Easter
A relatively chill, long Easter weekend for us.
Having kids in Catholic school means it was a four-day weekend, stretching from Good Friday through Easter Monday. Not that we took much advantage of it by doing anything special.
M had a high school friend visit her at UC on Friday, so she didn’t come home until Saturday morning, with her pal giving her a ride to Indy. Then she spent Saturday evening with friends. Most of the rest of her weekend revolved around napping, homework, and laundry. Normal home from college stuff.
I ran her back Monday morning. Her first class isn’t until 11:15 so we didn’t have to leave super early. She only has three more weeks of class and her last final is April 25. Her summer is right around the corner.
A couple of S’s siblings were traveling for the holiday, so we decided to scrap the big family gathering this year. Instead we had her dad and stepmom over for dinner with the girls Saturday, then went out for an early breakfast Sunday before the church crowds hit our favorite spot. We walked in to only a few other folks being seated. By the time we left it was starting to fill up quickly.
We pulled some of the patio furniture and cushions out and used them Saturday and Sunday, which were warm and breezy. But we had to put all the cushions back into storage as soon as we were done with storms in the forecast.
Our lawn service has already been around, both treating and mowing the yard last week. It looks pretty great, lush and green. Most of our blooming plants and trees are starting to pop. It sure feels like spring. It makes sense that it might snow Wednesday.
College Hoops
I popped in and out of basketball coverage all weekend. I probably watched more women’s ball than men’s.
With that in mind, allow me to first blast the NCAA for allowing the situation in Portland to occur where one of the three-point lines for the women’s games was improperly drawn. They didn’t figure this out until after four Sweet Sixteen games had been played, and then Texas and North Carolina State agreed to play their Elite 8 game on the non-regulation court so they could, you know, actually play when they were supposed to.
They even had extra games to figure it out, with the women’s regionals being staged at two sites instead of four. This combined with a handful of other “incidents” so far in the tournament show how the NCAA still doesn’t give the women’s game nearly enough respect despite the massive increase in ratings and interest.
Oh, and don’t get me started on how bad the refs are in women’s games. You can make a long list of objectively incorrect calls in every game. There was the Oregon State girl who had position for a rebound, an LSU player crashed into her sending both to the floor, and the Oregon State girl was called for the foul. Or a jump ball that was called in the Iowa-LSU game by a ref who could not see the ball, which was clearly in the left arm of an Iowa player while two LSU players were latched onto her right arm. If I thought about it longer I could come up with a lot more.
The women’s Final Four is kind of perfect. You have undefeated South Carolina, looking for redemption for last year’s loss to Iowa. I’m not sure America felt super strongly about the North Carolina State – Texas regional final, but with the NCSU men making the Final Four, having their women make it as well is a nice story. Then you have Iowa-UConn, Caitlin vs Paige, in the matchup America wanted.
On the men’s side, man, UConn! I thought Illinois was a damn good team and then the Huskies laid a 30–0 run on them. Thirty to nothing, in an Elite 8 game! Outrageous.
Good luck to Alabama stopping that absolute wagon of a team. I’m no UConn fan but you have to admire their squad. It is a near perfect college team. There are pros on it, but I’m not sure there are any All NBA guys amongst them. They remind me a little of the 2008 Kansas team. Coincidentally, they now rank just behind the 2008 champs as the fourth-best team in the KenPom era. Two more convincing wins could push them up higher on that list.
What a weekend for my Purdue friends. They finally got the Final Four monkey off their back. After Big Dog losing to Duke in the Elite 8, Carson Edwards going off but not being enough against Virginia, those great late Eighties teams flaming out every year, and then losing to double-digit seeds over-and-over, capped by last year’s loss to a 16 seed, getting over that hump against Tennessee had to feel amazing.
Who is waiting for the Boilermakers in the Final Four? An 11 seed in NC State. The Hoops Gods are funny sometimes.
There’s been a lot of discourse about how Zach Edey is officiated. To me it’s a near impossible task. He is pulled and grabbed and shoved on every play. And he also pushes off, shoves, and otherwise manhandles whoever is guarding him on every play. I will say he gets a great whistle. It seems like refs are so afraid to call him for anything because they don’t want to punish the big man that they sometimes let obvious fouls go unpunished. I saw a couple that were particularly notable over the weekend. If KU had played Purdue I probably would have seen a lot more, and been a lot more worked up about them.
Officiating Edey is an impossible task. I get that. What I don’t understand is why refs let Braden Smith travel pretty much every time he has the ball. It’s uncanny how he clearly moves his pivot foot without ever getting called for it.
How about North Carolina State! After Jamal Shead’s incredible bad luck Friday, it looked like Duke would waltz into the Final Four. Instead DJ Burns and his buddies dominated the Blue Devils in the last 10 minutes and kept their improbable run going to Glendale.
Duke still fouling with 1.9 seconds left was some funny shit.
I’ll get to my thoughts about KU’s future in another day or two. I do think the transfer portal should not open until the day after the Final Four, though. It’s super annoying to be blasted with messages about players entering the portal or rumors about guys who may come to KU when there are still games being played. A couple teams that were still alive in the Sweet 16 had already received commitments from guys in the portal.
Shut all this nonsense down until the day after the championship game to create a little free agent frenzy that can extend media attention on college hoops a little deeper into the spring.