52 Down
16 to go. Some first weekend of the tournament. Or week, I guess, with the new First Four games. The NCAA thinks it’s being sneaky, but it’s pretty obvious that we’ll have another tournament expansion sooner rather than later. It’s just a matter of logistics, mostly securing sites for an additional weekend of games. But it’s happening. Two years from…
Friday Notes
I’ve been stuck on a couple longer pieces all week. So to make up for that, a few smaller ideas crammed into one post. The new NCAA tournament broadcasting agreement is spectacular! Four channels with simultaneous games is about the coolest thing ever. We spent most of Thursday outside, enjoying the perfect weather, so I read e-mails and Tweets and…
Tourney Time
A lot of rambling thoughts about last weekend and the NCAA tournament. If you are a Facebook friend of mine, you know I only saw a few minutes of the Big 12 tournament. M. had a school event Thursday, keeping me away from most of the KU-Oklahoma State game. Based on the quality of play, that was probably a good…
Seven
Another year, another conference championship. Rather than wait a week, when we’re through the Big 12 tournament and have our NCAA brackets to pick through, I thought I’d do my KU season wrap-up today. It wasn’t that long ago when I was looking at the schedules, evaluating opponents, and assumed that Texas would go 16-0 in the Big 12 and…
Reporter’s Notebook – Crunch Time
The girls are about done and the boys start playoffs next week. More notes from the gyms of Indiana. Last week I saw the most impressive individual performance in four years of working for my paper. A kid knocked down 9 of 12 three-pointers and scored 34 on the night. It was damn near effortless. This kid is just a…
When Len Went Off
A terrific essay about a legendary night and how things have changed. Twenty-five years ago was another world. The game was over and I was by myself—my parents and brother presumably asleep—alone in the late night with the incredible fact that had just come into being. Len Bias beat Carolina. There was no one to shout it to, nothing to…
Reporter’s Notebook
More blurbs from the notebook of a roving sports correspondent. Wednesday I got my second crack at a college basketball game. It’s been two years since I’ve been to a game of the small college we cover, FC. The experience was similar to my last visit. Enjoyed seeing a Division 3 game. Marveled at the size of the gym, which…
Reporter’s Notebook
A few tidbits from the road. I don’t recall if I shared this story in a previous notebook, but late last month I had back-to-back games that were completely awful. In the first, one of our best girls teams, WCHS, won easily but in very ugly fashion. They should have won by about 70 but apparently decided to play down…
Darnell Vs. Jacque
More thoughts on the Coolest Athlete thread on Twitter. This isn’t an original observation – I even think I’ve written about it before – but something else struck me about how we view athletes while reading through the Coolest Kansas City Athletes meme on Twitter over the weekend: athletes are a lot cooler when we’re kids. The reasons are pretty…
Second Season
KU begins the final Big 12 season tonight at Iowa State.1 They enter the game #3 in the country, 15-0 against a solid schedule (#31 according to collegerpi.com, which also has them ranked #1 overall). Seems like just another good season in Lawrence, right? Maybe. Fact is this team remains a mystery halfway through the season. Do they still have…