1. There has been quite a bit of talk about the “Fab 5” documentary that ESPN aired about the Michigan teams of the early ’90s in particular their inflammatory comments about Duke. One of the players that they went after was Grant Hill and talked about their dislike of him at the time and the perceived elitism of Duke and his traditional upbringing. Hill responded yesterday with a biting attack at Jalen Rose. To be fair to the Michigan players it seems like their statements were in reference to how they felt as teenagers about their opponents rather than the 30-/40-somethings that they are now. We are still somewhat amused that Michigan students would play the elitism card with anybody.
2. We often laugh at the concept of a “vote of confidence” that administrations give to coaches in an attempt to convince the public that they aren’t going to fire the coach any time soon although they often do. Having said that the response that the Tennessee administration gave to a question about Bruce Pearl‘s job status should be considered ominous. We suspect that Pearl might be contacting a real estate agent in the Knoxville area pretty soon.
3. Last year we were all impressed by the NCAA’s decision the create The Vault, which was a collection of full-length video of classic NCAA Tournament games. This year the NCAA has decided to build on that technology to create an interactive bracket pairing games against each other until they select the greatest game of the past 30 years (note: it looks like they are only missing the full-length video for the 1973 UCLA-Memphis State game). We have to say that the “First Four” games in this bracket are something we could definitely get behind.
4. Speaking of great games. . .Most of you are probably going to be pretty busy today working watching the first round, but we highly recommend the recent piece by Time about Princeton‘s upset of defending national champion UCLA in 1996. It’s a rather long article, but definitely worth your time and if you get their early enough it should pump you up for the day’s games and the possibility of another historic upset.
5. Yesterday we gave you what we provided you with a link to a bracket by LeBron James. It turns out that LeBron actually has two brackets, but the one on his personal site has Duke not Ohio State winning it all. Taking a quick glance at his bracket it looks like LeBron is a big fan of chalk for his brackets as well as pre-game routines.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 17th, 2011 at 5:15 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: bruce pearl, duke, grant hill, jalen rose, lebron james, memphis state, michigan, ohio state, princeton, tennessee, ucla. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.