The college basketball blog 35 Seconds(run by the same folks who created the excellent college football blog Everyday Should Be Saturday) asked me to answer some questions as part of their Final Four preview for UNC. The preview is up now so feel free to drop by and take a gander.
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Being a UNC fan and by nature a huge college basketball fan there are few things finer than Duke-UNC or watching either the ACC or NCAA Tournament. Apparently ESPN.com Page 2 columnist Jim Caple agrees with this assertion as he ranks 101 things all sports fans must experience before they die. Here are the relevant ones:
5. NCAA subregional (March, various sites). The only problem with March Madness is that the championship game too seldom lives up to the previous two weeks of cuticle-devouring excitement. For the best experience, steer clear of the actual Final Four and go to a subregional instead. You get more games (four the first day), more upsets, more spirit and enough excitement to leave even Dick Vitale hoarse.
19. Duke-North Carolina basketball game (winter, Chapel Hill or Durham, N.C.). There are college basketball rivalries and then there is Duke-Carolina, which makes that Yankees/Red Sox thing seem like a simple misunderstanding. Cramming into old Cameron Indoor Stadium or marveling at the banners for all the Tar Heels greats in the Dean Dome is a college basketball experience not to be missed — even if you have to camp out in K-Ville for a couple of weeks to get a ticket. (Just check with a doctor first to make sure you have all your shots.)
24. ACC basketball tournament (March, various sites). The best way to tune up for your office NCAA pool is at this classic tournament, especially when it’s on Tobacco Road and so lively it should come with a surgeon general’s warning advising pregnant women and people with high blood pressure to stay away.
Well, sort of. It looks like I was taken by the New Jersey Nets at #17 in the Winning the Turnover Battle Blogger Draft in an attempt to keep UNC alum Vince Carter happy to he will re-sign with the team:
#17. New Jersey Nets: Tar Heel Fan of Tar Heel Fan
The Nets are looking for any way possible to ensure that Vince Carter stays in town. Maybe this will help.
Anyone happen to know a good agent I can hire?
I am linking this article by Luke Winn at SI.com about NBA Draft sites like DraftExpress.com and NBADraft.net because (1) it is an interesting read about these sites and how important they have become and (2) I really like the picture accompanying the article.
AP Photo via SI.com
The Wizard of Odds has been running a spoof billboard contest and last week an enterprising Wolfpack fan took a shot at UNC and Butch Davis. I decided to respond in kind.
Bill Simmons basically says what we are all feeling about [UNNAMED ANALYST] in pointing out that aside from the a bit of a rabble rouser, he also has been doing the championship of college basketball for three freaking decades. Unfortunately he is not getting any better and as Simmons points out there is not a darn thing we can do about.
Packer’s case is different, though. Many people (including me) believe he’s a humorless know-it-all and a curmudgeon, and we’re exhausted by his schtick. But because he announces the most important college games every spring, he can’t be avoided. Hell, these days, thanks to Janet Jackson and the seven-second delay for “live” events, we can’t even mute games and listen to radio simulcasts anymore — the audio never matches up. It’s Packer and Nantz or nothing.
So we’re left with two choices: mute our TV or grit our teeth. I’ve tried it both ways and found it’s more enjoyable to mute and listen to my iPod. That’s my plan through the title game. I’m doing it for my own sanity. No offense, Billy, but 32 years is more than enough.
The radio being out of sync is probably my biggest peeve. I would gladly put on Woody Durham as my father did during the 1993 title game because we were sick of hearing [UNNAMED ANALYST'S] anti-UNC opinions. Of course we turned the sound on the TV up after Chris Webber called the ill-fated timeout because Woody was speaking in unknown tongues at that point and we wanted to confirm what was actually happening. This of course led to one of the more memorable exchanges between [UNNAMED ANALYST] and Jim Nantz.
Jim Nantz: So, what do you think is going through Chris Webber’s head right now.
[UNNAMED ANALYST]: Well, Jim, he is such a cerebral young man…
That’s right. Chris Webber is cerebral.
Of course I also heard at one point this week that [UNNAMED ANALYST] would be at the East Regional. Please, CBS, I am begging you, send him to St. Louis.
I really shouldn’t write this because it is just one guy’s opinion of what may happen and we all know he is entitled to it. And by no means am I expecting everyone to have UNC in their Final Four but when I read a second article from a national outlet basically telling us the Heels will not survive the penultimate weekend of the NCAA Tournament I feel compelled to respond. After all that is what makes blogging so great, the little voice calling the mainstream media out. Today’s featured piece comes from Luke Winn at SI.com who informs us that not only will Georgetown win the East Regional but UNC is the most vulnerable team left of the four teams heading to East Rutherford.
Continue reading ‘Apparently UNC Should Not Even Play Friday Night’
Let me introduce you to Joe Rexrode. Mr. Rexrode is a beat writer in East Lansing, MI who had someone at Yahoo Sports afford him the gift of writing a special article about Saturday night’s 2nd Round East Regional game between UNC and Michigan State. What an absolute shame he wasted it with such an asinine article. Here are some of the “highlights”
Will Blythe who authored the fabulous book on the UNC-Duke rivalry, To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever, has been featured on Deadspin the past two days discussing the big game. He gave a rather pessimistic preview yesterday which may have been a stab at reverse mojo. Today he offered up praise for Billy Packer, who for all the things he has said wrong over the past decades, became obsessed on the local game coverage last night over the fact that Duke had the losses during the 1995 season credited to professional scapegoat Pete Gaudet and not Mike Krzyzewski who was out with a back problem. By rule the head coach hired by the school is always the coach of record whether he is on the bench or not. Since Coach K was concerned that his program was being screwed with, the losses were magically transferred from him to Gaudet.
In the second half, just as the Tar Heels began to close on the Blue Devils, Packer started to obsess on-air about Duke’s unseemly decision to credit the team’s losses during the star-crossed season of 1995 to Krzyzewski’s assistant Pete Gaudet. That was the season that Coach K took a powder, as it were, for his bad back and disappeared from public view like an actor going to rehab. “I think the losses should be credited to Krzyzewski,” Packer ranted.
Just so you know the reason it came up at all is UNC, in their media guide or records in general I presume, credit the two losses against UNC in 1995 to Coach K. Duke officially says they belong to Gaudet and it is my understanding that a petition was made to the NCAA to have those losses removed which apparently occurred.
(Hat tip: Carolina March)As most of the freedom loving world probably knows by now, Texas Tech coach Bob Knight made physical contact with a player on Monday night by tapping him on his chin to force him to look Knight in the face while he was “instructing” him on the finer points of college basketball. Naturally, ESPN took the incident and went into full on coverage mode giving us multiple angles, replays, analysis and five minutes leading off SportsCenter last night which included highlights of Texas Tech vs Gardner Webb(nevermind that #1 Florida and #2 North Carolina were also in action). Now, I found the act itself to be a non-issue despite Knight’s reputation and aside from the fact I have vehemently disliked him as long as I can remember. In fact this is de facto opinion of about 80% of the nation on this issue despite the fact Pat Forde was on ESPN last night advocating a 1 game suspension. Now, I was not planning on blogging this because as you may have noticed there is actual basketball being played, so I will defer to the always excellent Dan Wetzel who takes the opportunity to rap ESPN upside it’s bloated head. He points out the wild hypocrisy in ESPN ignoring Michigan’s Lloyd Carr who earlier this week stormed out of an ESPN on ABC interview for the upcoming game this week letting F-bombs fly. Nor would they show other coaches, and there will be other coaches, do it. Wetzel nails it on the head and closes it with this:
Yes, Knight should know better and should know the world has changed. But this act is hardly worth this kind of over-the-top coverage. Not when college athletics has serious problems – academic fraud, rampant cheating, widespread profiteering.
For a while “SportsCenter” – the overwhelmingly most powerful force in sports media – lost its way with a silly parade of sorry would-be standup comics as anchors. Now it has backed off that slightly and gone straight tabloid.
Daily coverage of Barry Bonds. Daily coverage of Terrell Owens. Daily coverage of whatever outrageous character it can drum up. “Up next on Cold Pizza, a clinical psychologist gives a diagnosis of Bob Knight.” (No joke).
One standard here, one there. Some get exposed, some get protected. No consistent news judgment. No sense of perspective. Just a toe-the-company-line ombudsman on its website.
Yeah, Bob Knight is in the media grinder now, the full force of the World Wide Leader flipping out over a flipped chin.
It’s fine if ESPN thinks he deserves it. But if so, he sure isn’t the only one. And that’s what the network isn’t telling you.
Well said. ESPN has become an entertainment outlet pure and simple. As an extension of that the news must fit the criteria of being entertaining and having Bob Knight make contact with a player fits that description. As for Knight, ESPN has a very odd relationship with the contrversial coach. On one hand they hold him up as an example of a coach “out of control” and blow up incidents like this to reinforce that idea thus creating news. On the other hand they had a show run on their networks about Knight holding open tryouts for a spot on the Texas Tech team. Obviously they had high hopes an incident like this would occur on the series, I guess since it didn’t they are trying to make up for it now.
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