THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT
Shark Week Continues

Privately, we hoped that in our day off (done with school woot!), the O.J. Mayo mess would calm down, and some other story would take over the headlines. We weren’t alone - in a small act of sanity, Ben Taylor at the Daily Bruin says, “Um, don’t all of you have anything better to cover, like college athletes dying in practice?”

NO! Silly us. Each minute factual revelation merely served to throw more chum in the water, which inevitably leads to nastiness.

On Tuesday, the attacks centered on Mayo and the USC leadership. As the story ages however, like a fine wine, more subtle variables gain strength to create layers of flavor for the well-heeled to snoot about.

Signal to Noise points out that USC may pay a price in recruiting long before sanctions come down. His local paper says Mayo has daddy issues (like any good southern boy). Wilbon says Mayo is a sweet kid caught up in the dirty system of agents. DeCourcy over at the SN goes a step further and says the entire sport of basketball is broken. (Though DeCourcy’s piece is less “subtle flavor brought out by age” and more “what happens when you toss the bottle against the wall in disgust, because the world is death.” Let it all out, Mike. Why, oh why did Celeste leave you and take both le chat and all the zigerettes?)

But at least O.J. and his former compadres won’t lose a high school title over this mess.

We’ve been asked our opinion, but we don’t view this as a forum for our “take” - we offer commentary only to be funny or make a valid point, and we’re so sick of this topic we’re not sure we can do either. We’ll try better tomorrow.

We now move onto to non-O.J. topics - but first, twins.

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Sans Annie Liebowitz.

THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT
Recruiting - Even More Strangers with Candy-esque

Late last week, Michael Avery, a guard from Encino, CA, committed to play for Billy Gillespie at Kentucky. A good late-signing season get for the Wildcats? We’ll know when Avery starts playing college ball … in 2012. Sure, he doesn’t know where he is going to high school, or how to drive, or where (or what) the clitoris is, but dammit all, he is proud to be a Wildcat!

Every child has to take a step towards adulthood at some point, and perhaps Avery truly is ahead of peers in this regard. In that case, he’s doing a nice job of following Miley Cyrus’ lead - build up expectations amongst a fan base, then bring them crashing to the ground when you act like the budding adult that you are. We’ll see if the analogy holds when he backs out of his verbal in three years and goes to UCLA.

TWO STORIES THAT INTERESTED US FOR NO GOOD REASON
Character Problems + Fuzzy Math = Profit?

We searched for “addition by subtraction” images, hoping others had better luck than us visualizing the concept. Dane Cook was the closest we could get, though we admit that without the all-important knife through the torso, leaving a vastly improved romantic comedy or HBO special in its wake, it’s not quite apropos. (Though we roundly enjoy Cook’s evil twin on Heroes.)

Douchy sign of the apocalypse? Sexually immature? Why not both?

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With the deadline for players to file papers as early entrants for the NBA draft having passed on Sunday, it’s time for the annual handwringing over the policies of the NBA and the NCAA on how this is handled. This year, the focus has been on the so-called “one-and-done” rule. Thoughtful pieces on the policy and its effects have come from Bruins Nation, Conquest Chronicles, Doug Lesmerises of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer), and surprisingly, Gene Wojociechowski at tWWL. (Even a blind squirrel finds a nut.) Contrast these thoughtful pieces to, say, a certain famous “real” journalist. Tell us which are better, Mr. Bissinger.

To a man, though, they seem to endorse one shared policy of the NBA and NCAA - the “testing the waters” loophole that allows players to attend pre-draft workouts sans agent to figure out their likely draft spot and weaknesses, giving players until ten days prior to the draft to withdraw their names and return to school. (Though everyone seems to hate the term “testing the waters”.) Team gets more information. Player gets more information. Everybody is happy, right?

Not Jay Bilas - no no no. He doesn’t like this one bit, and writes a few pages of scrill saying that players should either stay or go pro, no takebacks. (Insider, natch. Stupid tWWL.) What was fantastic, though, was this:

To me, there are three reasons why an underclassman should declare for the draft: (1) if the player is truly ready to be an impact player on the next level, (2) if the player is in dire financial need, or (3) if the player is a fraud and wants to enter the draft and be selected before he is found out.

That’s what seven years with Coach K and three years at Duke Law teach you, apparently - fraud is a-OK! (Though we would have expected such a stance to come from Doug Gottlieb.)

In seriousness, we take no strong stance on such issues - after spending far too many hours drunkenly debating such points with friends, we’ve come to the conclusion that whatever rule you have screws somebody, either by being too paternalistic or by giving young men just enough rope with which to hang themselves, so the particular rule in question matters little so long as it is consistent. (Needless to say, law school has worn us down.)

By now, you have assuredly heard of the kerfluffle on Costas Now on Tuesday night - Buzz Bissinger, he of the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and the best-seller and best-fucking-football-book-ever in Friday Night Lights, went on the offensive against blogs, and we mean offensive in the most literal way.

I would repost the YouTube video, but Awful Announcing went through the trouble of collecting it and deserves the hits, so please go over to his site to see both Costas’ introduction to the segment and the roundtable “discussion” itself. Come on back when you’re done.

So, just to be clear - Bissinger says that bloggers: (1) are full of shit, (2) dedicated to cruelty, (3) professionally dishonest, (4) dedicated to speed, (5) uneducated and poorly read, (6) unable to evoke a moment, (7) causing the complete dumbing down of our society, (8) have a disgusting voice, and (9) contribute nothing to sports discourse.

He then attacks Will Leitch with cherry-picked evidence and scant knowledge of Leitch’s actual writing. He curses up a storm, ends up fuming and frustrated, having done little besides scream his opinion and sneer at Leitch. In other words … (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), and (9). Nice job, Buzz.

Beyond Leitch’s simple but polite defense of blogging on the air, there have been numerous, truly thoughtful posts in response to Bissinger’s attacks on the medium. Leitch penned his own after appearing on the broadcast. Michael Schur of FJM did the same. Shanoff defends his brethren. Awful Announcing had words on top of the video. And our own blogfather has a response in two parts over at the mothership and The Sporting Blog.

We have nowhere near the qualifications of these fine gentlemen, seeing as how we’ve kept up residence in these quarters for a scant two months. (Plus, unlike the linked authors, we still cling to our relative anonymity for professional concerns, as we fall into Orson’s Group 5 and we haven’t had “The Talk” with our firm yet.) So we’ll let their words stand for now.

The thesis statement of all is simple, though - the Buzz Bissingers of the world notwithstanding, blogging is doing just fine. It is not journalism, nor does it pretend to be. It is commentary from the perspective of people who watch and read about the sports, but don’t have the privilege of talking to them while they stand naked in the locker room. If said commentary is funny, it will get readers. If it is not, it will not.

And to that end, since we want readers, we will return to the pursuit of funny with our next post. Enjoy.

Take the money and run.

THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT
Off on the Road to Rhode Island

After getting turned down by (seemingly) everyone and their brother, including UMass’ Travis Ford and George Mason’s Jim Larranaga, Providence College announced yesterday that they had poached Keno Davis, the 2008 AP Coach of the Year, from Drake.

The legal term for this is “huge f’in save.” We’ve seen a program get an excellent candidate after public swings and misses - see: Alabama (2007) and Michigan (2008) football coaching searches. But that is football, and Bama and UM are Bama and UM, and have the gravitational pull of black holes - even if they miss one star, they are sure to suck in another. This is basketball, where coaches in small conferences have far more opportunities to succeed than their brothers in the fall - and Providence is no guaranteed ticket to fame.

Will the gamble work for PC? Probably not. Davis has only been a head coach for one year, and spent his entire career as a player and assistant in the Midwest, and thus brings no relevant recruiting base to the Friars. In the dog-eat-crap Big East, he’ll be waiting for the scraps of more big programs (and other small programs from the A-10, like URI up the road) than he was in the Valley. Even the best coaches can’t succeed in the Big East without Grade A talent. We wish Davis luck (though not too much - he can finish 2nd to the Hoyas any year he wants), but we aren’t holding our breath.

HYPERBOLE GONE WILD
DBR Defends Krzyzewski, Patriotism, Puppies

The fine folks over at Duke Basketball Report published a retort to a New York Times story regarding Coach K’s statements regarding the US Olympic team’s place in the current political debate regarding Beijing and human rights:

Sometimes, through a performance you show more than by what you say. This is a tremendous opportunity to show camaraderie as teammates, serve as the ultimate example of people working together.

NYT says Coach K is in naive loony land. DBR says he recognizes that the best role the team can serve is as a quiet (hopefully successful) model of what is good, rather than a loud model of what we think is good. DBR is much closer to the ball, we think … but they we have to get off the bus when DBR makes the following analogies:

There are a couple of precedents for this: first of all, Jesse Owens, who just humiliated Adolf Hitler (we originally had Rupp here, which has to be our best typo of the year) when he tried to use the Olympics for his own ends. And secondly, the Czech water polo team, which pretty literally beat the everloving crap out of the Soviet team following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia after the Czechs had the audacity to challenge the power structure the Soviets imposed on Eastern Europe following World War II.

We love the guys at DBR - really, they do a fine job covering the team, players, coaches and alums. But … this is a little much, guys.

DBR: Making Duke fans sound like, well, Duke fans.

THE STORIES NO ONE CARES ABOUT
Players Leave for NBA Who Everyone Knew Would Leave for NBA

Derrick Rose. O.J. Mayo. Michael Beasley. Thanks for your one year stay in college, guys.

We agree with Bobby Knight that these one-hit wonders make an even bigger joke out of the “student” part of “student-athlete”. We wonder how these guys approached spring classes, knowing they wouldn’t return for a second year. Did the professors admit they would mail it in? Did they even bother attending? Or did they go to scout for trim?

A SERIOUS WORD
You Are The Pride of V.P.I.

Our distrust and dislike for all things Hokie is documented and still stands. But we set down the Hatorade for a moment to wish everyone down in Blacksburg a peaceful day.

We hope to not take too many controversial positions on this here blog … doesn’t sit well with management when you piss off the readers … but we couldn’t help saying something about the angst-ridden pieces about Bill Self post-championship. It was like a couple of these guys got together at a bong bar to smoke unfiltered and bitch about reality:

Wojciechowski: It’s like - why do you have to be a slave to the corporate master? Huh? All they want to talk about granfalloons, like “alma mater” and “money”. Those things are false groups, man. They are false. They aren’t real.

Shanoff: Yeah, man. I mean, who the fuck tries to turn SUCCESS into MONEY? That’s just the corporations talking, trying to keep the little man down.

Whitlock: Who the fuck let you in here?

[adjusts tie] Are these guys fucking serious? Really? We know that a couple of them have axes to grind (Whitlock works for a KC paper; Gene W. grew up in central Kansas), and we hate to be found agreeing with Simmons (a capital crime in the blogosphere to be sure), but what a bunch of hypocritical crap. More bitching after the jump.

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Now with more Buckeye flavor!

THE GAME EVERYONE SOMEONE? IS TALKING ABOUT

So Much for the Repeat
Ohio State 81, Ole Miss 69
UMass 78, Florida 66

We can’t even pretend to be excited about the NIT. Such excitement, however, is what we are paid to do (and by “paid”, we mean “spared from Orson’s mighty whip”), so some quick takeaway thoughts from the games:

1) No rematch between OSU and Florida - which as we covered last week, would have mattered just as much as Roy Williams playing Kansas again, since approximately the same number of players were around for each of the previous rounds of those battles.

2) We really respect the fans that turn out of the NIT games, making the trip to MSG for the finals. While we were at Georgetown, the Hoyas were stuck in NIT purgatory for a few years - and we’ll be damned if we didn’t tune those teams out as soon as Selection Sunday came and passed. We’re impressed by the fans whose loyalty extends beyond disappointment and follows their team straight into the mouth of oblivion.

3) Hahahahaha - SEC iz Da suckz!! (Really? No. But it’s fun to say, no?)

4) For reasons we cannot begin to explain, we think UMass will beat tOSU tomorrow night.

AND NOW, ONTO MORE FUN TOPICS

Not So Much with the Pillaging, Fellas …

What happens in Mexico apparently must stay in Mexico, until diplomats intervene or charges are cleared. Two Portland State players were hauled into a Mexican jail after one beat the snot out of a fellow American tourist while the other fled the scene. We enjoy this - two American college students are involved in battery against a fellow American college student, but because they do it at a Mexican resort, they will get to be a punchline for years months some indeterminate time.

Just to confirm, young high school recruits when you sign on to play with a team, do not attempt to emulate their mascot. Fellow PSU players now stand on notice that raping and pillaging are strongly discouraged. Centenary players … well, same rule, but don’t feel like you have to tuck the shirts in.

Hardy har har, funny men
The boys at PTI decided to open yesterday’s show with a patently obvious April Fool’s prank. The joke wasn’t terribly funny - sure, tug at our heartstrings - but we appreciated the effort all the same for the unintentional comedy. (Don’t sue, Simmons!)

Further, it confirmed out belief that you could come up with a topic off the top of your head, hand it to Tony and Mike, and the exact same debate would occur regardless: Factual description, Wilbon defends “his boys”, Tony sounds old, Wilbon makes half-informed point that sounds fully-informed because he’s Mike Wilbon, Tony makes crass remark and/or does penguin dance. Why, yes, as a matter of fact, we aren’t sure why we watch this everyday still either!

And finally, one last Sampson item before we let that sad story fade into Bolivian - and it involves an old friend of everybody who thinks they are indeed a man regardless of whether they are indeed 40, Ms. Jenni Carlson of The Oklahoman. Apparently, she just couldn’t help chiming in on the whole snafu:

For any journalism students out there - take this video as a cautionary whale. If her investigative skills are as robust as her writing style, it would explain why she became famous for a hack piece critiquing a player for eating fried chicken. (And really - who critiques a Southern man for eating fried chicken?) Free advice: similes are like rosemary - delightful for accent when used sparingly, wooden and overpowering when used in excess. (Exception proves the rule, natch.)

Have a great weekend, folks - we’ll be back on Monday.