Sure, be a dick and focus on the good teams with possibilities. We like the teams we know are horrendously flawed and not really capable of winning anything but the flukiest of NCAA tournaments. Like Tina Fey and her mysterious scar, they are flawed beauties we’ll take, because the prettiest ones are a.) already overbooked, and b.) not answering our phone calls.

USC. The idiot savant squad who while brilliant will play the idiot part of the role in losses like their early season flukebomb they lost to Mercer. They also do the hyper-brilliant part of the equation, too:

Dramatic rap synth strings aside, he’s bad, and is Davon Jefferson. If the two stayed around for another year, USC would be an easy pick for preseason top 10 material next year. Since they will both pass up relatively unpaid labor for the piles of cash in the NBA, you’ll have to make do with the boom or bust dynamic of the USC team this year.

Mississippi State. They’re fun the same way watching a car wreck is: mangling defense stopping all forward momentum, causing everything to come to a screeching halt. They allow around 60 points a game, so if you’re pitting teams against each other in fantasy matchups and love low point totals, you’re already matching Wisconsin against them in your head.

Syracuse. Five starters averaging double digits in scoring, two freshman and two sophomores in the starting lineup, and Boeheim zone defense madness. Pure funsies just to watch for the potential.

Florida. Ditto for Florida, especially point guard Nick Calathes, who’s averaging 15.3 points a game and passing like Jason Williams would if Jason Williams were accurate and not baked off his ass on five pounds of primo chiba.

Buongiorno! It’s a-such a wonderful day to be a Duke basketball player…oh, the glamourosities, you cannot understand! Just last night, an Asian girl gave-a me the throbbing-a hand job of the likes-a I havent-a seen since-a the firm grip of Dick Vitale released my tensions all over his bald pate! Like a snow-capped alp, he-a was, or like the Roman Senator a-seeking the relief from summer heat by letting the gelato a-melt on his head!

So, friend. Consider the damage a-made to my belissima a-face against the powerful negroes of a-Florida State!

Thuggish, the men were, the Paulissima says! See how-a there hands came-a so close to the face, so rough they were with-a the creamy skin of the Paulissima! Five gallons of-a the finest-a lotions he sinks in a week, and yet the gangstas do not respect-a the Paulissima’s space of the personal sort!

And the words! They a-cut the Paulissima so deeply he had to score nine points, leave-a the arena, and immediately put on his-a favorite Il Divo CD just to rub the balm of solitude on the wounds of the heart, he did.

And put-a the cucumber creme of rejuvenation on his-a eyes.

And have the-a Asian girl with hands of the iron a-file the corns from his a-feet.

And go to the bed, he is crying the Paulissima, for the hurt he takes for your love on the court. Does this heart not bleed gouts of his blood for you? Does passion of his breast not radiate from-a the thumping of the chest, the deepness of his three-pointers? You may speak, but the Paulissima will not listen, as he is in need of the the-a sleep, and wanting quiet to prevent the-a age lines from creasing the perfection of his-a face, which is creamy like the fresh hot pot of risotto.

(HT: Awful Announcing. )

He jumps just like his pappy!

Did you hear that the Pitt Panthers were playing without two starters? Did you hear that this will be the case for the next two months? So can we drop it now and move on to the basketball?

Because that’s what Pitt is doing.

The Panthers defeated Georgetown 69-60 last night at the Oakland Zoo in the regular season’s lone matchup between these latter day rivals. The game pitted the Big East’s most dominant young big man against the conferences elder giant. Some speculated that the 6′7″ monster known as Cloverfield DeJuan Blair would lose some of his effectiveness against the ungodly tall Roy Hibbert, but that was not the case. The freakishly long-armed freshman scored 15, grabbed nine rebounds and ate half of a Toyota Yaris The points were nice, but it was the rebounding that put a more physical Pitt team (does that go without saying yet?) ahead of the favored Hoyas.

Nobody could get the Georgetown offense going in the second half and Ronald Ramon’s hot shooting (finally) carried the Panthers to the nine point edge. Pitt now stands at 15-2 despite the losses of Levance Fields and Mike Cook while Georgetown’s second loss will leave them searching for answers.

One guy who can’t help is Chris Wright, the talented freshman scorer is out indefinitely with a broken foot. Now I’m not going to pretend to know how Chris got hurt (or you know, look it up) but I’ll bet it has something to do with the fucking cobblestones on 35th Street. When those fuckers get wet they start claiming ankles like Lance Stephenson.

Virginia got Cameron-slammed last night, which happens sometimes when you play Duke at home: constantly laboring under twelve point deficits, unable to keep pace with aggressive man-to-man defense, and then completely losing the pace late in the game as Duke went to the hoop repeatedly on alley-oops and other teabagging shots you only dare attempt over an outmatched foe at home.

The Cameron Crazies™ chanting “air ball” were enough to make a Virginia student want the world to shut the fuck up.

It’s one and oh for the Hapsburgs of college hoops in conference play–but how did they actually look? Singler still looks a season or two in the weight room away from being a dominating interior presence. With no competition from Virginia in the middle, he could tip-in and knock around with the thump of a much bigger player. When he goes up against the Dejuan Blairs of the world (and yes, there aren’t many), he’ll get outrebounded by a 20-5 margin as he did in Duke’s loss to Pitt. They still look like a team without a low post presence and an over-reliance on the three, even though they can hit them from parking lots out in Cary blindfolded.

The formula looks like it remains the same: stop the three, and make Duke beat you from inside. Virginia can’t do it–they have a very, very long season ahead of them–but someone(s) in the ACC can and will. On the upside, the defense they’ve shown thus far has been aggressive and consistent, even with Virginia’s collapse making it difficulty to parse out whether the Cavs were sloppy or Duke was out-hustling them.

One of the men pictured above is responsible for the success of the Saint Louis Billikens basketball program and the other is a goofy looking talisman, but they both enjoy a good luck belly rub. Neither one of them is doing their job all that well.

Last night Sweet Saint Lou set a new benchmark for shitty offense that will remain on the books for the rest of Rick Majerus’s life. That’s right, two full years! The Billikens were in my own backyard for a matchup with the Colonials of GW in what will surely go down as the worst basketball played in the District since the halcyon days of Craig Esherick. The team managed to eek out 20 points in the whole fucking game.

The numbers were about what you’d expect, 5% 3-point shooting, 14.6% overall from the field, and one 18 minute scoring drought. Jesus Christ, I got bored just typing that, imagine if I’d actually sat through the entire two hours of action basketball utter crap. If I had I can guarantee you that I wouldn’t be back here writing about the game. They’d still be picking little pieces of my corpse off of the Metro train.

By the way, Saint Louis lost by 29.

Billikens Blitzed
Billiken Basketball Blog Is Dark

The college basketball landscape is a vast, vast countryside with rolling meadows, open plains, treacherous cliffs, and other various biomes ripe for hyperbole. 35seconds would like to help everyone explore this random land of wonderment by bringing to light some lesser known programs. Whether they have bracket-busting aspirations, interesting back stories, or just give good mascot, there’s always room for some mid-major lovin’.

Tennessee State University Tigers (5-9, 2-3)-RPI: 233, currently unranked

Notable wins: at Illinois, at Eastern Illinois, Morehead State

Notable losses: at Indiana, at Vanderbilt, Georgia Tech

Located in Nashville, Tennessee, TSU is most known for being the alma mater of Oprah and her vast, vast, VAST media empire. While the school isn’t well known for much else and isn’t embroiled in an African boarding school debacle, the Tigers fight it out in the Ohio Valley Conference hoping to at least be the best team from Tennessee in the OVC. They are currently last in this regard behind Tennesse-Martin, Tennessee Tech, and Austin Peay. Austin Peay the statesman was also rumored to be one hell of a baller in his time, but now deceased, the spread would likely be something like the senator laying two and a hook. Junior guard Bruce Price leads the Tigers with 20pts and 5 assists, but honestly the only reason we noticed these guys at all is because we get the Big Ten Network, the official home of the nonconference upset. Here’s hoping they catch some more lightning in a bottle so we have an ironic 15 seed to pull for.

Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks (12-1, 0-0)-RPI: 69, currently unranked

Notable Wins: at Oklahoma, at SMU, at NIU,

Notable Losses: at Texas Tech

Ok, let’s get the details out of the way because there’s a lot of awesome rolling around the campus of SFASU that it would be a disservice to this column to ignore any part of it. The Lumberjacks are living up to their sweet name this year by doing some nice RPI damage in their non-conference schedule and it looks to be between them and last year’s equally great Southland candidate, The Texas A&M Corpus Christi Islanders. They will depend on juniors Matt Kingsley and Josh Alexander, each averages around 16.5 points and 5 rebounds a night.

With that out of the way, let’s dig in to the outstanding B stories long before the guys at CBS get their hands on them. A brief background in Texas history, Austin hates Houston, and Sam Houston is logically Stephen Austin’s chief rival. The members of the Sawyers carry axe handles into football games to intimidate their opponents, and get their own section of the stadium to wield their festive bludgeoning instruments. The basketball team has their own brand of crazy, with a section devoted to Purple Haze, the rabid fans, the Jimi Hendrix song, and one of the nicknames for a festive party beverage. As far as notable alumni go, we have to defer to Joseph W. Kennedy, the co-discoverer of plutonium. Plutonium fucking rocks.

Hey there, everyone. Katie Ralston here of your local friendly Champaign-Urbana chapter of the Illini Bandwagon. I just wanted to remind everyone that we are still having weekly meetings at The White Horse at 6pm every Wednesday. Come on in and enjoy the $1.50 drafts and $5 pitchers of yummy spiced rum and Pepsi as we all get geared up for Karaoke at 9.

I know its been a rough year being a member of the Illini bandwagon and all, and sure, we suck some righteous ass right now, but that’s no reason to not support how much we don’t hate our sort of favorite team. Right? Right? Right. We all know there’s just so many reasons why the team is struggling this year, and all of it is completely not our fault. Its so hard to win at Illinois because we’re so awesome and the deck is stacked against us almost every night. We need to stick together like the temporary counsel of indigenous peoples that this school represent and show our love for the team or at least the color orange, which by the way is totally ridonk with practically everything.

Looking at the year so far, its not that much of a surprise to the loyal bandwagoner why we’re getting slapped around by the Penn States of the world. I mean, seriously, Penn State? Ewww. Its obvious that they had some help to get out of the House of Paign alive. The refs were clearly on their side the whole night. No matter how much my friends and I screamed our love for Stevey Holdren (so cute!) those losers wouldn’t give us any breaks. Good thing Coach Weber didn’t put him in, because he totally would have thrown some fucking elbows in their face just because. Our man’s got five fouls to give, and at least one of them is going to be a forearm to some unsuspecting phony major dumbass. Maybe they don’t teach “Not getting kicked in the teeth” at places like Tennessee State. Our school is so much smarter than that.  I wanted to punch them with brass knuckles covered in razor wire after that one.  Christ.

Why don’t these retarded visiting teams just realize how insanely good we are and just lie down? Its because they are all out to get us. Everyone has painted a target on the Illini’s back just because of all of the things that we do so much better than them, like accounting and stuff, but even that shit about how we invented the internet. Look it up, bitches. Its really just the conference doesn’t want us to completely take over. Its absolutely them, the networks, and the Jews. Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on out there, guys. you know they totally told that limp-wristed Eric Gordon to go to Indiana and paid Bill Self to go start his crazy church missionary crap out there in Kansas. Fuckers.

Anyway, be sure to come by this week when we plan on doing ass loads of shots with Dee Brown, he’s pretty much here every night.

Billy Gillespie is probably picking up ‘For Sale’ signs off of his front lawn at this hour. Louisville, struggling with its own problems right now, took the Wildcats to task in front of the hostile crowd at Rupp Arena that practially blue itself in disgust. The Cardinals were deep and fast with a defensive presence full of the double entendres. Senior forward Juan Palacios returned after being injured for 10 games, putting up 17 points with 6 rebounds and 4 assists. Right about now, Kentucky fans are probably inching very closely to the “Fire Coach” lever which, if you are not familiar with it, looks remarkably like Conan O’Brien’s “Walker, Texas Ranger” lever.

Louisville 89 - Kentucky 75

#16 Villanova walked into the Allstate Arena last night prepared to walk all over the suffering Blue Demons.  DePaul was not expected to stay with the Wildcats, but opened up an 18-8 lead out of spite.  Villanova never got closer than 5 points after that, and suffice to say, their coach was not pleased.  Techinical foul awarded to the Pinstriped One as his team start the Big East season with a weak road loss.  Depaul’s senior guard Draelon Burns scored 20 points as the Demons led by as much as 16 points midway through the second.  His performance earns him a fashionable new set of cement shoes and some nice fresh fish on his visit to Philly next Wednesday.

DePaul 84-Villanova 76

My, how ribald a blind item can be!!

WHICH SEC COACH has been seen recruiting at juvenile detention centers all over the southeast?

( …most of em…)

WHICH BIG EAST COACH refuses to implement the Triangle 2 defense because it’s “too faggy”?

WHICH FORMER GEORGETOWN COACH was recently forced to resign from his position as girl’s softball coach at a Washington area elementary school?

WHICH PRINCETON COACH wants to run his own motherfucking offense for once?

WHICH BIG EAST COACH eats his polish sausage in one bite without a bun or any sort of utensils?

WHICH BIG EAST COACH is simultaneously running the largest crime family in Philadelphia?

(Jay Wright…SHHHHHH!)

WHICH PAC 10 COACH thinks that AIDS can be transmitted through your dreams?

And for a bonus…BLIND ITEMS REVEALED!!!

WHAT IVY LEAGUE COACH…has every episode of “A different World” on VHS?

Blind item revealed! It’s Tommy Amaker.

WHAT C-USA COACH…appears in the World of Warcraft as a dwarf mage named Thundercock?

Blind item revealed! It’s John Calipari.

WHAT Big Ten Coach is prominently featured in a 1992 issue of High Times magazine?

Blind item revealed! It’s Thad Matta.

WHAT SEC COACH is best known for his cameo appearance on 1980s syndicated serial “Small Wonder?”

Blind Item revealed! Billy Donovan, who played Jamie’s robot “half-brother” in the 1984 episode “Half-brother Half-machine”

WHAT BASKETBALL ANNOUNCER is wanted for war crimes and tax fraud in South Africa in connection with his time as a mercenary in Angola in the 1970s and 80s?

Blind Item Revealed! It’s Dick Vitale.

Biowarfare, babeeee!

Ahoy there my lovely basketball travelers. I hadn’t seen you there on the leisure deck as I was thoroughly focused on my refreshing Campari on ice, so nice. So, it seems we’re ready to chart a course through these blustery midwestern times and set off to the lush tropical climes of hot and sexy conference play. Tonight’s main attractions bring a few old friends together with the dash of the exotic. Manuelo! Full speed ahead to fantastic!

Pushing Off With Some Light Jams

Lafayette at (13) Pittsburgh 700et, ESPNU
TCU at (14) Texas 500et, ESPN Full Court

Some of us aren’t ready to head out into the open seas, so we’ll just kick back and take in some sweet cupcakes as we ready the riggings for a full night of smooth conference play. Enjoy these match ups as a change of pace between more rigourous bouts of delightful.

Strong Beats and Primal Screams

Penn State at Northwestern, 900et ESPN2

Rutgers at South Florida, 700et ESPN2

St. John’s at Syracuse, 700et ESPN Full Court

Some real meaty conference mumbo jumbo going on right here. The scrappy nights leaving it all on the line start right here and right now. Sure, they may not be the flashiest songs in the book, but you can’t make a good setlist without them. Start the conference fires burning on this cold winter’s night, and keep it burning bright. You’ve got to keep the fire. Keep the fire as we head into these stormy waters.

Tonight, Your Specials Will Be Smooth

#24 Wisconsin at Michigan, 700et
#12 Indiana at Iowa, 900et

Some classy types kick off their conference schedules with some light doormats. Iowa and Michigan haven’t started the season off on their best feet, but there may be some hope for just a little bit of home cooking. Its still Top 25 magic stirring the pot, and the wins count just the same. The Badgers and Hoosiers look to keep it smooth as they put on their rock bloukers and start their schedule with some comfortably casual and confident play.  These two are so smooth they’re for regional eyes only.

Chinua Achebe tried to warn us but we were too busy being tasered to notice.

It should come as no secret that I’m a huge fan of Pitt hoops and their spritely spark plug, Levance Fields. So I was obviously devastated to return to the computer after a week off to find that my beloved point guard broke a metatarsal (latin for “ass-kicking bone”) and will miss at least two months..

Fields survived an off-season plagued by a handsy cop with an itchy taser finger know he’s on the shelf because of a fucking toe. It marked the second consecutive game in which Pitt lost one of their starters for an extended (read: all fucking season) period. The team has lost another leader and taken a serious hit to their overall depth. Sharp-shooting Ronald Ramon takes over at point while future-stud Gilbert Brown is filling in on the wing.

In the past two games the Panthers are 1-1 with a huge overtime upset over Duke and a crushing defeat at the hands of the indomitable Flyers of Dayton. Sweeping Georgetown might not be quite as realistic a concept as it was last week.

I’m sure other stuff has happened in the world of college basketball, and as soon as my hangover subsides I’ll be sure to look into it.