As RTC heads into its 11th season covering college hoops, it’s time to begin releasing our annual compendium of YouTube clips that we like to call Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball. These 30 snippets from last season’s action are completely guaranteed to make you wish the games were starting tonight rather than 30 days from now. Over the next month you’ll get one reason per day until we reach the new season on Friday, November 10.You can find all of this year’s released posts here.
As RTC heads into its 10th season — Season X, if you will — covering college basketball, it’s time to begin releasing our annual compendium of YouTube clips that we like to call Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball. These 30 snippets from last season’s action are completely guaranteed to make you wish games were starting tonight rather than 30 days from now. Over the next month you’ll get one reason per day until we reach the new season on Friday, November 11.You can find all of this year’s released posts here.
Here we go… headfirst into another season heralded by our 2014-15 edition of Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball, our annual compendium of YouTube clips from the previous season completely guaranteed to make you wish games were starting tonight rather than 30 days from now. Over the next month you’ll get one reason per day until we reach the new season on November 14. We’ve captured what we believe were the 30 most compelling moments from last season, some of which will bring back goosebumps and others of which will leave you shaking your head in astonishment. For all of this year’s released posts, click here.
Evan Jacoby is an RTC columnist and contributor. You can find him @evanjacoby on Twitter. TT4 will cover four selected teams of interest – Syracuse, Indiana, Murray State, and UNLV – by tracking their ups, downs, and exciting developments throughout the course of the season.
Welcome back to Tracking The Four! Remember that TT4 will run as a full piece on Tuesdays, and on Fridays we will post a shorter ‘wildcard’ edition of fun content from each team. This week, we present you with the TT4 Midseason Dunks of the Year. Some of these have become instant classic moments that are recognizable plays. We’ve embedded the top slam from each team for your enjoyment.
Indiana Hoosiers
Indiana’s had plenty of highlight exposure on ESPN and your favorite basketball shows. Most notably, we all remember Christian Watford’s game-winning shot to beat Kentucky on December 10. But earlier in that game, Victor Oladipo absolutely brought the house down with an arena-shaking slam that brought the building to its feet. This one is the Dunk of the Year to me, right now, simply because of the magnitude of the play, giving huge momentum to Indiana in the second half against the #1 team in the country. Just watch the reaction to this dunk:
Any time you can have Dickie V scream out, “Are you SERIOUS America??!?!”, you know it was something special. This most amazing part of this dunk to me? He blows right by Michael Kidd-Gilchrist up top, one of the best perimeter defenders in college basketball. This dunk won’t be forgotten by anyone in Bloomington for a long time.
Last year Keion Bell sent shudders through college basketball nation when he dunked over five of his teammates at Pepperdine’s Midnight Madness.
A year older and a year wiser, Bell decided to up the ante at Friday night’s version, dunking over a preposterous seven people of varying sizes. Some of the others weren’t half-bad either.
Next year: he plans to bring the entire student body out of the stands and dunk on them too.
We already know what you’re thinking — when can we watch the 6’3 junior guard play on television this year? The Waves are rebuilding in a major way after a 7-24 slate last season, so as of now you only have two chances to see Keion Bell soar through the clouds (do they have clouds in Malibu?) this season.
Shamelessly cribbing from the clever NBA catch phrase, we here at RTC will present you with the 2010-11 edition of Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball as we ramp up to the start of the season a little over a month from now. We’ll be bringing you players to watch for this season and moments to remember from last season, courtesy of the series of dump trucks, wires and effluvia known as YouTube. If you want to have some fun while killing time, we encourage you to re-visit the entire archive of this feature from the 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons. Enjoy.
We’re total suckers for this kind of thing (h/t TSN).
Clemson University’s physics department (Clemson has a physics department? who knew…) has come up with some contraption (pictured) that supposedly can tell us just how much force a basket is subjected to when a large athletic manchild decides to jump up, grab it, and throw an orange ball through the middle of it as hard as he possibly can.
This Looks Like Something Our Cousin Charlie Has Lying Around His Garage (photo credit: physorg.com)
We’re having a little trouble believing that Clemson could come up with something like this – a dunkometer – but if it’s actually reliable, score one for State U. over the nerds at MIT and Cal Tech. According to the CU spokesperson, who doubtless was the guy with one of the lovelies pictured below:
Ray Sykes had a nasty dunk at the East Carolina University game,” said Jonathan Cox, one of the students working on the project. “It peaked at a little over 30 g’s, one of the highest recorded so far. That’s awesome when you consider an earthquake’s ground motion produces accelerations around point five and one g.
Physics is Phun!!!
So they’re saying that Ray Sykes’ dunk was 30-60 times more powerful than an earthquake? What does that even mean? Part of us wonders if this isn’t a prank by the three nerds at Clemson on the rest of the campus… “see what happens when you put a 40 up there!… watch how crazy they’ll get!”
We would be interested in learning what this particular dunk would have scored, though. Probably 100 Hiroshimas combined with 50 earthquakes.
