THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT
IU Gets Their Day in Court, For Good or for Ill

Perhaps a little too far with the hyperbole, no?

The long-awaited trial is finally coming. For months, we witnessed the gathering of evidence, heard public statements from shady characters in the saga, questioned the competency of the prosecution, and wondered if the right verdict and punishment would be handed down. Yes, for months we watched a noxious stew of sports and justice with a tinge of racism.

But today is the day the trial of O.J. Simpson will finally start.

Wait, wait … damn Google News, why do you display stories that are 14 years old? Unlike Billy Clyde, we’re not interested in things born in 1994.

[adjusts tie] Ahem. Let’s start over.

All that stuff in the first paragraph? Still true. The only changes: the trial is before the NCAA Committee on Infractions, with Indiana University and Kelvin Sampson playing the role of the Juice. And don’t try to tell anyone in Bloomington that the stakes are lower. For Hoosier fans, this trial – considering all that has already happened and punishment likely to be levied – is about the murder of IU basketball.

Mark Alesia of The Indianapolis Star has an excellent summary of the charges against IU and the procedure for the hearing. His colleague Bob Klapisch does his best Daniel Day Lewis, predicting there will be blood in the Athletic Department in the fallout from the trial. And our friends at Inside the Hall will have open thread coverage of the hearing all day.

There is a silver lining to this – no Court TV, and no Nancy Grace. At least we hope not, since she doesn’t exactly have the best record on cases involves college athletics.

Three more headlines, including some mid-major love for the weekend, after the jump.

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It’s a big honor to be inducted into the North Carolina Hall of Fame – truly, I’m honored to be here. When you are the coach of a Division III program, you have to keep your expectations realistic. Can’t get ahead of yourself.

Good buffet here tonight. Don’t see too much todo like this at Guilford.

Anyway, thank you for the honor, but I don’t know about this “overcoming all odds” talk. It’s not like I’m that Pistorius guy.

Sure, I recruited three future NBA players to a small, NAIA school in central North Carolina, and won a national title in the ’70s. But every squirrel finds a nut – and let me tell you, World B. Free was one hell of a nut. But it was a different era. You could convince a guy to leave the big city for a small school without handing over tens of thousands of dollars in illegal payments. Didn’t have that kind of money at Guilford. All we offered was good coaching, a great education, and all the moonshine and co-eds you could handle. It was a simpler time, really.

And yeah, I coached a couple of teams to golf national championships as well, even though I don’t know much about golf. Doesn’t seem like a big deal. Guilford needed to cut the budget, so I tried to help out where I could. I always say that a good coach can coach anything. Tried to prove it once by taking over a cock-fighting ring during a mission trip in Guatamala a few years back. We were only there for a few weeks, but with tough practices and good motivation, I had Señor Garra winning every match he fought. It’s just a matter of getting through to the kids – or animals, whatever.

So yeah – proud to be here tonight, but I just took what life gave me. You can do the same.

(Ed. – In all seriousness, coaching two sports to championships at any level? What a badass. Read the profile.)

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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The off-season sometimes provides you with slim pickins – and when that happens, ain’t nothing you can do by ride that bomb all the way to the ground. Plus, real life has made strong demands on us today, so a-blogrollin’ we will go.

Today’s theme music – the exact opposite of how we feel these days as nuptials draw near:

Jarrett Carter may be our new favorite blogger, with two worthy posts at two worthy blogs – first, five reasons to keep the best D1 HBCU conference tournament in the Cackolack. We agree with him on all points, though we are saddened that the ACC Tournament won’t be in Greensboro, its rightful location. Atlanta is for bad traffic, gun crime, Tech fans, and SEC affairs – the ACC has no business dragging itself to such depths.

In worthy post #2, Carter asks if Gary Williams wants out of Maryland. Based on the offseason he’s had, as thoughtfully collected by the boys at DBR, who could blame him for wanting to get out with his reputation intact?

This is a bit old, but so is recruiting obsession – Mike DeCourcy breaks down the five spring signings that actually matter over at the SN. That one of said five impact players signed with Fresno Freakin’ State says all that is necessary about the current importance of the spring signing period.

In further evidence that as statistics increase, the result equals one, Yet Another Basketball Blog attempts to quantify coaching success based on recruiting and tournament play. Coach K underperforms! Tom Izzo does better than expected! Northwestern sucks! Oliver Purnell can’t beat competition with five breathing players! Surprises all around! (We kid. It’s a good piece that gives evidence to the conventional wisdom. But don’t expect a revelation.) (HT: RTC.)

Finally, while totally unrelated to college basketball, we love when two worlds collide – Above the Law, the preeminent blog in legal snark, links to Clay Travis, he of the CBS Spin on Sports column, as he gives law school selection advice. We link to this without comment, other than to say that given that Messr. Travis has abandoned the law to become a full-time sports writer, UVA Law should retroactively grant him admission.

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.

Each day this week, we’ll be previewing one of this year’s Final Four participants, little gunners that they are. Oops, we’re about to drop something. What? Knowledge. (That’s powerful, but true.) But since we’re babbling idiots, we found another blogger who knows a lot more about the team than us. We’ve already handled UNC, Memphis, and UCLA; finally, the Kansas Jayhawks, with the help of Cory from Rock Chalk Talk.

We feel some sympathy for the Jayhawks, reviled by Tournament fans for holding off upstart Davidson and giving us the all-chalk Final Four that we currently enjoy. (We’re somewhat familiar with the sensation of everyone cheering against our team.) So we held their preview for last, hoping that cooler minds had prevailed. (We’re not convinced. We still haven’t put away our red and black banners. Sorry. We’ve never claimed impartiality.)

But there is great beauty in this Kansas team making its way to the Final Four. Bill Self, who has won everything but a Regional Final since first becoming a head coach at Oral Roberts (!) fifteen years ago, gets to pull a monkey off his back. Brandon Rush, who would be in the NBA were it not for a season-ending injury last spring, reaps a benefit for staying in school an extra year. And all of the KU fans we’ve met have been good-hearted, extremely knowledgeable fans who engage in surprisingly few couch burnings, considering they live in Lawrence.

But can they keep going and win the title? We turned to Cory from Rock Chalk Talk, who provided expert biased analysis as requested, and plenty of it. His responses to our questions, after the jump.

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Each day this week, we’ll be previewing one of this year’s Final Four participants, little gunners that they are. Oops, we’re about to drop something. What? Knowledge. (That’s powerful, but true.) But since we’re babbling idiots, we found another blogger who knows a lot more about the team than us. We’ve already handled UNC and Memphis; today – the UCLA Bruins, with the help of Jamie from Bruin Scoop.

We’ve been saying for a while now that we think that UCLA is the most talented team in the country, but that we’d believe they could win the national championship when they hoisted the trophy and cut down the nets in San Antonio. While you wouldn’t know it from their schedule sheet (not too many close final scores), the Bruins have let a ton of teams hang around far deeper into the game than the pregame matchup would suggest. Add the pressure building from two straight years of playing bridesmaid to the Gators, and we feel justified in our skepticism even while amazed by their skills.

But are Bruins fans feeling the same? We talked with Jamie from Bruin Scoop, who was kind enough to offer a ground level perspective. Her answers to our questions are after the jump.

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Each day for the rest of this week, we’ll be previewing one of this year’s Final Four participants, little gunners that they are. oops, we’re about to drop something. What? Knowledge. (That’s deep, but true.) But since we’re babbling idiots, we found another blogger who knows a lot more about the team than us. Yesterday we handled UNC; today – the Memphis Tigers, with the help of Sadie from Go Memphis Tigers.

You know what’s delicious with crow? Barbecue sauce, and lots of it. Strong on spice, just the right amount of sugar and rich in flavor – anything that kill the awful taste of being wrong.

Anything to make the pain go down more easily.

Sufficit to say, we were wrong about the Tigers; we thought a conference season’s worth of weak opponents would leave them ill-prepared for the tournament, but, we suppose that’s the beauty of the tournament. After a close call against Mississippi State in the second round, they’ve breezed their way to the Final Four.

For a much more informed view on the Tigers as we get ready for Saturday, Sadie was kind enough to provide some expert biased opinion. Her responses to our questions come after the jump.

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Each day for the rest of this week, we’ll be previewing one of this year’s Final Four participants, little gunners that they are. Ooops, we’re about to drop something. What? Knowledge. (That’s deep, but true.) But since we’re babbling idiots, we found another blogger who knows a lot more about the team than us. Today – The North Carolina Tar Heels, with the help of Brian from Tar Heel Fan.

You know, they’ve been overrated all season. They got bonked by a terrible Maryland team at home, and depantsed by a deeply flawed Duke team. And who cares that they blew out their first four opponents in the tournament? Two of those teams were barely mediocre, and every squirrel finds a nut. Maybe Pitino was drunk Saturday night. We’ll never know.

Ah, dammit, who are we kidding? We’ve said it before, so we might as well say it again (and again through clenched teeth) – Carolina has put on an absolute show during the first two weeks of the tournament, and comes in playing better basketball than any other amateur team in the land.

But that doesn’t mean much once the ball is tipped, and frankly we’re gonna feel weird saying anything else positive about our sworn enemy. So for a better bead on what to look for from the Tar Heels this weekend, we asked Tar Heel Fan for some expert biased opinion. His responses to our questions come after the jump.

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