Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Get Those Bums Outta Here

It's telling that the biggest story around NC State basketball this season does not have anything to do with, say, their new coach. Or the continued gelling of players like C.J. Leslie, or their epic collapse and near miss at Duke, or, really, anything to do with NC State basketball. Instead, the one thing that's gotten the Wolfpack any kind of national play - and the first national attention they've gotten since the foofaraw wherein one particularly insensitive dolt of a columnist compared the then-vacant State coaching job to Khloe Kardashian - involved the somewhat irregular ejection of two notable Pack alumni, Tom "Googs" Gugliotta and Chris "I Now Hawk Mortgages on Local Sports Talk Radio" Corchiani, from last weekend's game against Florida State. Apparently the ref didn't follow proper procedure in asking that the two gents - whom everyone swears were innocently spectating - be booted from the building, possibly as a result of the fact previously, he had followed procedure and the desired results had not been achieved.
Whatever. I don't know what Gugliotta and Corchiani were saying or not saying, and I don't particularly care. No matter how just or unjust their ejection might have been, neither of those guys was on the court. On the court, the Wolfpack was getting its head handed to it by an eminently beatable Florida State team, even though State desperately needed one more signature win to cement their NCAA tournament status. And on the court is where things theoretically matter. It's all well and good to get excited over stuff like this, but the fact that more heat is being generated over what happened to a couple of guys who last suited up when the Raleigh Bullfrogs were a going concern than about the actual team. Better to focus attention and discussion on the guys who are on the court, and then maybe, just maybe, ESPN and company will notice more than the sideshows.

No comments: