Buzzers
Some weekend. Friday night I was on the road, covering one of our better teams, FHS (11-3 entering the game), against the #10 team in the state, MHS. MHS had just lost their first game of the year, one they played without their best player, who is the #2 scorer in the state at nearly 30 ppg. They are also…
Conference Craziness
It appears that the dust has settled, for the time being, in the great college conference realignment of 2010, so I can finally try to put some thoughts together. I’m not promising anything particularly well organized or original. Consider yourself warned. What a strange couple of weeks it has been. There were multiple times during that span in which I…
Anyone Need Two?
So, not the greatest sports year at my noble alma mater. A series of fights between the football and basketball teams. A football coach forced out because of abusive behavior. A football team that fell apart, lost seven-straight, and pissed a chance at a division title away. A basketball player, who was already in the doghouse, decided to shoot his…
12 – X = ?
I’ve refrained from writing about the whole Big 10 expansion / Big 12 dissolution thing until something actually happens. But with all the rumors this week, I figured it was time to tack a crack. 1200 words later, I wasn’t making a logical argument and hadn’t come close to completing my thoughts. So how about this: it will suck if…
Friendly Rivals?
Evil Gail’s comment on my Butler post brought up an interesting point: as with last year’s Missouri team, it was hard for me not to like this year’s Kansas State team. Rival or not, I like teams that have a personality/style, play hard, and have players that make big shots in important situations. This year’s Wildcats fit that description to…
They Pulled Me Back In
So I guess I can watch the Final Four now. Traditionally in the years when KU goes out of the tournament early, I stop watching basketball. When I was younger, it was pure pouting. My team wasn’t playing anymore, so I was taking my remote and going home. Now it’s more to protect my circulatory system. I don’t need to…
Mixed Bag
Some weekend. Two days in Kansas City to honor a good friend who is getting married in about a month. Plenty of good food* and good times. A spring snow storm that made travel treacherous Saturday night and the weekend extra memorable. A dicey Sunday morning in which I wasn’t 100% sure I was going to be in any condition…
Brackets
If you think I have some thoughts, you thought right. I think. Let’s just get this out of the way: someone at Duke called in some serious favors. It’s one thing if they had earned the top overall seed to be rewarded like that. But there were reasonable voices who said, on Sunday, that Duke was not deserving of a…
Vexing
”Just got back from Kansas-Okla. This KU team fascinates me. I cannot tell yet if they’re good, great or legendary.” That Tweet from Joe Posnanski on Monday night perfectly sums up how I feel about this year’s Jayhawks. The only team in the nation in the top five in both offensive and defensive efficiency, yet most observers believe they’re capable…
Dumb And Dumber
If there’s one thing fans of college sports can agree on it’s that the NCAA sucks. While well-intentioned at its core, it has turned into an unwieldy, hypocritical bureaucracy more interested in self-preservation and revenue generation than the best interests of the “student athletes”* (Favorite NCAA hypocrisy is the insistence on the term “student athletes” during NCAA sanctioned events. Because…