Carolina walk-ons beat Duke 3-0, and so do the scholarship players!

CBS has just showed its first prime-time regular season game on the television and that game was Duke visiting North Carolina. The game was very watchable, and it started the way it ended, with Carolina on top!

And what a way to win the game and the regular season championship. The Carolina walk-ons beat the Duke starting line-up 3-0! That was more than two minutes of game-time, not some random three-pointer fluke! The house of cards of Coach Rat has been exposed to a prime-time audience!

Other than Nolan Smith and Seth Curry, the rest of the Duke line-up is basically over-hyped over-rated spoiled brats. And it showed tonight. Big-time! Sure, Kylie or Katie or K-whatever his name is Irving is gone, but Duke is not the only team that lost important players during the season.


The importance of a true point-guard
If you needed any further evidence that a solid point-guard is of uttermost importance to a team, just look at the Carolina Tar-Heels the last two years - check the games with Larry Drew and check the games with Kendall Marshall. Conventional wisdom, and perhaps because of Dad's NBA career, had Larry Drew as the next big thing at Carolina point-guard. Instead, he won't even be a Q-Thomas, since he left mid-season. Marshall is indeed an interesting case. Unlike the last two championship point-guards (Everybody-Loves-Raymond and Ty Lawson), Marshall is not a beep-beeper, but more of a think-first, pass-first type of a point guard. This is a rather rare thing to see from a true freshman that didn't even run the team at the start of the season. Having top-caliber talent around can certainly make a point-guard even better.

Virginia Tech, you are awesome with capital V baby!!!

It's awesome baby! It's unbelievable baby! Virginia Tech has beaten the Dookies! Oh the joy! The jubilation! A fair and square win, with the Dookies fumbling and crumbling like a house of cards at the end of the game. It's unbelievable! Thank you Seth Greenberg for a great victory against the most overhyped team in the history of team sports!

I am surprised Vitale did not cry because his Dookies lost :-)

Villanova, you deserve a trip to the Final Four!

Great Job Villanova and Jay Wright! Great job Rollie for picking him as an assistant! Great job NCAA for putting Nova in Philly! In what promises to be a very dramatic in-state rivarly beat-down in the Elite 8, Villanova is just one win away from the Final Four. And having known and played Pitt in the past, they won't get surprised or shocked in the second half like most non-Big-East teams are.



But this post is to CELEBRATE the HUMILIATION of the clueless DIRTY RAT! He was clearly outsmarted by Jay Wright, as if Casparov was playing chess against the average McDonalds employee.

Who in their right mind tries a three-forward line-up against Nova, including a lumbering seven-footer that doesn't even play against most teams? Three lumbering bigs against the mobile and agile and versatile Nova crew? How stupid was that? It was Coach-K-stupid!

Hey, floor-slappers, where was your defense last night?

Hey, Henderson, where was your NBA game last night?

Hey, three-point shooters, you couldn't even slap the floor last night!

Hey, McDonalds all-american team on the Duke bench, time to start filling in the transfer request forms!


Thank you Villanova!
Thank you Villanova and Jay Wright for such a wonderful gift to the world of college basketball last night! Thank you for exposing the Dookies for the fake spoiled brats that depend on favorite calls and NCAA and ACC favoritism in order to have "success"!

If you missed the game, you can watch it again and again at NCAA.com and also on your TV set with CSTV (CBS College Sports).

You can also enjoy Villanova's best moment so far, the official DVD of the 1985 National Championship between Nova and Georgetown.

Dirty Dookies get their head handed to them 101 times!

Dirty Dookies Done Dirt Cheap! Hip-hip Hooray! The Dookies LOST! The Dookies lost to "Ou-en-si"! The Dookies lost!

But before we get to that, we would like to point out the dirty play of yet another Dookie, this time Kyle Singler. It's a good thing there are cameras everywhere, because it exposes more and more of the dirty plays that go in the game. And by exposing them, it helps clean up the game!

If the Ratface-K was the papal coach he thinks he is, he should have suspended Kyle Singler out of his own free will for dirty play. It was a totally unnecessary elbow incident, and as the Coach of the National Team, and a "guardian of the game", Ratface-K should have made a strong statement by suspending Kyle Singler for a handful of games.

But of course we all know he won't, because he's not the Pope of college basketball, he is a pretentious weasel :-)

Okay, enough Colbert-Report-inspired Dookie-hating, now let's talk about the game :)


North Carolina at Duke Game Recap
Brett Favre ruined ESPN's big day. Instead of the family of networks talking about the UNC at Duke game non-stop, they had to waste countless hours on yet another fake Brent Favr (or whatever his name is) "retirement".

North Carolina started the game on fire. And we don't mean that as exaggeration! By the second media time-out, they were on pace to score 130 points. Two of their struggling rotation players, Neon-Deon Thompson and Bobby Lasor-Frasor were making just about everything they shot.

But we all know that was Camelot, and reality sank and so did their shooting percentages, while the Dookies starting sinking threes left and right.

During this segment UNC had a "Kansas-style" epic melt-down, with Roy Williams being "too proud" to call a time-out and stem the tide, following the Dean Smith rule-of-thumb of letting the players fight through it and figure it out.

But then reality sank in for the Dookies in the second half, and UNC slowly but steadily took over the game. Despite some mistakes and sprees by the Dookies, the game was never in-doubt, and UNC had the closest thing to a coasting (for such an intense rivarly game) to a big victory.


Fallout
It was really funny how both Dick Vitale and Mike Patrick got really excited when Duke score or made a run ;-)

Vitale got in trouble at Cameron! His "base" told him that he's not praising the Dookies enough and he is praising UNC too much. For that, Vitali apologized publicly and live on the air ;-)

Roy's jacket fellout as he got angry at Tyler Hansbro for not calling out a jaw-breaker screen for one of his guards.

Watching the first half of the game validated what many people have known: North Carolina is a defense-optional resort :)

It was quite interesting to note that Ole Roy went to a four-shorties rotation towards the end of the game, with Green playing the four-spot, in an attempt to fight off the pressure and have better free throw shooting.

Coming in the next few hours:
* Opinion on Tyler Zeller (medical redshirt or play?)
* Opinion on Nolan Smith

I thought I was dreaming: OMG Clemson did blow-out Duke!

I wasn't sure last night. I thought I dreamt it all. But when I checked the newspapers, the websites, the blogs, the forums and the tape, I realized it wasn't a true! IT WAS FOR REAL!

Clemson managed to disintegrate and decompose the "feared" Duke 7-man offense and 7-man defense! OMG! It really happened!

Thank you Clemson!
Thank you Oliver!
Thank you Tigers!
Thank you South Carolina!
Thank you Stephen Colbert!

We are all Clemson fans today!

Finally a February where we don't have to talk about the epic meltdown of Clemson. Finally, a February where Clemson has a MAN-SIZED VICTORY over a top tier team! Finally! And that is good news because this is a coach and a team that deserved success! Finally!

And that is made a whole lot more sweeter because they DEMOLISHED DUKE. They RUINED Duke. They gave Coach Ratzilla orange nightmares for years to come! They made Jay Bilas and Mike Patrick cry during the telecast. Bilas was admonishing Clemson players when they were beating Duke by 30, while playing down the epic meltdown of the Dookie pukie overrated spoiled brats!

And on top of that, Terrence Oglesby was auditioning at the end of the game for the next "White Men Can't Dunk" movie ;-)

We are all Clemson fans today!!!

Watch Duke losing to Wake again on ESPN Classic: 5pm eastern on Thursday

If you can't get enough of the Wake Forest win over Duke, tune to ESPN Classic today (Thursday) at 5pm eastern for an instant-classic repeat. But if you can't wait, you can also watch it for free online at ESPN360.com, available in different screen-sizes and even different screen aspect-ratios (16:9 or 4:3).

We are all Wake Forest fans this year!

Thank you Wake Forest! Thank you! An awesome with a capital-A win! Despite the fact that Wake started falling apart, they managed to keep it together and win this game by executing with less than three seconds left! Wooohoooo!!!!!!!

Wake grabbed a commanding lead, but a combination of poor free throw decision, bad decisions by their two lead guards, and of course Duke's 6th man (the Zebras), managed to slow Wake's offense and score enough points for the Dookies to make the game competitive and even winnable for you. Even Dick Vitale thought one of those calls should have gone the other way, and Dookie Vitale is a bigger Duke cheerleader than the Duke's booster club :)

Oh what a great game :-) Go WAKE FOREST Go! Go WAKE FOREST Go! Go WAKE FOREST Go! Go WAKE FOREST Go! Go WAKE FOREST Go! Go WAKE FOREST Go!


Wake's future in March?
Now the big question for Wake Forest is the future. They look like they could be a team of a destiny with a Final Four run and beyond. However, they also look like a team that could have a deer-in-the-headlights first week in the NCAA tourney and get bounced out. We were certainly disappointed by the decisions made by their two lead guards in the last eight minutes, they were charging ahead on offense as if they were 10 points behind, instead of backing out, reading the defense, and then attacking. I'm sure this is something Dino Gaudio will be working on in the next few days.

And speaking of Dino Gaudio, what an amazing job he has done at Wake Forest, carrying on the tradition of the late and beloved Skip Prosser! And during the half-time interview, one could have easily be hearing Skip Prosser uttering the exact same words.


Goodbye #1 for the Dookies
So what happens to the Dookies from here on? They win a lot more games (thank you Zebras!), and they stumble in the NCAAs to our great excitement :)

I'm not sure what Coach K does to his players in the secret dungeons of Cameron Indoor Cave, but they have that blank stare, as if he has stolen their souls and replaced then with Wojo-clone-souls ;-) And if they are not deemed as "stars", it seems like Coach K de-claws them offensively, and they just can't shoot or make a basket.

Of course talking about Duke, there's also the elephant in the room, the team is a little bit "too milky" and that can obviously raise some socio-political concerns. Perhaps that's why Paulus was benched, so the starting line-up would be a little bit more "diverse".


Wake should really become the new #1
You know, if you are the #4 team and you beat the #1 team, you should take over the #1 spot, instead of UConn who will likely beat easily a couple of non-Top-25 Big East teams.


Silly Rules needing to change revisited
Once again, silly rules that need to be modernized affected the game but not decidedly so. The five fouls is just plain silly and so is the absence of a semi-circle under the basket, something that took away a couple of legitimate Wake Forest baskets.

Again, the game is basketball, not human pinball. Having players stand under the basket and take charges is not a basketball skill, it's a not-basketball skill! Fix it NCAA!


If you missed the game...
If you missed the game or want to enjoy it again and again and again, then head on over to ESPN360.com and watch the replay for FREE :-)

We are all Michigan fans this week

Thank you John Beilein! Thank you! I knew you could do it! Thank you Michigan! Thank you Ann Arbor! Thank you for giving the sleazy Dookies their first defeat of the 2008-2009 season! The first of many to come we can hope :-)

That's what happens when you have a real basketball coach coaching versus a phoney :-)

Go Michigan Go! :-)

The ultimate Duke Hater gift: the 1990 NCAA Final DVD!

Yes, Duke Hater fans, we have what is possibly the ultimate Duke Hater Gift ever! The official DVD of the 1990 NCAA Final where the UNLV Running Rebels steamroll and blow out the Dirty Dookies by 30 (thirfty) points. Watch the smugfest melt from the plastic face of Coach Ratface K! Enjoy the blowout and the run and gun style of play of the Rebs! Go Shark the Tark! Okay, Tark the Shark :)

The price is $24.99 and eligible for free super saver shipping if your order is $25 or more. To jump over $25, you can just buy an mp3 song for 89c cents, or find another low price trinket to put you over the hump. The DVD is produced by Thought Equity and NCAA OnDemand.



NCAA On Demand has started releasing lots and lots of basketball games on DVD, so you can relive your favorite basketball moments in the best quality possible. Sure you can watch the old grainy VHS tapes, but if you are going to be watching on your new big screen TV, it's not gonna be pretty :) There are currently over 1400 DVD titles produced by NCAA On Demand, covering various NCAA sports from different eras.

A nice site that keeps track of the Final Four teams in summary format is SportsStats.com. Be sure to check the team stats of the 1990 UNLV Rebels team, the one in the aforementioned DVD. You can also get other DVDs from the 1990 NCAA tourney. Check the link on the previous paragraph!

Wikipedia has assembled a summary page of the 1990 NCAA tournament! Dookie tears not included, but they may be available on eBay ;-)

Outside the Lines: Tyler Smith and Duke's Blues

Today's Outside the Lines, on ESPN2 (330pm eastern) has a distinct College Basketball flavor. First up, Duke's Blues as Coach K gets his second early exit from the NCAA tourney! Thank you VCu, thank you Belmont, thank you West Virginia and Bob Thuggins! Outside the Lines re-examines the Duke/North Carolina rivalry with Raleigh Radio Host, Bomani Jones.


Some love for Coach K
As we mentioned a few years ago, in October 2005, at our sister blog, Recruiting Wars, that the return of Roy Williams at UNC would significantly alter the dynamics of the rivarly. Don't look now if you are a Duke fan, but look now if you are not! A national championship, an elite 8, a current run in the sweet 16, an amazing job on the year after the championship when he didn't have the usual Kansas/UNC talent, and such. More on that in January 2006.

What has Coach Ratface K done? He stockpiles Mcdonalds All-Americans, plays only half of them, and wastes the life and potential of almost all of them. Look at where DeMarcus Nelson's career has gone! He was a scoring machine that could have been a whole lot more in college had he played elsewhere. At Duke, just like most players, their life force is drained by the Ratface K, and their game just evaporates into floor slaps.

The second feature, the centerpiece, is the story of Tennessee's Tyler Smith, told by Tom Friend.

Certifiably Insane: Top 65 don't get at-large bids!

We love Seth Greenberg, and we understand he was emotional after his loss at UNC, but the top 65 teams don't get to the NCAA tourney. At-large bids are given to 34 teams, and it's usually the top 45-50 teams that get in the NCAA tourney. The remaining slots are filled by automatic bids from smaller conferences that would never ever earn an at-large bid. But we understand what he felt, almost winning in North Carolina, and I'm sure he must feel that a couple of calls went against Virginia Tech towards the end of the game.

Meanwhile, Boise State is beating New Mexico State with 15 minutes left in the second half, not that it matters bubble-wise, or seeding-wise even :)

Keep in mind, the SEC conference championship will be played on Sunday March 16, at 330pm eastern (1230pm pacific) on ESPN2. The game will also be shown on the local CBS affiliate in the cities/states of the two participating teams.

We are behind on our TV listings, we just added the TV listings for Sunday March 16, 2008.


THANK YOU CLEMSON TIGERS
It's always a special day when Duke loses. I am organizing a parade in their honor on Monday. And I'll ask everyone to wear green, to celebrate the freshness of their victory! Check your local events calendar, there may be a parade like that in your city :)

THANK YOU CLEMSON TIGERS! I knew you could do it Oliver Purnell! Go Tigers Go! Go Clemson Go!!!

You can celebrate this victory with some Clemson gear too if you like:

Thank you Miami, thank you!

Thank you Miami Hurricanes! Thank you Frank Haith! Thank you state of Florida for delivering yet another Duke loss! Thank you Miami fans, alumni, players, alumni, professors, janitors, athletic department employees, boosters, and everyone affiliated with the great University of Miami!

Why am I so excited about Miami? Because they BEAT DUKE! last night!

To celebrate this win, be sure to get some Miami Hurricanes gear: