Several outlets today are reporting that the literary world is about to be turned on its ear.  As if he didn’t have enough on his plate, like hauling the University of Kentucky into court, trolling the Lexington bars, making friends with the locals, and maybe trying to find a JOB, one Mr. Billy Gillispie has decided to put pen to paper and tell the world his story (with the aid of an actual writer, of course).  That’s right.  Even though I’d say you might have to wait a whole, like, TWO WEEKS for the thing to be written, we will soon be enlightened by…The Billy Gillispie Story.

My question is what on earth is going to actually GO INTO this book?  Riveting chapters about how he was Kentucky’s 18th choice for the head coaching job when they hired him?  A list of his favorite beers?  A discussion on the benefits of never playing a second of zone defense, or how two-hour full-speed practices on game days can lead to REALLY cool injuries for your team?  It seems to me, aside from taking himself a lit-tle too seriously, making an idiot out of himself and embarassing the school he represented (esp. as it pertains to a certain Jeanine Edwards) and being an inflexible boob, the man just hasn’t DONE anything yet.  And there’s a good chance he never will.  With the public persona he’s built for himself and the fact that he’s shown a proclivity for suing former employers, the guy’d be lucky to get a job cleaning John Calipari’s golf cleats, let alone a coaching job at anything resembling a major basketball program.

Seriously, who’s going to buy this thing?  The Texas A&M and UTEP years are too far gone for anyone there to care.  Kentucky fans will only buy it if it turns into a diatribe against his former players (yeah, THAT’LL make players want to play for you, big guy), but even then most UK supporters will refuse to buy it out of spite.  He might call it The Billy Gillispie Story, but I think we all know what this is, in terms of his career — a hundred-page, picture-filled, large print coffin nail.

Yesterday in the White House South Lawn, President Obama greeted Coach Roy Williams and his Tar Heels to celebrate their recent national championship.  Obama spent some time in his remarks reflecting on his pickup game in Chapel Hill last year, going so far as to suggest that luck may have carried both he and the Heels to victory in the ensuing year.  (well, that, plus a catastrophic economic collapse and Ty Lawson’s DUI; so yeah, it was all luck…)

Obama is our first genuine hoops president, so it’s no surprise that he employs former Dookie and teabagger extraordinaire Reggie Love as his assistant.  Everyone can use a House Dookie, after all.  This was a culmination of a particularly rough few days for Love, though, as he was forced to endure the gigantic slurping of his most hated rival from his BFF, coming on the heels of a weekend pickup game where he took a substantial shot to his face during play.  From Politics Daily:

After the game, Mr. Love had a bandage on his chin, according to the pool reporter at the scene. And on return to the White House, he “muttered he might need stitches.” 

Yes, you read that correctly.  Mr. Teabags took a shot to his chin, a phrase which carries all kinds of hilariously inappropriate references that we won’t use here for fear of ending up in Gitmo. 

While our confidential sources did not give up the name of Team Obama‘s version of Dikembe Mutombo (Chris Paul?), it’s pretty clear that the President means business on the court – his team won three of the five games against Love’s crew (RTC is still waiting for its invitation).  As you can see from the above photo taken at the UNC ceremony on Monday, though, it appears that Love is just another whining Democrat Dookie who can’t handle a little rough action around the edges (unless of course it involves voluminous amounts of alcohol and someone’s scrotal region, then he’s +1).

I took part in my first interview last night as part of Dan Levy’s podcast. I refuse to say that I was on (the name of his show) not that there’s anything wrong with it. You can hear my segment on Dan’s website (also available on iTunes). Dan runs a great show even if he did call us out in a segment the same day he added us on Facebook. My segment is about 1/4th way through the show. It’s the part where they are talking about college basketball if you couldn’t figure that out.

A couple things that I wanted to clarify that I screwed up during the interview:

• In the deluge of questions he threw at me I mistakenly thought he was asking which school I would pick, but he was asking which coach I would pick.
• If I had to pick a coach for my imaginary (I hope) kid to play for, I’d go with Roy Williams or Coach K. Like I said during the segment, I think Roy has moved ahead of Coach K in recent years (I left Coach K out of my current top 5 even if he would be in the all-time top 5), but it’s tough to turn down a legend. I am not sure that Coach K’s coaching ability has decreased as much as his ability to recruit and evaluate talent. I think it’s more of the latter so I wouldn’t mind picking him as a coach.
• As much as I respect Jim Calhoun and John Calipari as pure basketball coaches I’d have a hard time selecting them. My issue with Calhoun is this whole recruiting fiasco. My issue with Calipari is that I’m not sure where he’s going to be next year. Sure Roy turned his back on his kids at Kansas after he told the world that he wouldn’t, but I can’t imagine him doing that in Chapel Hill. Or could he?

I’d like to thank Dan for giving me the opportunity to be on his show and would love to be back any time he needs someone to talk about college hoops or anything else for that matter. If anybody else needs us for interviews, contact me at rushthecourt@gmail.com.

When Yahoo! Sports first broke the story about UConn alledgedly violating multiple NCAA rules, we were curious whether the media in Connecticut would take on the sacred cow that is UConn basketball. Outside of the occasional activist reporter photographer, there has been a widespread belief even among outside media members (Scott Van Pelt and Bill Simmons and his buddy JackO being the ones that come to mind) that the Connecticut press would not criticize Jim Calhoun for fear of offending the university and losing their credentials to cover the program. Well we have our answer.

In yesterday’s Hartford Courant, Jeff Jacobs rips Calhoun and the UConn athletic department for their handling of the situation. It’s worth a read and we suggest you check out the comment section for the people who in turn rip Jacobs for having this happen right under his nose, but getting scooped by outsiders. I think there is plenty of blame to go around here from Josh Nochimson to Calhoun and his assistants to the UConn athletic department to the UConn administration, who let it happen on their watch. I’m sure the $12 million or less that he brings in makes them UConn President Michael J. Hogan give Calhoun’s program little longer leash than say the women’s hockey team. How far do you guys think the blame goes? And what if any criticism should be levied against the local media for not finding out (or perhaps even investigating) this stuff earlier? Or do we excuse the local media becuase UConn basketball “feeds their family” in the immortal words of Latrell Spreewell and exposing the program would mean less revenue at the paper and potential job cuts (even before the economic downturn)?

We were granted the opportunity to speak with Bill Laimbeer, a 4-time NBA All-Star, member of 2 NBA Championship teams (“The Bad Boys”) and former team captain of Notre Dame as part of a promotion that Coke Zero is doing for http://www.TasteTheMadness.com.

I have to say going into this interview I was a bit apprehensive. I’m not the world’s smoothest sports interviewer on the planet (as Seth Davis can probably attest to) and Bill Laimbeer has a bit of a reputation although looking back now I can’t remember any Jim “Chris” Everett moments from Laimbeer so maybe my concerns were unnecessary. It turns out that he was much friendlier than I expected and actually laughed at a few of my jokes. Even though it was part of the Coke Zero campaign, we spent most of the interview discussing basketball (college, NBA, WNBA, and even Boston fans like Bill Simmons) and not just the promotion.

One of the things that stuck out when I reviewed the interview was that Laimbeer still seems to harbor some animosity towards Digger Phelps, who coached him at Notre Dame. Looking back I probably should have dug deeper into that, but we were on a schedule. If either Bill or Digger are reading this, shoot me an e-mail at rushthecourt@gmail.com and we can get to the bottom of this.

RTC: Coming from the West Coast, what made you decide to go to Notre Dame?

BL: Well, a few reasons. One was that my parents were moving from Los Angeles to Ohio at that time after my senior year of high school. That played a little part in it. The second part was that I thought Notre Dame was a national university both basketball-wise and school-wise, and I spent most of my life in the Midwest, but I spent my high school years in California so it seemed like a good fit. And Notre Dame was on TV every other week. There was only one game a week on TV.

Laimbeer at Notre Dame (Credit: Notre Dame Media Guide)

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Adidas has just released a new series of commercials featuring several prep-to-pro stars pretending that they went to various schools.The ads themselves are fairly interesting, but I would be more interested in your thoughts on where these guys (and other prep-to-pros) would have actually gone and what impact they would have had on those programs. Would they have led their schools to multiple championships or would they fail to live up to expectations? Would Tracy McGrady win a round in the NCAA tournament? I know that CNNSI used to do a feature like this making an imaginary NCAA tournament, but I can’t find the link right now.

First, here are the commercials:

Personally I would have liked the videos to feature the guys either doing a big press conference where they announce which school they will be going to or some sort of dream sequence where Dwight Howard is dominating some mediocre college center (Brian Zoubek?).

After the jump we have a list of prep-to-pros since 1995. I am interested in hearing your thoughts on where they would have gone and what impact they would have had. Leave you thoughts in the comment section and your reasoning for the argument.
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Yep, it wouldn’t be mid-March unless we had a new Coach K commercial…  this time it’s Nike, and no, it’s not that funny.

Cue the unfair recruiting advantage hysteria.

John Stevens is a featured columnist for Rush The Court.

On the news feed tonight the information has come down that Doug Towey, the CBS Sports executive who was responsible for the playing of the song “One Shining Moment” at the end of the network’s men’s NCAA Tournament coverage (that is, the song that plays over the highlight montage after coverage of the championship game), has died at age 61.

Evidently, the story of the song’s emergence goes like this:  the song was written on the back of a napkin by a man named David Barrett, who actually wrote it after watching Larry Bird play for Indiana State in the 1979 version of the Dance.  Barrett passed the song on to a friend at CBS (rumored to be Armen Keteyian) who in turn passed in on to Mr. Towey.  The original plan was to air it after Super Bowl XXI (1987).  Time constraints didn’t allow it, so the song was eventually aired after the 1987 NCAA Tournament final (Indiana 74, Syracuse 73, aka the Keith Smart game).  I, for one, say thank God for the long interviews after Super Bowl XXI.

I recall the first-ever spin of the song after that IU-Syracuse game.  As happy as I was to hear Teddy Pendergrass, with the first few notes I remember thinking that this was going to be some worthless attempt at tear-jerking, wondering why they would choose to end their coverage in this manner.  By the end of the song, I had already called a fellow hoops fan who I knew would be watching and we agreed — it was perfect.  The song itself can stand alone, especially because it was written with our beloved game in mind.  But when you pair it with the highlight montage… well, you indeed have perfection.

Nobody Turns Off the TV Until Luther is Done (photocredit: AP)

The late great Luther Vandross has had the honor since 2003.  And I’m not afraid to say that whether it’s Pendergrass or Vandross singing it, when I hear it, the ol’ eyes still well up to this day.  Maybe it’s because of what it symbolizes — you know, another season’s end.  Or maybe it’s because it’s just a great song.

So with nods to Messrs. Barrett, Pendergrass and Vandross, today we at RTC offer special thanks to Mr. Towey for pairing this song up with our game.  In that spirit, here are a couple of samples of what Mike Krzyzewski (and countless others) calls “the national anthem of college basketball.”

After months of hype (scroll to bottom), the much-talked about March Madness hubsite featuring Billy Packer and Bobby Knight was finally unveiled to the public today. [Ed. Note: In the interest of full disclosure, RTC is an affiliate of Fantasy Sports Ventures, the company that owns and operates the Knight/Packer site.] The site, which promises to feature analysis from two of the most well-known (and controversial) figures in college basketball history, is still in a little light on content right now, but it should be one of the more interesting sites on which to follow the NCAA tournament (after your morning stop to Rush the Court, of course).  Fwiw, we got 38 right on the trivia challenge, doing well on the seeding questions but less so on the historical records of points scored, etc.

While some people may detest the existence of both individuals, we’re actually looking forward to hearing what they have to say about the NCAA Tournament in an unfiltered medium as they are probably two of the more knowledgeable college basketball analysts in recent years (I can’t remember either leaving the likely #1 overall seed off their preseason top 25). Honestly, Bobby Knight might be one of my favorite college basketball personalities. Some people may think he went over the line at times as a coach, but I have no issue with anything he did and I respect the fact that he ran a clean program (remember that Indiana fans?) and graduated his players. As for Packer, sure, we’ve had our issues with him in the past (ok, maybe more than a few issues), but we’re not sure what March would be like without some authority figure taking shots at the Cinderella.  Somebody has to be the bad guy, right?

We held off on doing a post about this since every other blog already had a post up about it, but you may have heard that Rick Pitino and Christian Laettner were filming a commercial for Vitaminwater recapturing the magic of the 1992 East Regional Final. Personally, I enjoyed the Kentucky fans reaction the most.

Well today we received an e-mail in our inbox letting us know that the commercial was finally online. Here it is.

Duke fans, feel free to run around your homes or offices like mad men (or women). Kentucky fans will be back in a few hours after they get done puking.