RELEVANT URBANISM CONTENT FOR BLOG. Thank you Ambry Thomas.

The look on #49ers rookie corner Ambry Thomas' face when he was asked about the cost of living in the Bay Area pic.twitter.com/WCFrHU0zk8

— KNBR (@KNBR) May 13, 2021

Get rid of parking minimums. Build places to live where people can walk to their jobs. Prevent Ambry Thomas's eyes from literally popping out of his head if he sees one more ramshackle bungalow going for seven figures.

The stockade. Possibly coming to a college basketball court near you: flop technicals.

Under the current rules, a player is warned after flopping for the first time in a game. According to a release from the NCAA, if the rule is approved by the NCAA playing rules oversight panel on June 3, players could get hit with a technical foul for "falling to the court despite not being contacted after field goal attempts, dribblers who bob their heads to simulate being contacted and players who act like they were the recipient of contact despite not being touched."

"After two years of using warnings, we didn't feel like we were getting the results that we wanted," Tad Boyle, committee chair and head coach at Colorado, said in a statement. "We are trying to get flopping out of our game. We're asking the officials to call them when they happen."

The effect of this would be minimal given the reluctance to hit people with flop warnings last year. You might get ~half a technical free throw per game if the rate doesn't drop because the penalty for a flop is now marginally higher. On the other hand, if that got called against the home team fans would be beet-red and furious. I support anything that causes people to be irrationally angry at sporting events, so LFG.

Livers scouted. NBA draft scouting video on Isaiah Livers:

I wish people did these before NCAA tournament games so I could embed them and say "yes, Cam Thomas is this person."

It's impressive the consistency with which I say "yup, spot on" with this sort of content.

GRITTY HAS NO MERCY. This has very little to do with the topic of this blog, except insofar as wanton cruelty fits the brief:

https://t.co/Ii5VV2sRHw pic.twitter.com/Owb83HNdzc

— Gritty (@GrittyNHL) May 11, 2021

This guy did sort of bring it on himself by asserting that Gritty would only make things worse. Don't tell someone to do something they already want to do.

Looking at next year. The Athletic is running a series of X Things About College Basketball Team articles, and Michigan's notes that is a major outlier:

As of Wednesday, 1,578 Division I players had entered the transfer portal in the ongoing 2020-21 cycle. With 357 schools playing DI basketball, that’s roughly an average of 4.4 transfers per school. From the Big Ten, the number of outgoing transfers (including walk-ons) is 59. Every conference team has had at least two. That is, except Michigan. It’s the lone Big Ten school without a player in the transfer portal.

But this goes further. Even Howard’s staff looks like it will remain intact for second straight offseason, which is 1) hugely beneficial to Michigan and 2) pretty damn surprising. Heading into this year’s coaching carousel, it was obvious that Saddi Washington is overdue for a good head-coaching opportunity, Howard Eisley is ripe for an opportunity and Phil Martelli is a big name with a pedigree. I wouldn’t have bet that all three would still be in Ann Arbor all these weeks later.

Brendan Quinn also discusses Hunter Dickinson's offseason, which is the offseason's most critical:

First, the development of a right-hand baby hook is crucial. Even the possibility of an off-shoulder finish could keep defenses more honest and change things dramatically.

Second, Dickinson can, in fact, shoot the ball. It’s just a matter of dialing those looks up and building confidence.

“He really hasn’t shown off his ability to shoot the ball yet,” said Ben Dickinson, Hunter’s older brother, who served as an assistant coach when Hunter starred at DeMatha Catholic High School. “He really can shoot it. In high school, he’d have games where he’d hit three or four 3s, and they’d be huge 3s. Plus, he can face up, give you a jab, hit the short jump shot. Those are things he has, but he just hasn’t really brought it out because he doesn’t need to yet. He’s trying to be efficient and do what’s best for the team. But he has a lot more tools that he’s gonna roll out.”

His FT% and proficiency at elbow jumpers suggest that he's got a shot at adding some stretch to his game this fall. I think that's secondary to expanding his post repertoire, but I'm not sniffing at the idea of pick and pop with Frankie Collins running down a vacated lane.

How a long thing happens. Will Warren runs a Tennessee basketball blog with extensive opponent previews, and I'm always a sucker for Behind The Blog Scenes content. He obliges with a look at how those previews come about. Will's process is pretty similar to ours, with a stop at most of the same sites we hit up. I appreciate this evaluation of Synergy's Web 0.5 look:

For $20 a month, Synergy offers full team reports from D-1 to NAIA on every college basketball team in existence. Not only do they offer the play-by-play data discussed previously, they offer something even more important: play types, as in how often Georgia posts up or how frequently they create a shot from a ball screen. They’re in the midst of reworking their site, but the reports are charmingly low-tech and look more like a faxed document than anything else.

With Synergy, I want to check on a few things of importance. How often does Georgia take shots off the dribble? Which players are the ones who take those shots? Who isolates most frequently? How many ball screens, on and off-ball, can I expect to see on an average night? This is all before I look into the defensive side of things, where I want to see if Georgia features any unique defense that isn’t a basic man-to-man. (Answer: they run a zone defense about 14% of the time and will press in tight late-game situations.) Along with that, I’m trying to answer all of the offensive questions for the defensive side: how well does Georgia defend ball screens, are there any exploitable one-on-one defenders, are they guarding threes well, etc.

If you want to see how the sausage is made this is a close analog to what we do.

For the people are just in charge of things files. Northwestern's athletic director got hired to be ACC commissioner. Northwestern embarked on a search to replace him. It went… poorly:

Polisky, who was Phillips’ longtime right-hand man, was named as one of four defendants in a lawsuit in December by a cheerleader who accused the school of not properly handling complaints about her and her teammates being sexually exploited. The lawsuit came to public light in late January. Northwestern hired Polisky on May 3, days after the school said it filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The president who announced the hire, Morton Schapiro, left town the week of the hire, and the school made no public introduction of Polisky (though it did let him hire men’s soccer coach Russell Payne on Friday). A protest outside Schapiro’s home on Friday brought more negative press, with the school’s only public comment coming via a letter from Schapiro on Thursday defending the hire. That letter has since been taken down from the school website.

Polisky resigned six days later.

Details on the search included deeper in the article paint a familiar picture: an internal candidate with an inside track, a belief that consequences do not exist above a certain point on an org chart, sham interviews resulting in new contracts and withdrawals from external candidates.

Exit scholarship conundrum. Gage Garcia has entered the portal, which is mostly notable for people who track rosters and were confused as to whether he counted as a wrestler or a football player. He did not play in his first year.

Etc.: Comedy in progress is always fascinating. The FA Cup was good. This goes in an unexpected direction.