(EDITOR’S NOTE – As you may have surmised by the silence of this site for the last two weeks, we’re in the final throes of bar exam hell. We’ll be back and better than ever – or, at the least, 100% less burdened – on Thursday, but in the meantime we wanted to introduce you to the newest writer for these here interwebs, now_a_hoo. His obligatory “who I am and what I care about” piece, on his equal hatred for Duke and UNC, appears below.)

All-

I’m now_a_hoo, and I’ll be giving your friendly editor a few innings of relief from time to time while he starts his career and tries to have, y’know, a life.

How did I come into this privilege? The Italians (maybe) call it: il nepotismo. He and I used to be roommates. (Ed: Close enough. Actually, we still owe him for a few orders of chicken from Wayside, and he accepted a gig here as accord and satisfaction.)

A few things to get out of the way: James Madison undergrad, UVa for law school. My folks went to Michigan and I grew up in Virginia, so I came up with Michigan and Virginia basketball (during the Fab Five Never Happened and Jeff Jones eras, respectively).

Likes: UVa, Michigan, JMU, small schools, HBCUs, and brunch.
Loathes: tOSU, VPISU, MSU, Bob Knight, Ron Curry, Digger Phelps, snakes, the word “poon”, and ranch dressing.

So in the words of Steve Harvey, now that we got that shit out of the way, I have a confession to make: I’m an ACC basketball fan, but I’m neutral on Duke versus Carolina.

Before you get your Columbia- or Royal- Blue draws in a bunch, let me say this: everything you say about [Duke or Carolina, whichever you hate] is absolutely right.

But here’s the problem: It’s also 100% wrong.

It’ll be OK, Tyler.

Most of the complaints rivals have about each other stem from student bodies, fanbases, individual players or coaches that the rival fans don’t like. Let’s deal with each of these in sequence:

Student Bodies

Shorter Duke fans: OMG h33l5 R teh DUMB!!!1!!

FACT: Duke is ranked twenty spots higher in the imperfect, bordering on arbitrary U.S. News rankings, and the average score on the still basically racist and classist SATs is about 170 points higher at Duke.

BUT ALSO FACT: Carolina’s still one of the best five or six public universities in the country. (Ed: And the undergrad co-eds are hotter. This cannot be reasonably disputed, sad to say.)

Shorter Carolina fans: OMG D00k135 r teh SNOBZORZ!!!

FACT: Lots of Duke students used to pop their collars back when lots of college students popped their collars.

Will this ever get old? Answer: no.

BUT ALSO FACT: Most of them, whether they admit to it or not, spent their years in Durham like this.

Duke: Like a bad ’90s sitcom, but more diverse.

Fan Bases

There are people all over the country with legitimate love for both teams, but here’s the rub: both have HUGE bandwagons. Gobs and gobs of daywalkers. The center of gravity for Carolina’s non-alumni (or family, or what have you) fanbase is Charlotte. Duke’s non-alumni base is north Jersey. Can we agree that NASCAR Country and Soprano-land are equally hateworthy?

Individual Players

“J.J. Redick sucked!” – No he didn’t. He currently sucks. He didn’t at Duke.

“Eric Montross sucked!” – If he had, you wouldn’t remember him or his awesome flattop.

“Wojo sucked!” – Kind of, yeah.

“Kris Lang was ugly!” – Kind of, yeah.

“Ron Curry sucked!” – And it was glorious.

“Cherokee Parks was ugly!” – And it was glorious.

“Carlos Boozer was already a back-stabbing evil-doer!” – Incorrect.

“Vince Carter was already a lazy, selfish showboat!” – False.

Most of the players in the history of the rivalry who you love to hate are memorable because they didn’t suck. I’m sick of hearing people on opposite sides of a rivalry say that [awesome player] is awful. Since when is it not enough just to hate his breathing guts?

As someone who roots for Michigan, I can tell you that I don’t think Mateen Cleaves sucked. But he had the unmitigated audacity to play for MSU while simultaneously not sucking, so he can sit on a tack as far as I’m concerned.

Coaches

If you take issue with the coaching in this rivalry, you’re a Heel. That’s fine. You can tell me about how Coach K looks like a rat and had an Amex commercial. Then you’ll tell me about Matt Doherty. And I won’t care.

In the 64-team era, there has been one coach (well, two if you count Pete Gaudet, and I don’t) you could score as below average. The two biggest names are both coaching royalty.

For Duke: Coach K has had an effect on Duke that can’t be quantified. During his tenure Duke went from a solid school (known mostly for humanities Ph.D. programs and hosting the only Rose Bowl outside of Pasadena) into a legitimate Princeton safety, which is a compliment.

For Carolina: Dean Smith is Dean Smith. He did his part to push integration along, and he could have run for any elected office in North Carolina, on any party’s ticket, and win handily. He probably still could. [/abe vigoda'd]

Conclusion

Since sport is just an elaborate goof we get to enjoy while sliding down the razorblade of life on the long march to hell, let’s agree: Carolina and Duke are awesome, in an incredibly loathsome way.

May they rot. Screw those clowns. Amen.

THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT

Sadly, the biggest – and, for the most part, only – story in college basketball today is actually a story about pro basketball:

How old school are we? 2006 old school, that’s how we do.

The draft is melancholy for us. On one hand, we will watch any draft of any sport because we are … how do you put this … addicts. There is something intensely interesting about watching the future unfold, not to mention that we, like Bill Simmons’ and his dad, roundly enjoy reviewing the suits each year. Plus, if you can’t enjoy watching Stephen A. Smith interview someone who doesn’t speak English – well, brother, we just don’t know what to tell you.

(Oddly, we now have a taste for cheez doodles. Which are delicious.)

On the other hand, however, the draft is where we bid a fond farewell to college players we enjoyed because … well, we just don’t give a damn about the NBA. We’ve tried, and we just can’t. It’s not because we think the quality of play is poor; we don’t think that’s true in the slightest (at least, not anymore). It’s not that we don’t find the games entertaining, or that we have a problem with the NBA “culture”. It’s that we have no blood on that field; we have no stake in what happens at that level.

We grew up as Cleveland Cavaliers fans, which was fun during the glory years with Mark Price and Brad Daugherty. (See, Carolina fans? We can let grudges go.) But then Daugherty got hurt and starting caring more about racing than playing. Price got traded. The Cavs acquired Shawn Kemp (and future negotiation rights with all 329 of his children), who promptly got fat and terrible. The team sucked. And then the 1998 lockout happened.

Even as college kids, there was only so much time we had to devote to following sports – there were things called “Goldeneye”, “beer” and “trim” to which we wanted to devote our attention. And at that time, with our team in shambles and the league thumbing its nose at its fans – well, we just couldn’t care anymore.

We’ve tried to go back to it – it’s not like we’re unaware that the Cavs have the best basketball player alive right now – but any devotion we may have had to our team is gone. As Simmons put it – like him or hate him, he sometimes finds a nut – when you cheer for a team these days, you are essentially cheering for laundry. And you know what? We just don’t care about that laundry anymore, because it’s so evident that those wearing it don’t care either. And without a rooting interest, frankly, just about any sport becomes difficult to follow with any sort of regularity.

Is it that much better at the college level? We’d like to think so – after all, a player chooses where to go to play his college ball, and part of us really wants to believe that players who choose to attend our alma maters share some of the same hopes and dreams we had when we first stepped on campus years ago. It can’t ALL be based on booster gifts, coaching personalities, and co-eds, right? (Though, in fairness, we had hopes and dreams for the same co-eds. We just had no chance.)

No one knows for sure, of course, and we’ll admit that our view is a rosy one, especially as it pertains to top level players. But we’d rather cast our lots with the guys who, at the margins, are playing for fun rather than the guys who are, at the margins, playing as a job.

So, we’ll be watching the Draft tonight – partly for fun, but partly to say goodbye to players that we won’t see or read much about again. It’s the cyclical nature of college sports, but it’s still kind of sad.

THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT

Wait a second … that doesn’t seem right after several days off … let’s try that again:

ALL THE CRAP THAT’S HAPPENED IN THE LAST WEEK

That’s better. Quick roundup of the biggest stories, with a little link love for our brother blogs:

Paul Hewitt Stands Tall, States the Obvious

At last week’s meeting of the Knight Commission (the body studying academic standards for NCAA athletics), Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewitt earned a lot of press by voicing controversial, even shocking, opinions about all that is wrong with the current student-athlete model. Radical stuff, like “Eligibility rather than academic growth has become our biggest concern”, and “Agents are turning college campuses into the Wild West.” Whoa, whoa, Paul … drop one bomb at a time, baby, we weren’t prepared. Hang on, we’ll sit down. OK, go on:

“While I like to see everyone who reaches college earn a degree,” Hewitt said, “we need to find more effective ways to achieve our goals. I do have a problem with putting numbers out there, saying ‘Meet these numbers or else. You’re turning education into a race.”

Phew … radical, radical man. You’re lucky you didn’t lose your job for saying crazy stuff like that.

Of course Hewitt is right, and we all know he’s right – it’s just that no one in the powers that be care, since they can’t hear him over the sound of cash registers. And Hewitt had some thoughts about that as well:

[Hewitt] said he’d like to see basketball become a one-semester sport and that coaches overall would like to see a shorter schedule, but he admitted it’s “not going to happen” because of the lucrative television money that comes from playing more games, even in early November.

Whoa, Paul – we were with you right up until you suggested cutting games. We have a habit to feed, you know. Crazy talk like that will get us back on the harder junk.

Three more headlines, including more delicious statement of the obvious, after the jump: THREE STORIES WORTH A FEW LINES APIECE Spin – It’s Not Just for Politics! – Ohio’s athletic director is just jacked – we mean, Pete Carroll level jacked – to find a new coach. You know, after their previous coach left for Bryant University, a school in Rhode Island that hasn’t joined Division I yet, and which we had to look up to ensure it existed. Understatement Doesn’t Suit Us – Mike Miller has been doing an interesting weekly series over at MSNBC ranking the greatest college hoops programs. We’ve roundly enjoyed them, right up until he reviewed our alma mater at #16. We don’t challenge the ranking … we challenge his assertion that the program suffered only a “slight dip” under Craig Escherick. You mean, our version of [NAME REDACTED]? Did we watch the same teams? O Rly? – Mike DeCourcy says that Duke’s recruiting has suffered in recent years thanks to Coach K’s summer job with USA basketball. You don’t say.

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.

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.

As a starting note, nothing we say below should be construed as critiquing Kansas fans from some legitimate melancholy right now. We’re avid fans too, and we would hate it if our coaches left for greener pastures. (We were apoplectic when Coack K was considering leaving Duke for the Lakers in 2004.) So, Kansas fans, please feel free to have as much angst as you deem appropriate over this whole issue.

But you – sports writers – have no such standing. We understand that your job is to take a stance and defend it, but we don’t understand why would take a stance on what essentially comes down to a profoundly personal issue – and then place your own value on that choice, and deem the actual decision-maker morally bankrupt if his value aren’t the same.

For instance, an actual quote from Gene W.’s piece for tWWL:

Alma maters are overrated. So is money.

Now, Gene went to Tennessee, so maybe he doesn’t understand the value of either alma mater or money. (Burn! But we kid.) But these are the values upon which he judges Bill Self – and he closes the piece by saying that if Self ranks alma mater and money higher than he does, that he is essentially a bad man for holding such preferences and will live to regret it.

First, blaming someone for being interested in going home to work makes little sense to us. We’re not coaches or players, so maybe we just think differently – but even as a lowly attorney, we can say with 100% certainty that if one of our alma maters (sadly, we have three) offered us a position as General Counsel, we would think very, very seriously about leaving the city and heading back to College Town, USA. It’s an emotional and personal decision, and belittling the personal aspects of it because they don’t match your personal preference is borderline unprofessional.

Second, what exactly would Kansas fans have to complain about if he left? Unlike Roy Williams, he brought home a championship before heading home to alma mater. Even after NBA departures, the cupboard would still be full of good players for whoever steps into his place on the sidelines. And did we mention he just won a national championship?

Third, let’s take the alma mater thing out of it and just consider the money. Just what makes seeking a higher paycheck bad? Haven’t we moved pass the paternalistic articles about student athletes who leave school early for the pros? Sure, everyone wishes they would stay in college and get a degree, but ultimately it is their choice to seek the secure short run option over the riskier long run option. Isn’t this the same thing? So, do Gene, Dan, and Jason think that it is OK to be paternalistic with middle-age white men but not with late adolescent (and predominantly) black men?

Fourth, and most importantly, how exactly did Self “making the story about himself” after the championship? Oh, really? He did that? We weren’t aware that (a) he started the rumors that OSU would offer him a huge contract and (b) he wrote the damn stories that went out across the wire services himself. Like ol’ Roy before him, Self was in an unenviable situation, and did what he could to manage the story while staying in the moment with his team.

We aren’t saying that the media should never give opinions about personal actions. Saying that it’s bad when athletes and coaches engage in criminal activity? Totally fair game. But scorning a man who faces an agonizingly difficult decision immediately after reaching his professional pinnacle, simply for recognizing the decision as difficult? Hack. Hack hack hack hack hack.

[/rant]