Other than Michigan St. @ Purdue tonight (and really, who wants to watch that?), the games tonight are quite pedestrian. So piggybacking a report from SportsbyBROOKS yesterday (via Deadspin) that the root of the frosty relations between Kentucky capo Billy Gillispie and ESPN sideline reporter Jeannine Edwards goes back to her refusal to enjoy consensual carnal relations with go out with him, we feel compelled to comment on such a weighty matter.
(photo credit: sportsbyBrooks)
You may recall our first inkling of their tiff on January 27 when UK played at Ole Miss. Gillispie was unhappy with his team and thought Edwards’ question was particularly bad, so he told her so.
Then last week during the UK-Florida game at Rupp, Gillispie seemingly mocked Edwards as he pretended to not hear her question before telling her that she “would know better than” him when it came to, you know, basketball… stuff. We even wrote at the time that maybe there was more to his condescension than met the eye.
So what’s the story here? The easy answer is that, yeah, Gillispie is peeved that Edwards denied his amorous advances, but as any female aged 18-50 who lives in the Lexington area knows, Billy Clyde isn’t exactly the kind of chap who takes the word “no” to heart. And that of course assumes he can even remember it. No, Gillispie has beef with Edwards, but that’s probably because he’s a chauvanist men’s basketball coach who doesn’t respect her position rather than any particular incident involving dating her. Come on, ladies of Lexington… you gals who frequent Harry’s after games and have fallen into the Gillispie Fly Trap – feel free to chime in here.
Nevertheless, sideshows sell and so we come to tonight’s UK @ VanderbiltJodie Meeks game, and guess who is scheduled to once again be the sideline reporter? Yep, Ms. Jeannine Edwards. Is there any question that ESPN’s halftime interview split ratings will be the highest of any game all season long?
Of course, if Vandy somehow does something interesting for the first time in the history of that school, maybe ESPN will avoid this whole sordid mess by interviewing Kevin Stallings instead. Wouldn’t that be rich?
And now, with your RTC public service announcement…
ESPN Full Court will be FREE, as in zero dollars, for the week of Jan. 12-17, as part of a promotional teaser to inspire you to buy the second half of the season for the low, low price of $75*.
Here are a few of the nationally prominent games featured this week that you shouldn’t miss because they’re free (the full schedule is here):
Tues 1/13 – Kansas St. @ Kansas
Wed 1/14 – Wake Forest @ BC
Sat 1/17 – Arkansas @ Florida
Sat 1/17 – Syracuse @ UConn
Sat 1/17 – Wake Forest @ Clemson (possible battle of unbeatens)
Sat 1/17 – South Carolina @ Tennessee
Check your local cable or dish provider for the channel listing and times.
Credit: Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times
There is some good news for the residents of Detroit. [Ice hockey is not a sport so don’t even bother telling us about the Red Wings.] In a brilliant PR move, the University of Detroit has decided to make tickets for their New Year’s Day game against Youngstown State free. If you’re in the Detroit area on New Year’s Day, we want to tell you how sorry we are recommend you check out the “Free for All” at Calihan Hall (1:05 PM tip). In addition to the free tickets, spectators also get free non-alcoholic Bloody Marys and complimentary aspirin or ibuprofen for the hangover from some more potent drinks the night before. To be honest, this isn’t the most attractive match-up on paper (3-8 Youngstown State at 4-7 University of Detroit), but we believe that it is important to reiterate that it is FREE. According to our rudimentary math skills, it’s pretty hard to beat that value proposition (at least in ratio form).
While the University of Detroit is probably most well-known as the only successful stint of Dick Vitale’s coaching career (78-30 with a 21-game win streak that ESPN uses to justify his role as the most well-known promoter of our beloved sport), the Titans have been perennial contenders for the Horizon League title and had 4 consecutive 20-win seasons between 1997-98 and 2000-01. The Titans program also produced NBA stars Dave DeBusschere and Spencer Haywood.
Credit: http://www.cineastentreff.de
While I hope that the Detroit basketball program reaps some rewards from this PR move, I am more intrigued by the idea of a grassroots campaign to get people into college basketball at a level that is more pure than what ESPN and CBS feed down our throats from Midnight Madness until One Shining Moment. If more colleges try this model, they can start to pull in families and get a younger generation of fans who actually root for their local team rather than just what they see on SportsCenter or what some rapper is wearing on BET. If they do that, college basketball can start to fight its way back into the national conscience, which is a place we all know it belongs.
* not all games guaranteed to be gooey or delicious
What can we say – after all these many months hoping and waiting for this day, the hugest of days, we’re absolutely thrilled that it has finally, inevitably, encouragingly come to pass. No, not the election of the first minority president in our nation’s history… rather, the release of ESPN’s 2008-09Full Court television schedule! And it’s bigger and better than ever – that’s some change we can believe in! There are 579 games on the docket, and at first blush, it appears to us that there are more mid-major games than ever before. We’ll do some further analytics later, but for now, here is the schedule.
(h/t Patrick Marshall of Bluejay Basketball is the RTC correspondent for the MVC and Big 12 Conferences).
Ed. note – we cleaned up the chart a little, finding there were some womens’ games mixed in, so after removing those we’re down to 562 games from opening night to finish.
Here are some quick-hit stats – if you’re an SEC/Kentucky fan, it looks like you’re in business this year.
There are also 38 conference tournament games, including portions of the Atlantic Sun, CAA, MAAC, Big Sky, Southland, Big 12, ACC, and SECTournaments.
Here are the fifteen most intriguing games we see on the package this season:
This is not really college basketball-related, but the Round Mound once played at Auburn (fringe benefits included), so we’ll give ourselves a pass here. This is from Sir Charles’ recent conversation with CNN’s Campbell Brown about the political climate in this country. In this clip, Brown asks Barkley about his future political aspirations relating to a run for governor in the state of Alabama. His response is simply phenomenal.
Brown: So, you gonna run for governor?
Barkley: I’m planning on it in 2014.
Brown: You are?
Barkley: I am. I can’t screw up Alabama.
Brown: There’s no place to go but up…
Barkley: We’re number 48 in everything, and Arkansas and Mississippi aren’t going anywhere.
Did you know that Tark the Shark now has a blog called SharkBytes with the Las Vegas Sun? We mentioned this earlier today in Fast Breaks, and a couple of other blogs (notably, Fanhouse and The Dagger) talked about how interesting this development not only is, but could bewill be over the course of a season, especially given Tark’s penchant for outspokenness and rabble-rousing.
Tark Is Not Friendly With Arizona (photo credit: AP)
But both of those blogs focused on what Tark wrote about recruiting against Kentucky in the good old days, regaling readers with a tale involving all-world prep prospect Sam Bowie and a Rodeway Inn in Pennsylvania. A funny and interesting story, no doubt, but not nearly as compelling as what we found when we dug a little deeper into the post. Consider, Tark wrote:
Other programs, like Arizona, would rip us behind our backs, telling recruits’ mothers that hookers would get her son or the mob would get them. Mothers would call me and I’d have to fly back a second time to talk with her. I’d tell parents, if a coach comes in and bad-mouths another program, I’d eliminate that coach right away. If your son gets hurt, you and your son will be bad-mouthed. Once, the father of a kid in San Diego asked me what I thought of Arizona. I said, they have a good program. The dad pounds a folder on his coffee table. Coach, let me show you what they said. The folder was filled with every bad article ever written about UNLV. Arizona had sent it to the father.
Now, Tark’s been around the west coast a long time – starting as head coach with Long Beach St. in 1968, and continuing at UNLV from 1973-92, but Arizona only became a real force in college basketball upon Lute Olson’s arrival in 1984. UNLV and Arizona would have probably been recruiting the same caliber of player only after his landing in the desert. So, who else other than Lute Olson could Tark be referring to here?
It’s no secret that we’ve had our issues with the WWL over the last few years, but if you remove its Disneyfied cross-promotional garbage and the regrettably unwatchable Sportscenter, there’s still no better existing production value when it comes to the actual broadcast of games. And lots of them. A fair argument can be made that ESPN has done more for the popularity of college basketball since its inception than any other entity, media or otherwise. Most everyone we know grew up watching Big East or ACC games on ESPN in the 80s and 90s, and as we all know, prior to ESPN’s existence, the NCAA Tournament was largely shown on tape-delay.
What we’re getting at is that ESPN and college hoops have a long and prosperous history together, and it’s nice to see that continue in the modern era of sports specialization. With that said, we wanted to point out that ESPN’s decision released today to have an “Opening Day” extravaganza of college basketball is nothing short of brilliant. We’ve also often bemoaned the fact that, unlike nearly every other major American sport, college hoops really doesn’t have a “start” date. The season begins when teams start playing in random tournaments sometime in November, and most people are surprised to learn that college hoops has started when they see a Purdue-Florida Intl. score on a random Tuesday night along the bottom line scroll.
ESPN’s big day of hoops on Nov. 18 (which, interestingly, is a Tuesday and will have no competition with football) will at least make certain that the general sports nation is aware that college basketball is back and people should start taking notice. Some of the very best nonconference matchups occur in late November and early December while most folks are still paying attention to a handful of teams on the college gridiron, so from a marketing perpective, the initiation of a huge day of solid to good basketball games to “kick off” the season’s coverage is a winner. We also love how they’re making use of all the time zones to approximate a full 24 hours of coverage. The schedule is below.
The hoops bonanza scheduled for ESPN networks on Nov. 18 (all times ET).
• Midnight: UMass at Memphis (ESPN)
• 2 a.m.: Fresno St. at St. Mary’s (ESPN)
• 4 a.m.: Idaho St. at Hawaii (ESPN)
• 6 a.m.: College Hoops Tip-Off Special (ESPN)
• 10 a.m.: Penn at Drexel (ESPN)
• Noon: Liberty at UNC-Asheville (ESPN)
• 2 p.m.: Iowa at Kansas (women) (ESPN)
• 4 p.m.: Centenary at Baylor (ESPN)
• 6 p.m.: Richmond at Syracuse (ESPN)
• 7 p.m.: NIT Regional Final-Purdue (ESPNU)
• 7:30 p.m.: NIT Regional Final-Boston College (ESPN2)
• 8 p.m.: College GameDay-Chapel Hill (ESPN)
• 9 p.m.: Kentucky at North Carolina (ESPN)
• 9 p.m.: Florida Gulf Coast at Kansas (ESPNU)
• 9:30 p.m.: NIT Regional Final-Oklahoma (ESPN2)
• 11:30 p.m.: NIT Regional Final-Arizona (ESPN2)
Yeah, we’re way behind on this story and everything else, but we finally extracted ourselves from under a wet blanket of indentured misery-tude and we can once again focus on what’s really important… like whether Jay Bilas will finally turn around and punch The Redundancy known as Digger Phelps in the schnozz… or whether Hubert Davis’ high-pitched guffaw will cause rabid bats nesting in the arena rafters to attack the GameDay crew… or whether Rece Davis’ hair will ever move…
Still, in the three years that ESPN has been doing College Gameday, the on-air chemistry has steadily improved to the point where it has become must-watch tv for knowledgeable hoops fans throughout its Jan/Feb/March run. We still can’t figure out why ESPN locks itself into games before the season even begins (unlike its CFB counterpart, whose venue changes on a week-to-week basis), but the majority of the time they pick a nationally relevant game (14 of the 31 games have involved two ranked teams, but last year involved a notableexception: last year’s S. Illinois – Creighton 48-44 stinker on Jan. 26is one of a handful of games involving two unranked teams in the four-year history of GameDay), and some of the humorous bits are LOL-worthy (see Tebow clip below).
Irrespective of all that jazz, ESPN released its schedule of 2009 sites recently, and it’s apparent that ESPN is looking to party in college towns aplenty this year – missing are some of the lamer venues such as Syracuse and Durham in favor of more traditionally collegiate beer and babes locales.
January 17- Chapel Hill, NC (Miami-North Carolina) January 24- South Bend, IN (UConn-Notre Dame) January 31- Knoxville, TN. (Florida-Tennessee) February 7- Spokane, WA (Memphis-Gonzaga) February 14- Madison, WI (Ohio State-Wisconsin) February 21- Austin, TX (Oklahoma-Texas) February 28- Berkeley, CA (UCLA-California) March 7- Morgantown, WV (Louisville-West Virginia)
Some quick thoughts –
Best Game. We love the UConn-Notre Dame matchup in South Bend. UConn should be close to all the way “back” this season, and Mike Brey will have a top 10 team possibly riding a near-50 game homecourt winning streak in South Bend on that night. Plus we get to see Digger in his ridiculous green tie and marker ensemble. This night has fun written all over it. Our runner-up game to watch would be Memphis-Gonzaga in Spokane, a rematch of a fairly entertaining game from last January.
Likely Stinker. Nobody wants to watch Ohio St. and Wisconsin play bruiserball in Madison on Valentine’s Day, that goes without saying (coincidence? we think not). But the Miami-UNC game on Jan. 17 also has us shaking our heads a little. If you’re going to show us the prohibitive favorites on GameDay, at least give us the courtesy of matching the Heels up with someone who can challenge them… Miami? Hmph – this has 30 point blowout written all over it, and Miami is a Top 25 team!
Who Knows Game. The Feb. 28 game between UCLA and Mike Montgomery’s newly acquired California team would have been a blockbuster had Ryan Anderson stuck around for his junior season in Berkeley. But we’re still intrigued to see what Cal can do in a “big” game like this one, exactly the kind of game that Monty built his rep on down at the Farm in the 90s.
Missing Powers. No Duke this year, which we really can’t believe since the Devils will be a top 5 team. There’s also no sign of Bill Self’s national champion Kansas Jayhawks – instead we get a Big 12 matchup in Austin between Oklahoma and Texas. For the first year in GameDay history, Kentucky will also not be involved in a game this season.
Cult of Personalities. GameDay loves to show certain coaches nearly every year. We mentioned Roy Williams’ UNC squad, who will be making its fifth appearance. Rick Pitino’s Louisville Cardinals will also be making their fifth appearance, as will Rick Barnes’ Texas Longhorns. As a brief sidenote speaking of personalities, the Mar. 7 game between Pitino and Bob Huggins could be exceptional. Louisville should be absolutely loaded next season, and we only have doubts about WVU from their loss of the acrobatic Joe Alexander, but Huggins will have his team sky high for this one anyway.
In a move that we are certain will generate a ton of praise around the college basketball world (and the blogosphere), CBS has decided to not renew everyone’s least favorite curmudgeon Billy Packer (h/t to The Big Lead for pointing this out). After 27 years at CBS and having called the national championship game every year since 1977, CBS has “decided to move into another direction” (a phrase I’m sure many of our readers have heard before).
Like most college basketball fans, I’m excited to see Packer and his bitterness leave the airwaves (although I’m sure that rtmsf is sad to see a Wake Forest alum lose his job). While Packer has certainly become an institution (of hatred) in college basketball, it seems like in recent years, Packer has been more controversial than normal although that may just be a recency effect.
Among Packer’s “memorable” moments:
–1996: During a Georgetown-Villanova game, he calls Allen Iverson a “tough monkey”. He apologizes and John Thompson (the original, not JT3) says it’s a non-issue because he says Packer is not a racist.
–2000: When two Duke female (yeah, I know an oxymoron) students ask to see his press pass, Packer reportedly responds “Since when do we let women control who gets into a men’s basketball game? Why don’t you go find a women’s game to let people into?” Once again Packer apologizes.
–2004: Criticizes the NCAA selection committee for giving 1-loss Saint Joseph’s a #1 seed in the East Regional. This leads to a small disagreement between Packer and the CBS guest–St. Joseph’s coach Phil Martelli. The Hawks go onto reach the Elite 8 (beating Packer’s alma mater Wake Forest in the Sweet 16) before losing to Oklahoma State in a tight game.
–2006: Packer rips into the selection committee for taking mid-majors over BCSconference schools. The mid-majors responded by having Bradley and Wichita State make it to the Sweet 16 and George Mason make it to the Final 4.
–2008: With 27:30 left in the national semifinal, Packer tells viewers that the game is over. Surprisingly it isn’t. I’m sure the CBS bigwigs weren’t too thrilled that Packer essentially told viewers they could stop watching with 27:30 left in the game.
I’m sure there are others dating back to the beginning of his time on TV, but frankly I’m too young to remember the more distant controversies.
In an attempt to remain “fair & balanced”, we should note that Packer is most likely the 2nd person casual college basketball fans think of when they think of announcers–a distant 2nd to Dick Vitale. We’ll leave you with this YouTube clip from last year with Packer and Jim Nantz discussing his potential legacy (disclosure: I haven’t listened to this because I’m at work and I forgot my headphones–it’s a Monday):
Yesterday we brought you a video showing Barack Obama playing ball with some yahoos at a gym in Illinois. This is better.
North Carolina’s primary is on May 6th, and what better way to pander to engage and interest Wal-Mart Nation the good people of the Tarheel state right before an election than to strap on some Air Jordans and play pickup ball with their beloved Heels.
Update: moving pictures!! (h/t The Big Lead)
So is Obama’s gray shirt the hoops equivalent of the red jersey in football scrimmages? How’d they know which team he was on?? Whatever you do, don’t hurt the guy in the gray shirt!
Either Obama is asking Roy how he got down 40-12 to Kansas… or, they’re sharing fun tie stories.
Yes, son [Ty Lawson], you will make more money than me next year. Wanna contribute?
Even a skinny 46-yr old dude in too-tight sweats can find holes in the vaunted Carolina defense… and yes, ACC refs, that was an offensive foul on Obama. Hansbrough to the line for two.
That’s more like it – I can play with these 12-year olds!
Um, what am I supposed to do with this?
Uh oh – now we know Psycho-T’s problem with the NBA. Smooth Sam is a legit 6’9 – so that makes Hansbrough, what, 6’7 + hair (even allowing for the slight tilt in the photo)?
Final thoughts. What must uber-Heel and former Democratic nominee John Edwards think of all this suckling at the teat of the Ram in Chapel Hill?
