Let Games Begin

It has been a slow season of late at the Yard. The teams of our destiny have not performed as cached in our memories. The sordid scandals of the past year have squished the comic tendencies out of our cynical nature. Our research staff did uncover this quiet little story about an Ivy League Taiwanese kid rising from obscurity to become a starting point guard of the New York Knicks! We hoped to get the word out to our loyal membership but Sports Illustrated trumped us while we were stranded wine tasting in Napa. It was a great story but the barrel tasting at Peju Vineyards winery is not something to be skipped for a scoop. Linsanity would have to wait and it appears to have run its course anyways. There are not many priorities at the Yard but Napa cabernets always trumps Asian point guards even if they play in NYC.

We needed to rest up anyways for our largest event of the year-The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. For 14 days of March and the first two days of April, college basketball and all of its madness will rule the Yard. There will be 62 basketball games played all over the nation. We had a practice run during championship week trolling through 272 conference tournament games starting last weekend and culminating with the Big Ten title game. There have been upsets and upstarts and the first round is still four days away.

Preparing for the 48 hour Thursday-Friday shift of 32 tournament basketball games later this week is not a regiment we take likely. With three TV’s playing three different games, the Yard was scanning round robin through the ACC, SEC, Conference USA, Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, Atlantic 10, Big 10, Southland Conference, Pac-10 and Mountain West Conference season ending tournament games. We got started on the Deuce at 8:00 AM settling in for the highly anticipated Vermont Catamounts versus the Stony Brook Seawolves matchup. We warmed up the second 48 inches of LCD madness at 8:30 with the Marshall-Memphis game on CBS. Remote dexterity had to be taken to another level with the SEC and ACC Semifinals tipped off simultaneously on ABC and ESPN. Four games and only three TV’s, our skills were being tested to extreme viewing levels. Jo at the Yard was caught switching on the Food Channel on the main screen when we took a quick lunch break after the UNC-NC State game. No explanation was needed as we recovered the remote with extreme prejudice and returned to our myopic programming. Anthony Bourdain will still be on TV April 3 and Jo is just going to have to hang in there until then.

With household priorities re-established, the day marched on. There was a small tear when the Norfolk State University Spartans earned their first ever NCAA bid with their victory over the Bethune-Cookman Wildcats. Duke gave us another reason to root against them when they signed Austin Rivers. The Dukies were already in our cross hairs but signing the progeny of Celtic head coach Doc Rivers was another pinch of venom in our legacy cauldron of distain. It was nice to see them get upset in the ACC semifinal by Florida State. Ohio State looked formidable against the Michigan school in Ann Arbor. The State University in East Lansing will be a more formidable opponent for the Buckeyes. Coach Tom Izzo is gearing up for another long run into March. If Missouri does not get the #1 seed in the Midwest after winning the Big 12 Tournament, there should be an SI investigation. The Tigers boat raced Baylor in the Championship game after Baylor boat raced the Jayhawks in the semifinal. Kansas and Missouri split the season series. Kansas will get the #1 seed because they are Kansas. Missouri will get shipped out as a #2 seed because they are Missouri. Pacific 10 conference tournament is the worst of the lot. Colorado versus Arizona is like watching a mid-major before that was a cool thing. UCLA may be on well documented hard times but the whole conference sucks this year. The Mountain West has better players and is more entertaining to watch than any team in the moribund Pac-12. Let the games begin!

All of the major recruits who left UCLA in the past three years will be playing in the NCAA tournament this year. If all of them had stayed at UCLA, the Bruins would have been a Final Four type of team. Chace Stanbach and Mike Mosher of UNLV left UCLA and were All Conference selections in the MWC. Kendall Williams and Drew Gordon were MWC All Conference selections at New Mexico. Matt Carlino was all WCC Honorable mention as a freshman point guard at BYU. With those who stayed, UCLA will be lucky to get an NIT bid.

Final Seconds: UCLA has marketing posters at the Sports Arena asking for donations to help support athletics. The poster broke down all of the related costs for a student athlete including tuition, housing and books. The data factored in $3,875 for health and fitness per student athlete. The numbers sounded reasonable but the student athlete that was the canvas for the narrative was UCLA’s 6’10” 305 pound center Joshua Smith. Observing Josh’s health and fitness these past few years as he has piled on the pounds while huffing and puffing up and down the court, one has to wonder where that money went? Not the best example for that marketing pitch.

Overtime: There are some records that will never be broken in every major sport. Most of them are unreachable because of changes in the games related to numbers of games, longevity of players, performance enhancements and other clinical stuff. One such record that had escaped our radar was the NBA record for average minutes per game by a single player. For any player to play all 48 minutes of an NBA basketball game is rare. It has happened on occasion and it is always well noted in the sports world. In 1961-62season, Wilt Chamberlin averaged 48.5 minutes per game for the entire season. He played an 80 game season.