuring that nobody was getting systematically screwed over? And yet, the office instead chose to simply assume that whatever the last price paid for a piece of property was that property’s value.
At best, this strategy is insane.
It managed to simultaneously accomplish many things, none of them good. It deprived the county’s coffers of monies that could have been used to pay for all sorts of improvements. It shifted the tax burden unfairly to new homebuyers, people expected to foot the county’s bills because, inevitably, they were paying more for their homes than people had a year, a decade, or a generation earlier. And it created the Armageddon scenario we’re seeing now, in which one taxpayer fed up with this arrangement fights through hell and highwater to get the Assessor’s Office to change its strategy, which in this case meant a county wide re-assessment.
Instead of allowing homeowners to adjust to incremental increases in property value and the accompanying property taxes, homeowners were instead lulled into a false sense of security that was shattered when the value of their home seemingly doubled overnight, meaning their tax burden doubled overnight. It’s almost as if the Assessor’s Office was intentionally trying to create a disaster.
If you want to be angry at anybody, start with Rodney Pyles, the County Commission that enabled him for years, and the idea that taxing recent homeowners to maintain political comity was ever good to begin with.
The Homeowners
At the same time though, letting off the hook the angry homeowners who have seen their property assessments double and triple is nauseating at best. Those homeowners are the ones who have been enjoying the county’s services for years while paying a lower price for them than more recent homebuyers. In their world, this makes perfect sense, because…well, just because. Because it is better for them to pay less. Because they paid less when they bought in. Because they’re on fixed incomes now and can’t afford an increase.
While I am sympathetic to the people that seen their property(ies) overvalued in the most recent assessment and to the people who will struggle to pay the higher taxes that will result from these assessments, I want to know if those same people would have been willing to sell their properties for the previous assessments.
Suppose, for example, that somebody had been paying property taxes based upon an assessment of $50,000 for a home and who are now angry that they’ll be paying property taxes based upon an assessment of $125,000 instead. Would any of those people have been willing to sell me the home they’re living in right now for that $50,000 price?
The answer, of course, is no. In fact, it only a person who would be willing to accept as payment the old assessment of their property that has any ground to stand on. To put this pointedly, I don’t believe many of those people are out there. They’re not protesting. They’re not complaining. They’re not infuriated. Why? Because their existence is questionable at best.
Simply put, the people most angry about all this want to have their cake (a low property tax bill) and eat it too (property that is more valuable than the assessment). Unfortunately, that model is grossly unfair for all of the reasons discussed earlier here and elsewhere. The fact of the matter is that new home buyers shouldn’t be asked to foot the county’s bills and old homeowners should accept that they benefited for quite a long time from the county’s idiotic assessment model.
