Here are some impressions/comments jotted down as I watched yesterday’s tournament games:
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UNC-Wilmington C, CJ Gettys went to same high school as Ben Roethlisberger. After seeing Ben for all these years, it is hard to imagine that he is not nearly the biggest guy to come out of that high school but Gettys is 6 inches taller and probably 30 pounds heavier.
Duke’s defense was lethargic in the first half. They started the second half with animated defense and turned a 3-point deficit at halftime into a 10-point lead in about 6 minutes.
Colorado/UConn was a sloppy game on offense and defense. Colorado C, Josh Scott is a big man with decent mobility and a very good interior passer.
Butler/Texas Tech were not the best teams to play in the early time slot by a wide margin, but it was the best game to watch among those first four games.
Iowa State is unimpressive but dominated Iona. Draw your own conclusions from that. Iona plays “AAU basketball” which is fine until you have to play someone who has a modicum of “team basketball skills”.
Virginia simply outclassed Hampton. Same goes for Kansas and Austin Peay. Indiana looked like it was a scrimmage against Tennessee-Chattanooga. Once Kentucky decided to break a sweat, it was all over for Stony Brook.
Yale/Baylor was a great game because it was a close game. Questions:
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Does Yale coach, James Jones ever smile? Does he ever get upset? Do you think his blood pressure ever goes above 105/60?
When Arkansas-Little Rock finally beat Purdue in double-OT, that was the second #12-seed to win yesterday.
Buffalo kept it close, but Miami was the better team.
Wichita St. just kept grinding out plays to beat Arizona. The Shockers are tenacious on defense.
Had only seen Utah once before yesterday and I was impressed. They toyed with Fresno State.
Providence/USC was a great game. What more do you want than a game that goes down to the final 2 seconds before it is decided by one point with a layup?
Gonzaga looked awfully good for an #11-seed. Domantas Sabonis – the son of Arvydas Sabonis proving that genetics works – was Dominant Sabonis here.
I have a few other notes from yesterday that do not speak directly to the games themselves. Yes, I did find a few “Bad Ads” that will receive mention in the annual “Bad Ads” compendium come December. In addition, here is one other observation from yesterday:
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We saw shots of players arriving at the arena wearing headphones. We saw shots of teams that were scheduled to play in the second game of a double header sitting in the stands watching part of the first game wearing headphones.
Then it dawned on me… These student-athletes were listening to recorded lectures in Advanced Physical Chemistry or Macroeconomics in preparation for their mid-term exams back at school next Tuesday.
In women’s college basketball, there is a sordid mess ongoing in Florida. I will present here a comment from Greg Cote in the Miami Herald that will likely give you more than you want to know about this:
“FIU: Panthers fire women’s basketball coach Marlin Chin. Let’s see here. An NCAA violation. Allegation of sexual misconduct with a player. And a 5-26 record. That would pretty much be the trifecta of how to get fired.”
Moving on to another topic, team sponsorships and promotional linkages do not always make sense to me. I plead ignorance when it comes to any sort of expertise or gut-feeling when it comes to marketing/promotional “stuff”. Having said that, this next one is unusual even for the world of marketing.
There is a German soccer club playing in the second level of the Bundesliga called Sportverein Sandhausen 1916 e.V. That is a mouthful even in Germany, so the team is simply referred to as Sandhausen and they have just entered into a sponsorship agreement with an enterprise in the nearby town of Heidelberg. The enterprise is Bienenstock Eros Center; you guessed it, it is a bordello.
Oh, but it is not just any run-of-the-mill cathouse… According to the Sandhausen folks, Bienenstock Eros Center is an “eco-brothel”. The building is a passive energy-conserving structure; smoking is forbidden in the brothel. A team representative stated definitively that players for Sandhausen would not receive discounts as a result of this sponsorship arrangement. He did not mention if that same discount ban applied to referees for Sandhausen home games…
Finally, here is another item from Greg Cote of the Miami Herald:
“More than 24,000 runners were registered for Sunday’s Miami Marathon and Half Marathon won by Moroccan Benazzouz Slimani and New York’s Allison Kieffer. One entrant Larry Macon, 71, of San Antonio, competed in his 1,606th marathon. That’s 42,077 miles in a lifetime of running. Big deal. My car already has more than 7,000 miles and I’ve only had it six months.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………