All you can eat Fridays! (Rivarly Week edition)

Coaches Corner

This weekend is the "Suits and Sneakers" cancer awareness weekend where college basketball coaches will be wearing suits and sneakers to help raise awareness about cancer. This event will be highlighted in just about every college basketball game shown on TV.

Phil Martelli: Don't miss Hawk Talk, on CSTV. This is a very unique coaches show. Despite having not one, but two basketball people, the show rarely covers basketball. The two basketball people are coach Phil Martelli, and Mr Bracketology and St Joe's employee Joe Lunardi. If you haven't seen Hawk Talk before, make sure you watch at least one installment! In this week's episode you will find out that Phil Martelli will be publishing a brand new book, with an expected release date of October 2007. It will be titled "Don't call me Coach", a variation on a theme on the Wooden book "They call me coach". Marteli is collaborating with an acclaimed PhD writer (I don't recall his name) on this book, who said the book has a distinctive Martelli style and character (as it should). I don't know if they checked, or if it matters, but there is already a book with the same title from 2002...


Battle of Tobacco Road Revisited

Was Josh McRoberts crying when he got his fourth foul? Or were those tears of ...frustration? Cry-baby Dookies? As you may recall JJ Redick was not shy about crying either :-)

Jay Bilas and Hubert Davis tried so hard to sound unbiased and impartial when analyzing the Duke vs North Carolina game they went out of their way to overly praise their rival and exaggerate their strong points while softening their weakness.

Memo to the people of ESPN: Can you please stop interrupting live games with the silly 30/30 updates? You even interrupted the Duke vs Norht Carolina game? How sacriligious is that in a basketball sense? With all the updates at the bottom ticker, the halftime show, updates before/after time-outs, and half a dozen ESPN-branded tv networks, do you really think it is necessary to interrupt a game and show stock footage of Bill Parcells and say that they are still looking for a coach in Dallas? Can't you just do the updates in a voice-over while still showing the game full-screen? ESPN, you are not CNN, you are a sports network!


Battle of Los Angeles (USC vs UCLA) Revisited

The Governator sought the blessing of the Wizard of Westwood as he was leaving Pauly after he made a brief guest appearance during the USC vs UCLA game.

I forgot which USC player made this very astute observation but he was right on the money by calling Ben Howland's style of play at UCLA a hockey program!. I couldn't agree with you more USC player!

Tim Floyd was so upset with the officials that he adamantly refused to comment on them. Because if he did, he would have been fined and suspended. But we all know he thought the officials were really horrible. So perhaps the NCAA will start fining coaches if they hint or imply that they thought the officials were horrible by refusing to comment on them. On a totally unrelated note, Myles Brand will be playing a new sophisticated version of Big Brother (no moustache this time) in a brand new adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 - just kidding on the movie part, but just barely :-)

But did the zebras give the game to UCLA? I think not... As you may recall late in the game the zebras messed up an out of bounds call (USC player standing on the endline) and gave the ball to USC instead of UCLA. But after that the zebras overcompensated by giving UCLA a series of calls, including a technical foul.

National FSN didn't pick up the USC vs UCLA game! How crazy is that? :-) The game was on Prime Ticket, SoCal's secondary FSN channel, and carried on Fox College Sports, with UCLA prime-homer Don MaClean


Etc

Numbers: Louisville lost to Georgetown yet they committed just one turnover. Yes, just one. After the game Pitino said if they played 10 times Georgetown would have won 9. (the other one a 0-0 draw?)

Is Skip Bayless becoming the Bill O'Reilly of basketball? First he dismissed college basketball as boring with mediocre level of play and talent compared to the NBA, and he said he'd rather watch two NBA contenders play a regular season game than watch March Madness. This during Cold Pizza but thankfully Greg Anthony was there to set him in his place and explain to him the difference between the NBA and NCAA. Later on Skip found out that he is inspiring Allen Iverson because of all the hatorade he's been drinking in Iverson's name. The Skip O'Bayless Factor?

Good news for the Pac-10: first time ever that six Pac-10 teams were ranked in the AP Billboard Hot 25 chart (that's my new name for the basketball polls).