An Old Friend
Perhaps no one has noticed, but I have yet to write anything lengthy about KU basketball this season. There are a couple reasons for that – which I’ll get into in another post at some point – but the bottom line is I have a different relationship with the team and with college basketball in general this year. In fact,…
Best Of The Naughts
The Lawrence Journal-World just completed their reader-driven contest to determine the best KU basketball player of the last decade. Weird timing, yes, since apparently everything that happened in the spring of 2000 gets pushed back to the 90s. But fun anyway. Some thoughts. It was interesting looking at their brackets – they went position-by-position – and realizing how unique KU’s…
A Bar Too High
Let’s get this out of the way right up front: expectations for athletes are never fair. Especially for kids who were high school stars and who move on to elite college programs. All these kids do is play a game they have some natural talent for very well and suddenly outsiders are ranking them against other kids their age, experts…
Pisser
Well, that certainly sucked. I should have done what I threatened to do midway through the first half: turn off the TV, get in the car, and drive until the game was over. It worked against Davidson three years ago. Perhaps it would have worked yesterday. Instead, I just turned the volume down when the second half began, pulled out…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Some Notes
It’s hoops season, bitches. One more week of half-assed posting while I write my “novel.” 40,000 words down; 10,000 to go. I hit a couple games in the county girls tournament last week. One was a blowout, as expected. It was 10-0 after a minute and never got closer. The other looked like a great match-up on paper. It was…