Daily Bubble Talk (Thursday)

Coach's K's Who's Praising Me Now? segment They are building a new practice facility in my name! I am so great! They named the court after me and now they are naming the new practice facility after me! I am the best! Did I mention my American Express commercials and all the great business leaders who pay $1500 for my seminars to watch me verbally abuse my players? I am so great!

Thank you MARYLAND
Thank you Maryland for beating the Dookies! Thank you Gary Williams, Comcast, players, fans, students, professors, janitors, Matt Damon (ooops wrong movie), ushers, alumni, donors, boosters, boosted, terrapins radio network, and everyone else supporting Maryland!

Speaking of the Terrapins, there was a funny moment in this week's Gary Williams's coaches show. Probably this was an editing error (or perhaps an inside joke?): People working behind the scenes were featured, and the last one, a graduate assistant, was mentioning how everyone is considered equally important to the team regardless of what function they perform (doing laundry, game plans, radio, logistics, etc). Well, as he was finishing up his comments, the audio from his last 2-3 sentences was muted as the editors were fading out the segment. So much for being treated like an equal :-)

Basketball and Politics
Just two degrees of separation: What's the link between Brown's college basketball coach Craig Robinson and Democratic Senator and presidential nominee Barrack Obama? Craig Robinson is the brother in law of Barack Obama. Coach Robinson appeared on this week's edition of CSTV's Taking Issue and revealed that Barack has a good jumpshot. The spillover effect of primaries, they find their way to March Madness! Speaking of basketball and politics, there is a movement to finally give the Ivy League a conference tourney. This would also have the positive side-effect of giving the Ivy an automatic NIT bid if the regular season champ does not win the conference tourney (or get an NCAA at-large bid).


Bubble Talk

Every single Championship week game on the ESPN family of networks (over 80 of them) will be available online for free at ESPN360.com. Great job ESPN! Also nice is the new three-screen view of ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPNU coming off time-outs. This is a great idea by ESPN. However, what really annoys me is interrputing live games for those stupid 30/30 updates. ESPN fix it, and fix the item below as well:

BCS bias alert: ESPN's College Gamenight is almost completely ignoring conference tourneys of the mid-major conferences. Last night they only showed the Patriot League brackets for 5 seconds.

Memo to everyone: Please STOP saying that 20 wins will get a team in the NCAA tourney. This is an old-school metric, when conference schedules were balanced and all teams played 28 games. Now most of the "bcs" conference schedules are unbalanced and teams play 30+ games because of the early season exempt tourneys. Lining up 13 cupcakes (UConn, Syracuse, etc) means that a team not good enough to make the (new) NIT can get to 20 wins. So stop already :-) This includes you too Digger. You keep repeating that like a broken record. And please stop projecting every single Big East team in the tourney. A couple of days ago on SportsCenter he hesitated a bit before saying UConn was out. UConn is barely in the NIT bubble (fewer bids, automatic NIT bids should chop off the at-large NIT field to 24 or so). Also, stop saying that 10 conference wins, or a conference winning record will get a team in. The criteria are: who did you play, when, where and how well. That's what matters. As you may recall Jim Harrick's last Georgia team was given an at-large bid with (I believe) around 17-18 wins because they played a tough schedule, and they played well. They were a Final Four sleeper that year had they been eligible.


Not Bubble Talk

Stupidest Ideas of the Day: Brian Curtis of CSTV on Taking Issue thinks 1) there are too many teams in the NCAA field (how stupid is that?), 2) does not want to include too many teams from one conference 3) does not want to include teams with losing conference records (have you heard of unbalanced scheduling Brian?). Brian Curtis does a decent job most of the time, but sometimes he desperately tries to be "edgy" but instead he comes across as a "me-too wanna-be" :-) (I hope he is not reading this!) His show "Taking Issue" airs on CSTV on a weekly basis. This week he has two college basketball coaches as guests: Villanova's Jay Wright and Brown's Craig Robinson. He is also a contributor to CSTV's excellent weekly preview show "Crystal Ball".

Bizarre Timing for Marcus Williams to announce that he will enter the NBA draft. Probably a record-early announcement? But perhaps this was Lute's idea. In the past he has been known to want playes to make up their mind as soon as possible, so he may be the one who forced the issue. So now everyone knows that he is looking for another forward for next year (any recruits listening?) and that his players can get NBA-Draft-ready (different from NBA-ready, but then again, no one is these days) in just two years. Negative Recruiting? Rumors were circulating that the Silver Fox is suffering from Parkinson's, which he dispelled at his weekly news conference. First it was old age, and since that didn't work, apparently now the negative recruiters are going down the list of illness and conditions. Everything is fair in recruiting it seems...

Spin Wars at Kentucky: Tubby brilliantly spun the press release by the Kentucky AD. Perhaps Tubby should consider a career in politics. A losing streak of more than 0 games is usually cause for concern at UK, so when Tubby lost a handful in the last few weeks, well that didn't sit well. Earlier in the season I didn't think there would be a coaching change at Kentucky but after this incident, I am starting to think that either Tubby will get tired of all the complaining and opt for the NBA (or another college job, or perhaps some TV analyst work) or Kentucky will go after some big names to replace Tubby. Which could lead to the unthinkable: Pitino returning to Kentucky???

Great job by Pat Summitt in showing school spirit, team-work and also opening the door for a new era of co-operation between women's and men's basketball programs. Great job Pat! Pat Summit is already in the hall of fame, she has national championships and 940+ wins, Bruce Pearl needed this more, so this makes Pat's effort even more so impressive. Also this had a pleasant side-effect of creating a lot of noise about Tennessee's men's and women's basketball.

On a related note Skip Bayless has been obnoxiously objecting to the Bruce Pearl body-paint and Pat Summitt's singing and cheerleading. On a totally unrelated note Skip is a Vanderbilt graduate. Totally unrelated I assure you ;-) Oh Skip...

Giving people second chances is a risky business, but the Suttons specialize in that. Latest example being the bonehead (pun intended) play by Mario Boggan.

Idea for ESPN: Put Dick Vitale and Mike Patrick in the Cameron Crazies section, take away their microphones, dress them up in Dookie gear, during timeouts show them dancing with the Crazies, and and let Doris do the game. She is clearly the only one paying attention to the game and the only one who really analyzes the game. Validation point: Doris figured out how to properly pronounce Vasquez's name while Vitale and Patrick did not.

Frustration Boulevard Jim Calhoun was caught by the ESPN cameras, fully animated, screaming "bullshit" at the officials.

Another triple-double by Stephan Lasme of UMass. Perhaps they are a triple-double away (which would be an NCAA record) from an at-large bid! Remember the name NBA Draft fans!

Duke's students will have to take "diversity classes" after the lacrosse incident. Make sure Coach K attends those classes too...