I’ve been getting into George Mason basketball over the last few years. The first reason is that is super-local to me – they are like ten minutes down the road. The second reason is that my wife works there. And the third reason is that I love the Green Machine, their pep band.
This year though there’s been a new energy about the school and the team. There’s new leadership in all sorts of places and I’m loving it, especially on the court. Kim English has been a great recruiter so far and the team he’s put together has been very fun to watch. When I went to my first game this year I turned to my wife and told her you could tell this was a different kind of team.
There’s definitely a feel that they can win some games. I say that knowing they have already, but really they have a good attitude to try to take on whatever comes and I think they could be a really good team. I’m excited for their future and home that Coach stays a while. This is the largest school in Virginia and there’s no reason they couldn’t keep moving up in the world – or on the court.
Players like Ticket Gaines, Josh Oduro, D’Shawn Schwartz, and DeVon Cooper are really changing things. Ticket is very fun to watch and I find myself honing in on him and watching him rebound, he goes all out and does the dirty work. I love Oduro’s sort of old school moves around the basket. And the D’Shawn and DeVon are doing well on the outside.
So many positives! However, this week was a bit tough with two losses. The loss to St. Louis wasn’t bad in a 2 OT thriller, but if they just could make free throws, especially in the clutch, they could have taken that one. They played well in their end of game scenarios on that what but they were down, they haven’t played as well in those scenarios when they’ve been up. The loss to LaSalle was bad. They didn’t have Oduro playing but they could have taken that game. A bit of a disappointing week but I’m sure that will change.
Stay safe and healthy out there!
The Review
Here’s what happened on the blog last week:
- Monday: Henry Jones
- Tuesday: Dan Warthen, Tom Poquette
- Wednesday: Paul Zuvella
- Thursday: Dave Kingman
- Friday: Billy Spiers
- Saturday: Wes Chamberlain
- Sunday: Mike Proly
No theme for the week and no theme for the #twofortuesday. This was mostly a week of getting the oldest posts in my backlog out. Those are verging on TTMs that were received a year ago. I imagine if I don’t start stepping up the amount of posts I will go well over a year old in the backlog with how much I got in last year.
The Preview
Here’s what I have coming up for this week:
- Monday: Livin’ in Harmon-y…
- Tuesday: Shields you from the storm…
- Tuesday: Dear John…
- Wednesday: Happy Valentines Day (not really)…
- Thursday: Drago heart…
- Friday: What’s up with Hu-son…
- Saturday: In the office, he’s the Filer…
- Sunday: Chief…
No #twofortuesday theme this week again. There just wasn’t anything coming up that I felt was matching enough and this was a sort of random week with regard to what I was planning to get posted.
Other Notes
After a few weeks of 30+ returns, aside from the weeks with holidays that have less days for returns, this week was a bit of a disappointment. I only got fourteen returns back. I’m thinking that on top of just sending out a bit less starting this year, I’m also at the end of a run with some things I planned to send out. Usually the end of those runs are guys who either take longer to sign or they are long shots or just inconsistent signers. Whatever it was, there was a pretty steep drop off this week.
Given there weren’t many returns overall, there wasn’t much to choose from as far as stragglers or anything like that. The longest one out was Stan Royer and that was 130 days. The next longest after that was Jerome Henderson who was out for 65 days, exactly half the time for Stan. Some of my favorites of the week were guys that are just great signers: Jeff Ballard, Scott Livingstone, Manny Mota and Ted Power.
The new Recent TTM Success is updated. Couldn’t even fit everything from this week in the last 30 section this week.
Have a great week!