Badger Badger

In the wake of last night's upset of undefeated #1 seed Kentucky, and the subsequent crumpling in disgust of brackets everywhere except the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill region of North Carolina, I give you, without comment, this:

Pack Over Spiders

This is how big guys beat little guys: depth.

Why UMass Was Rooting For a Meteor

There was one thing guaranteed in last night's UConn-Kentucky championship game: UMass fans were going to feel screwed regardless. 

Why?

DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON!

My initial instinct was just to write DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON about five hundred times, claim I'd hit word count, and hit publish.

But that would be wrong. Or at least, a little eerily reminiscent of The Shining.
So, let us take a moment, and some verbs, to consider the University of Dayton, which has advanced to the Elite 8 when nobody thought they'd be in the Big Dance to begin with.

DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON ahem. Excuse me.

Things We Learned About the ACC During The Conference Tournament

Incontrovertible truths demonstrated on the hardwood of Greensboro:

The way to beat NC State is to beat holy hell out of T.J. Warren. If Warren and someone else are scoring, the Pack is damn hard to beat. If Warren alone is scoring, they're in the game. If he's not scoring and nobody else is, they're done.  Duke understood this, which is why Warren was eating hardwood for most of today's semifinal. And nobody else really stepped up to make them pay for it.

The Boeheim Freakout, Reconsidered

One of the more interesting tropes I've come across recently is the notion that Jim Boeheim's freakout against Duke was a result of him being unable to handle the unfamiliar pressure of Cameron Indoor Stadium. Presumably it was this, and not an iffy blocking call, that caused Boeheim to go completely monkey @#$#nuts all over the refs while performing a half-Magic Mike.

To which, after due consideration, I can only say "nope".

No Smart Puns

If you are a grown man whose greatest joy in life is paying huge amounts of money for the privilege of taunting 20 year olds you don't know, then there is probably something wrong with you.

No, Marcus Smart shouldn't have shoved the so-called Texas Tech "Superfan" (and "Superfan" is awfully close to "SuperFund", but that's neither here nor there) when the guy said whatever he said to Smart at the end of the Oklahoma State - Texas Tech game. Smart will almost certainly be suspended, as well he should be - the line between performers and spectators is one that should remain inviolate.

Your Handy-Dandy Guide To Teams That Think They Got Screwed Out Of the 2013 NCAA Tournament

Every year, there are teams that claim that they got screwed out of a spot in the NCAA mens' basketball tournament. These teams tend to fall into two categories: teams from big conferences mad that teams from little conferences made it, or teams from small conferences mad that teams from big conferences made it. The truth is, once you get to a certain level it's all a crapshoot anyway, and nobody who's on the razor's edge for an 11-seed play-in game has a hope in Hattiesburg of winning the thing. (OK. Except for VCU that one time). But still, people squawk, and as such, it's our responsibility to give you a little information on why.

Without further ado, let's meet the screwed.

Boeheim At the Grey Havens

Also pictured: Rollie Massamino, John Thompson and Lou Carnesecca

Sometimes, a man knows when to step off the stage.

Check the ending of The Lord of Rings. (The real ending, not the six or seven extras from the last movie). Frodo knows the world is changing. Middle-Earth is no place for him any more. It’s time to move on, and so off he goes to Elfland, or, as those of us not living in the Third Age call it, “retirement in Boca Raton”.

In Which Coach K is Consistent

Last night Virginia beat Duke. Virginia's home fans rushed the court. Duke coach / Polish Yoda Mike Krzyzewski was extremely unhappy about this and, apparently, traded some f-bombs with some Virginia fans. Krzyzewski said afterward that he was concerned about his players', coaches', and staff's safety in the crush.

People are giving him crap about this.

But I have to admire the man's consistency.  When Duke beat NC a few weeks ago, Krzyzewski stopped Duke's fans from rushing the court (by gesture and shouting):

So this isn't merely a case of "don't rush ME if I lose." Good on 'im.

Et Tu, Testudo?

So Coach K. is mad that Maryland is leaving the ACC. Mad that they're going to the Big 10. Mad that they're walking away from a conference they helped found in 1953 (by breaking away from the Southern Conference). Mad that they're abandoning the long-time rivalry.
He's right to be mad, of course. That's a lot of tradition for Maryland to be abandoning for the promise of a paycheck and regular exposure on the Big 10 Network. I applaud Coach K.'s stand that teams should not leave their conferences, that they should not abandon their long-time rivalries for filthy lucre, and they should not leave the conferences they helped found behind.
And I look forward to hearing Coach K. re-iterate these sentiments next year when founding Big East member Syracuse comes to Cameron Indoor Stadium as part of its initial season in the ACC.

What Can Brown Do For SMU?

The real story with SMU hiring Larry Brown to coach their basketball team is not that Brown is 71, or that he is the only coach to have won both NBA and NCAA titles. It's not even that he hasn't cached college ball in decades, or that he is a dead ringer for Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. No, the only noteworthy thing here is that Southern Methodist University just hired a ball coach so thoroughly an MOT that he's a featured alum of the Maccabiad Games. That's not what the sportswriters concern-trolling the story are doing is nonsense. Worrying over what Brown's hire might do to SMU hoops would make sense if any of these guys gave a damn about SMU basketball at any other time, ever. It's a mediocre program in a mediocre conference, nothing that sportswriters normally waste words on, and for them to be shocked, SHOCKED at the possible damage a Larry Brown hiring could do is disingenuity of the first water. Never mind that SMU has put a first-rate team of assistants in place behind Brown, including a head-coach-in-waiting with a pretty good pedigree. Never mind that pretty much anywhere Brown has gone - with the notable exception of the raging vortex of suck that was the Isaiah-era Knicks - he has won, something SMU basketball hasn't done a lot of in recent memory. (Last NCAA tournament appearance? 1993). Never mind that he's taking over from Matt Doherty, a coach so bad he failed at Chapel Hill, which means that there's nowhere to go but up - something unusual is happening, and so hands must be wrung over it.
In all honesty, I think this is a great move for SMU. For one thing, it's the first thing to generate national press - tons of it - about the program in twenty years. Money can't buy that kind of attention, at least not directly, but suddenly SMU basketball is on the map. And two, Brown is a really, really good coach, a better coach than SMU has had in a long while. And if making your program better and raising your program's profile simultaneously isn't the point of hiring a new coach, I don't know what is.
(In other news, ESPN commentator Fran Fraschilla is apparently up for the North Texas basketball job. Fraschilla has not coached on the college level in ten years. I look forward to an equal amount of media hand-wringing, should he get the job.)

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.