Well, after the first day of the tournament, my bracket isn't quite the smoking ruin I feared it would be at this point. I lost a few games, but only one of my Elite Eight was eliminated. It served me right for picking Texas Tech, but what can I say? I like Bob Knight, and I'd rather have my bracket die than pick BC over any team of his.

Bob Ryan had a good piece on Knight in the Globe to get the readers ready for the BC-TT game. Every now and then he almost makes me forget that he called Antoine Walker a punk when Ainge traded him to Dallas. I like Bob Knight because he is honest. He might be a mean old man who doesn't waste his time working the media, but he says what he feels. That's why the media doesn't like him. Not because he threw chairs or choked a player, but because he doesn't make tearful apologies and he doesn't show any deference to the press.

I didn't have enough confidence in VCU to pick them over Duke in one of my brackets, and I'm too lazy to check the other right now. I was rooting for them big time, and I'm thrilled that they won. I hate Duke almost as much as I hate BC. Duke well may be the Harvard of the South, but what exactly does that mean? Do they play Dueling Banjos with a chamber orchestra?

I hate Duke basketball because they're frauds. Every Duke player flops with far too much frequency to suit me. They work the officials, they whine and that's not how the game is meant to be played. Just about every questionable call seems to go their way. Three quarters of the national media fawn over them. And the limited success enjoyed by Duke players on the next level goes to show that their skills don't translate to the pro game. The best NBA players from Duke are invariably the ones who leave early. Look at Elton Brand and Deng.

I get so sick of people praising Shane Battier. He's not a great defender. He is a master of clutching and grabbing and flopping. The US National team had no business taking him to the World Champions over Gilbert Arenas. But when you hear the national television commentators discuss him, you'd think he was one of the 50 greatest players of all time. He isn't even one of the 50 best players in the NBA right now.

But then, I have problems with the cottage industry of basketball experts. I haven't criticized Ric Bucher in a while, I've had other things on my mind. But last week, he said Shaq ranked below Kareem on the list of all time centers because Shaq played with superstars like Kobe and D Wade on his championship teams. This is an excellent point, because it is a little known fact that not only did Kareem never play so much as a second of basketball with another star on his team, but the NBA insisted that his teams always play with 4 players rather than the standard 5 because Kareem was so amazingly talented. Give me a break. Kareem played with Magic, Worthy and the Big O (the real Big O, not Glen Ordway). What are they? Chopped liver?

I should have more to say after the rest of the first round games are played. I have a bad feeling that something terrible is going to happen to my brackets this weekend. And by that I mean something worse than the death of an Elite Eight team on the first day.

The Pro Bowl has come and gone, and very little remains for the football fan until the draft. Baseball hasn't started spring training. The Celtics are frustratingly bad because they come oh so close to ending their losing streak only to drop games by 2 points or 4 points. And no one can watch college hockey because of the vicious injustices which occur each and every night.

Can you imagine that another Beanpot has just concluded and against all probability Boston College was on the outside looking in. You just knew it had to be their year. After all, it hasn't been a very good year for BC athletics. Another middle of the pack football season led to an appearance in the Feel Sorry For Us Bowl, and their coach headed to greener pastures at NC State. Then there's the basketball team and their recent legal troubles.

It must be getting tough for the sweatstains in their cute, little yellow superfan shirts to carry around the burden of athletic disappointment along with their room temperature IQs and bizarrely inflated egos. It's not easy being the Greater Boston area's premier Catholic institution of higher learning, but if they don't pull it together, Regis is just waiting in the wings. But there are more important things in this world than BC, believe it or not. So Jerry York can retire to his lair and dream of that 3rd Beanpot championship and rest his troubled soul with the knowledge that he has been cheated out of his just due. Like Mark Cuban, but with a measure of dignity since he is a good coach and not a total douche.

I was stunned that Marty Schottenheimer was fired today. I guess I'm a little less surprised, having read this piece by John Clayton. I noticed that Manusky had signed to be the 49ers defensive coordinator. I remember being surprised when I saw that on the ticker on ESPN, mostly because I thought Mike Singletary was already filling the position. I guess there is a semantic difference between assistant head coach/defense and defensive coordinator that I'm missing.

Yeah, Marty has a terrible playoff record, but at least he gets teams to the big games. It's not like his teams have gotten worse in each season since he's been there like Danny Ainge or Jon Gruden. I'm having a hard time accepting the coach of a 14-2 team losing his job. It's also amazing to think that grown-ass men (to borrow a phrase from Charles Barkley) working dream jobs in professional sports can't put petty squabbles aside and work together. Actually, it's not that odd, I'm sure that if I were a coach or GM I would allow personal rancor to ruin all kinds of relationships because I'm rude, ill-tempered, sarcastic and difficult to get along with under the best of circumstances. But I try to be a better person once a week, for about an hour at a time.

I'm interested to see where the Chargers go from here. The obvious favorites have to be Ron Rivera and Caldwell from Indy. I wonder whether the Chargers will try to sign Singletary as payback for Manusky. But there has to be a big problem filling their vacancies, since it's come out that AJ Smith wanted to prevent his assistant coaches from interviewing for other positions. Will other teams let the Chargers talk to prospective offensive and defensive coordinator candidates? I also wonder if the AJ Smith-Schottenheimer relationship fell apart because Marty might have wanted to bring in his son Brian from the Jets to be his offensive coordinator.

But away from the mess unfolding in San Diego, where my friend will have so much trouble that even his man crush on Marcus McNeill might not sustain him through a cold winter (figuratively speaking) in paradise. As I sat watching the Pro Bowl, a friend of mine as disappointed in the outcome of the Super Bowl as I was suggested that Peyton Manning bears an uncanny resemblance to Ted Haggard, the disgraced evangelist from Colorado. You be the judge:

Peyton vs. Ted









That remark made me laugh like hell, and it got me thinking that Merle Haggard must be pissed whenever the story about that cat and his man-whoring and meth escapades comes across a news ticker. I apologize for the formatting, still learning some of these things, even 10 months into the blog's history. Now you see why I never post pictures.

Watching the Pro Bowl brought out one of my less impressive moments as sports fan this year. I went on a mini-tirade on how terrible the NFC wide receivers were. How they should have had TO on the team. And then Anquan Boldin made that amazing play to score the final TD of the game and Steve Smith got the two point conversion to tie the score briefly on a great individual effort. There is nothing quite like being wrong (and spectacularly so most of the time) 90% of the time to wound the ego. Bad times.

I am glad Duke fell out of the top 25 for the first time in almost a decade today. I hate Duke. I hate Coach K. I hate the Cameron Indoor Stadium. I hate the Cameron Crazies. Coach K deserves all that he's reaping this season. In my mind, he forfeited whatever claim to legitimacy he had as a basketball coach when he brought in Shane Battier to play for the US National team.

I know the argument that the team needed his toughness and his defense. Alas, the TSA must have confiscated them before he left the country, since they weren't evident in the tournament.
No matter how you slice it, there is no way that he would have been picked for the team if he hadn't raised the flop to an art form in college. If he didn't play for Duke, a better basketball player would have been on the team. It might have made a difference, but not likely. At least it would have been a more entertaining disappointment.