Alma Mater Hoops Update

Good weekend so far for the alma mater men's hoop teams.

Yesterday Ohio smacked Georgetown around as if their seeds were reversed, running away with a 97-83 victory. Georgetown only managed to come as close as 7 at about the five-minute mark of the second, but OU responded with a three and controlled the game the whole time. I don't want to count chickens, but there is a better-than-outside chance that OU could end up facing Ohio State, which might well qualify as the biggest sporting event in OU history. The Bobcats beat Kentucky in the tournament in 1964, but given that Ohio State is the big in-state bully, and given how much bigger the NCAA's are now, a Sweet Sixteen matchup with the Buckeyes would surpass anything I know about in Athens.

Closer to my heart, Williams defeated Guilford today in the DIII national semis 97-88 in a game that was a nailbiter until the end. Williams was actually down eight at the half but shot the lights out in the second half. Williams won the national championship in 2003 and has gone to one other championship game. The Ephs will face the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point tomorrow.

Revisiting the Greatest Idea Ever

As long as I am discussing the NCAA tournament, I may as well throw out one of the ideas that I have long put forward. I may as well pull it out again as I watch the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff defeat Winthrop in this year's "play-in game" to continue their improbable run.

Every year it seems the same debate plays out when addressing the bubble teams and the field of 65. It is a field of 65 because in its infinite wisdom the NCAA decided to make the two weakest teams go to Dayton and hold that "play-in game." But rather than subject these teams to that insult, why not take the last four at-large slots and have four play-in games, one for each region, pitting the last four teams from major conferences against the last four teams from mid-majors. It would make for a hell of a Tuesday, would help settle the mid-majors versus majors debate, and would allow every conference tournament winner a guaranteed slot. Reserve the 13 slot for the winners of these games, as customarily the 13 seeds are among the last into the field.

You're welcome.

Alma Mater Hoops Watch

We are about to embark on one of the great weekends in all of sports with the tipoff of the NCAA tournament. Each year my loyalties fluctuate. Unlike in professional sports, where my loyalties are firmly based in Boston, my college sports loyalties fluctuate. I grew up in a state without any real Division I presence in football or basketball (though UNH hockey is a perennial contender, albeit one that has yet to scale the top of the NCAA mountain). By default I have always been a Boston College fan as a result.

Going to college did not make a lot of difference on this front. I bleed purple and gold for Williams athletics, but Williams is a Division III athletic program, and while we have the greatest athletic program in all of DIII, it is simply not the same as the spectacle of major-level DI sports. I pursued my MA work at UNC-Charlotte (which now goes simply by "Charlotte" for athletic branding purposes). Charlotte has a respectable basketball program, once made a Final Four, and had a run in the period from the mid 90s to the middle of the decade just past when an NCAA run was the norm. Nonetheless, Charlotte straddles that line between major and midmajor-level program. For my PhD I attended Ohio University in the Mid-America Conference, for which the term "mid-major" was pretty much coined.

Otherwise my loyalties come and go. I have been a fellow at both Virginia and South Carolina, so I have tried with middling levels of success to appropriate those schools. I teach in the UT system and my paycheck (and tenure decision) come from Austin, so I gravitate toward the Horns. Duke was the most prominent and persistent college to recruit me for track out of high school, so I am not only not a Duke hater, I actually like to see them do well. Despite the appeal of being a free agent, it's a lousy way to go through life as a college fan, and I have always said that if I were to get a job at a college with big-time sports I would engage in full immersion and would write a book called "Becoming a Fan" based on that first year of overcompensation.

In any case, as usual, my alma maters are experiencing various levels of involvement with the Madness of March. Williams is ranked second in the country and has made the DIII Final Four, which is played every year in Salem. Williams has been there before, having won once, and has a good shot again this year. The Ephs will take on Guilford College on Friday for the right to play for the national championship. Guilford was the alma mater of one of my (late) college track coaches and is a Quaker school in North Carolina which will come into the national semifinal with a 30-2 record (Williams is 29-1) and that made the national semis last year as well.

Ohio University made an improbable run through the MAC tournament, its only shot at going to the Big Dance. Their prize? A trip to Providence (freakin' sweet!) and a meeting with historical powerhouse and #3 seed Georgetown. OU took a really good Florida team to the wire a few years back, though, and while far from a national power, OU has been to a dozen NCAA tournaments and will hopefully give the Hoyas a game. I'll proudly wear my OU green and am looking forward to the game on Thursday.

The news is not so good in Charlotte. The university inexplicably (to my mind) fired Bobby Lutz, the winningest coach in program history. In a dozen seasons Lutz compiled a 218-158 record. The team had its worst record in a long time last season, but was in a position for an NCAA berth this year until a collapse toward the end of the year and in the first game of the A-10 tournament scuttled any hope to make the field of 65. I have no idea what AD Judy Rose, the university administration, and the trustees want from the basketball program, but if the next dozen years look anything like the dozen just passed, it seems to me that it will be a rousing success and Lutz should have categroically been part of the program going forward. Lutz has been at least arguably the best coach in the history of the program, is a Charlotte alum, is one of the truly good guys in the profession and the community, and had weathered the toughest storm he was likely to face after last season. He had some of his best recruits on campus and had in the past turned down opportunities to move up in order to remain at his alma mater. I will continue to root for Charlotte to do well, but this is a lousy, knee-jerk decision no matter what rationalization comes from the athletic department.

In the meantime: Go Bobcats! And, above all, Go Ephs!!!

Gameday!!!

The ESPN Gameday crew will be in Austin tomorrow for the Texas-Texas Tech game. It's not going to be as thrilling as last year's game, as Tech is nowhere near as strong and the Longhorns might be better than they were in 2008, but it will still tax the scoreboard operator. My guess? Texas 54 Texas Tech 35.

The best part? I'm gonna be there.

Williams Keeps Kicking Ass

For the eleventh year in a row (and the 13th time in the 14 years of the competition) Williams College reigns supreme in the world of Division III college athletics. Williams has won the Directors Cup, which tabulates results across college athletic programs, yet again. Tellingly, the top three were Williams, Middlebury, and Amherst (BOO!), all NESCAC schools, all elite academic institutions. Brains and brawn go hand-in-hand at these schools. Perennially number one in the national liberal arts college rankings (the best at academics), number one in athletics (the best at sports), and number one in our hearts. Come fill your glasses up, to Williams! To Williams! To Williams!

"B" is for "Better"

Due to economic circumstances my MA alum UNC-Charlotte (which, for branding purposes tries to go simply by "Charlotte")is scaling back its plans for its new football program. And while this will seem like rationalization, making virute of necessity, I think the new Plan B is better and saner than the original Plan A.

(Hat tip to this guy. The Yankees suck.)

On Recruiting

The New York Times has a great feature on the football recruiting process for one of the best prospects in the nation, Jamarkus McFarland, a defensive tackle from Lufkin, in East Texas. His choice came down to the heated Red River rivals, Oklahoma and Texas and he has verbally committed to Oklahoma.

It is hard to fathom what being recruited at that level must be like. My own experience twenty years ago, in a non-revenue sport like track & field (I was recruited by a handful of small football programs, but not with much zeal - smart programs) leads me to believe that for a big-time football or basketball player the frenzy must be both ego-boosting and seriously pressurized. By the fall of my senior year I was receiving letters and phone calls every day, mostly from DIII schools but from a number of DI programs as well, albeit mostly the Ivies and their ilk. And even for an athlete of relatively limited talents in a sport that does not exactly carry with it a great deal of status I learned quickly that recruiters run the gamut from the unctuous purveyors of sleaze to the genuinely kind, almost avuncular. One Ivy League coach called me weekly and by the time the recruiting process was done we could spend an hour on the phone. But the school was too close to home and I had decided on Williams, which was actually comparably low-key in the recruiting process.

My favorite recruiting story: I had just gotten home from football practice one afternoon when the phone rings at my Dad's farmhouse. I answer and it is the secretary from a major ACC basketball powerhouse track program. I was being recruited by their blood rival, which was another basketball power but not an especially prominent (read: "good") track program (and going to a subpar program was the only way I was going anywhere near the ACC). I assume my being on the rival's recruiting list explains the call. The secretary asked me to hold for Coach X, and as soon as he got on the line he addresses me in a Southern drawl out of central casting. He asked me about some of my performances, and then there was a pause so pregnant it could have been half of the girls in the sophomore class at my high school before he let out with this gem: "Son, that just won't fly with us." I was taken aback (being insulted is generally not part of the recruiting process, which usually involves lots of smoke going up lots of derrieres) and since I was clearly not in any position to blow a scholarship at this Tobacco Road redoubt I simply responded, "But coach, YOU called ME." I still root ardently against that team during basketball season.

Harvard Beats Yale

On the eve of the 125th installment of "The Game," the annual football rivalry between Harvard and Yale, The New York Times reviews what Manohla Dargis calls a "preposterously entertaining documentary" of the most famous of all Games, the 1968 29-29 tie.

Resolving the Mess of the BCS

At the online newsletter of The New York Times' sports magazine Play Dan Shanoff proposes a pretty brilliant solution to the intransigence of those conferences that refuse to establish a playoff system for college football's highest level:

Personally, I would like to see [SEC Commissioner Mike] Slive take his ball and go home: "SEC-ede" from the B.C.S. and create his own playoff; as the nation's strongest conference (by far -- it boasts the past two national champs), he has the juice to do it.

Invite more playoff-friendly conferences, even individual teams, into the mix (and don't be afraid to go it alone). Create room for the non-B.C.S. schools to participate. Generate billions in revenue from TV networks and advertisers. And isolate the Big Ten and Pac-10, daring them to try to proclaim one of their member schools -- even an undefeated one -- as "national champ" while the rest of the country has turned its attention to a thrilling 8- or 16-team playoff. Any school that doesn't want to participate doesn't have to; I imagine that resistance will be short-lived.

Incremental measures won't work. Obstructionist colleagues need to be marginalized.

To save the B.C.S., they need to destroy it.

The idea that the BCS is worth saving, that a playoff system is somehow going to violate the academic integrity of college football, or anything else is patently absurd. The BCS is irredeemable and always has been. The fact that every other division of college football has a championship tournament and that every other NCAA sport has either a tournament or a meet to establish a champion on the field, court, pools, track, field, or ice should be enough to reveal the BCS for what it is: A naked grab for cash from a cabal of self-interested parties.

Quick Hits

A lot of different stories and arguments have caught my eye these days that I've wanted to write about. but rather than do that, I'll just give you a full onslaught to keep you occupied for a while.

Taylor Branch, whose three-volume biography of King/history of "The King Years" will be a go-to work for many years despite its flaws published a lengthy reflection on MLK and his legacy in the New York Times earlier this week. His article is taken from a speech he gave at the National Cathedral on Monday.

Another week, another work of nonfiction revealed as fraudulent? That seems to be the trend. The latest culprit appears to be Ben Mezrich's bestseller from a few years ago, Bringing Down the House, which provides the source material for the movie 21, which is probably playing in a multiplex near you. Every time this sort of story emerges I feel as if I make the same lamentation, but writing nonfiction is hard, and is all the more so because its biggest requirement is a fealty to the evidence. I don't think the reaction from we lesser-known writers every time one of these stories breaks is merely a mix of resentment and schadenfreude even if we may be entitled to a little bit of resentment and schadenfreude.

If that news is not depressing enough, The Boston Globe also has another seemingly recurring story, this one about the plight of bookstores. It ends on a somewhat optimistic note, however, so maybe the sky is not falling after all.

Do you know when the first intercollegiate baseball game was played? It was 1859. The participants? Williams and Amherst. Despite what you might read or hear, it is my understanding that the result of that contest is actually lost to history. That first game was played in Pittsfield, which baseball historians have also argued to be the home of the first known baseball game in the 18th century. With representatives from the College Baseball Hall of Fame (based not far from my home in the Petroplex in Lubbock) in attendance, the two teams will meet again in Pittsfield next week. Go Ephs! (And, oh yes, Amherst Sucks! Lousy, dastardly Defectors.)

Over at Real Clear politics Steve Chapman argues that when it comes to Iraq, "patience is not a policy." he makes a pretty compelling case. nonetheless, it is also true that in an ironic sense, the administration has fucked this war up so badly that they probably are correct that we now have to stay, without any sense of the fact that this really ought not to redound to their benefit.

At The Washington Post David Broder steps away from politics for a minute and thinks that he has discovered a singularly grim period in the world of sports. He's wrong, of course. Sports have always reflected society's tumult, and sometimes has fueled it. If there are problems with sports that is simply because there are problems with society. Take a deep breath and go watch a few games. Do so for a week and somewhere on a field, court, track, pit, pitch, course, or what have you, something wonderful will happen that will remind you of what sports are about.

Finally, and self indulgently, I've been busy at both the Africa Blog and the South Africa Blog, and I hope you'll check both of them out now and regularly.

The BCS, BC and VTech

Soon enough I'll have my annual rants about the Bowl Championship Series and the patent fraud that is the end of the major college football season. But let me give you a little preview:

Can someone please explain to me how Virginia Tech is ranked ahead of Boston College? The two teams play in the same conference. They have the same record, as both teams are 10-2. And they played once this year. Boston College won. And so what we have here is a case in which the voters (I realize there is the computer component to consider as well) have decided, despite what has happened on the field when the two teams played, that Virginia Tech is better than Boston College despite the fact that all things are equal and Boston College won when they met on the field. The experts have chosen to place themselves above the action on the field. And yet at the end of year we are supposed to believe that things have worked out because the very people who have a say in the system tell us that they have finally gotten it right.

I realize that neither Boston College nor Virginia Tech is going to be in the national championship picture. And I realize that BC and Virginia tech will meet again tomorrow in the ACC championship game. But if the supposed experts can allow this pretty clearly unjustifiable glitch in the system to happen largely because of their own belief that their opinions matter more than what has happened on the field, how can we take them seriously as the final arbiters of a system that everyone else knows is flawed?

Soon enough I'll be making my case for Hawaii's deserved place in the BCS Championship game (if they hold up their end of the bargain in the last game of the regular season at home against Washington tomorrow night).

In Defense of DIII

Over at The Slice Holmes has a great post on Division III sports. It starts with the Williams-Amherst gameday appearance and goes on to discuss an encounter with one of those guys who disparage DIII sports without themselves ever having played a game beyond the jv level in high school. Good stuff.

Gameday at Williams

Donnie Baseball asked for it, and I responded. Here is an expanded version of my views on ESPN's Gameday spending their Saturday in Williamstown for the Williams-Amherst game (which Williams won 20-0).

The True Scholar-Athletes

This week ESPN.com's ESPNU has been running a four-ppart series on college sports at the Division II and III levels. Naturally my alma mater, Williams, features prominently given that it is both the nation's best Division III athletic program and more importantly is among the very finest colleges in America. The first installment discusses how the best DII-III programs sustain excellence in the face of tight budgets and lesser status than Division I programs. The rest of the week's coverage looks at boosters and alumni support, fan support and internet coverage, and how smaller schools count on academic reputation more than sports. Chris Preston of the Shelburne News in Vermont is the author of the series.

Hat tip to Ephblog.

Coaching, Sexuality, and Missouri Lacrosse

At ESPN.com Greg Garber has the story of Kyle Hawkins, lacrosse coach at the University of Missouri. The Mizzou lax program, which competes at the club level, recently chose not to renew hawkins' contract. Not so long ago, Hawkins came out of the closet, and in so doing discovered the large number of closeted gay coaches at all evels of sports, with a plurality of these apparently from the college coaching ranks. It is difficult to discern whether or not Hawkins' sexuality played any role in the decision not to renew his contract, but by any measure, his story reveals the hurdles that gay coaches face.

Have You Heard About The Midnight Blogger?

Friend of dcat KC Johnson has received a lot of favorable publicity of late for the yeoman's work he did at his blog Durham in Wonderland in exposing the perfidy of DA Mike Nifong and the monumental folly of his case against the Duke lacrosse players. Canada's National Post has a nice story on Johnson that calls him the "Midnight Blogger" and suggests that his work has been Pulitzer worthy. They even have a picture that makes KC look shockingly like a young Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:

It must be the bow tie.
Hat tip to Ronit at Ephblog.

Fire Him, (Fine Him?), And Ostracize Him

I've always found Don Imus to be a fatuous gasbag who, on the rare ocasions when I have been stuck listening to him, has never been either funny or insightful. And after his latest racist remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team he (and his producer) ought to be fired from their jobs.

There is also a part of me that feels as if the FCC ought to fine them heavily -- a million dollars or more. The firing ought to be a no brainer. The fining is a bit more problematic given the First Amendment and the fact that I am pretty much a free speech absolutist. But the FCC has set the tone -- tv and radio stations have been fined for much less, and Howard Stern used to face the FCC's wrath all the time for far lesser violations. So even if I disagree with just about any fining, the FCC at least must be consistent on this matter. And if Imus were to fight the fine and win, well, I'd be more than happy to see the FCC take a punch in the mouth.

Here is the exchange in question:

"That's some rough girls from Rutgers," Imus said. "Man, they got tattoos ... "

"Some hardcore hos," said (producer Bernard) McGurk.

"That's some nappy headed hos there, I'm going to tell you that," Imus said.

Imagine being a father or mother of one of these girls, a sibling or a friend. These women are college students. Imus does not know a single one of them. He has no idea about their intellect or their character or their aspirations. he has no idea which are leaders, which are funny, which are beautiful. To him they are "nappy headed hos."

And this . . . is . . . not the first time accusations of racism have flown Imus' way. It's time for him to go. Apologies are, by this point, farcical and insignificant. Fire him. And while I think that in court fines ought not to stick (in any of the cases where they have been levied) as long as it uses fines to punish that of which it disapproves the FCC had damned well better fine Imus -- racism is a lot more important than profanity or Janet Jackson's exposed breast that no one actually saw.

TNR's March Madness Blog

The New Republic has a basketball blog in time for March Madness. There is a lot of gasbaggery mixed with pretension going on over there, but it's probably worth a view.

This might be one of the most balanced brackets we have seen in some time. As for the bubble teams, it is hard to work up too much outrage. Syracuse and Drexel would seem to have the strongest cases, and I have to wonder why stanford got in, but I think the selection committee has done better than at any time in the past few years even if a few potential bubble teams from midmajors played their way in and made things a bit easier.

My only early advice: Don't go all chalk. In other words, don't pencil in all of the one and two seeds. At the same time, and more importantly, don't get too clever by half either. There usually is a reason why a team is an 8 seed. For every Arizona in '97 or Villanova in '85 or NC State in '83 there are a million brackets ruined by someone thinking that they have a ten seed that is going to shock the world. You are much wiser looking for this year's version of the 2006 Florida team than for this year's George Mason. The reality is that picking an upset and being wrong runs you the risk of having that pick haunt you for the rest of the tournament. Your belief that Virginia Commonwealth is going to the Elite Eight is the reason why Sally in accounting is going to beat you soundly by picking teams she has heard of, going with high seeds most of the time, and having her upset team last for one round before they run into a team that has those pretty uniforms that also happens to be a three seed.

The idea of a play-in tournament for the last four slots still stands as the Greatest. Idea. Ever.

OU Axes Track

One of my alma maters, Ohio University, has made a distressing announcement. In order to manage the university's athletics budget and to adhere to Title IX, OU has announced that it is cutting a number of varsity sports. Among these will be men's indoor and outdoor track and field. I have a peripheral connection to the track teams at OU, as for a year and change (1999-2000) I was a volunteer assistant coach of the Bobcat sprinters and jumpers.

I have written about Title IX before (see here and here) and do not want to belabor that point. Plus, making matters a bit more complicated, while OU currently offers the second most varsity sports offerings in the Mid-America Conference, its athletic budget is in the bottom half of the MAC. Still, it is distressing. Men's track and field has been a fixture at OU since the early 1900s. The OU athletics Wall of Fame, which rings the main entrance to the university's still-stunning Convocation center, bears witness to the track success at the school. Nonetheless, the reality is that too often administrators find men's track and sports like it to be disposable in ways that other sports -- women's teams and the big revenue sports, football, basketball, and in some cases hockey -- are not.

No matter how the solons at OU spin it, this is a dark period for Ohio University sports. I hope that someone can propose a solution, but I fear that the reality is that the decision is final.