Running 2022-23 NCAA Basketball Thread

Pointing out what she sees as racism is not racist. I'm not sure I agree with her. I think part of the reaction was because people simply didn't watch the whole tournament, so they didn't even realize what a trash talker Clark is, but it's not racist for Reese to raise the question.

 

The ONLY problem I had was the timing. You talk trash during a competitive game, and sometimes it can even help if you get in the opponent's head.

Once the game is decided, with the confetti machine warmed up and players hugging coaches on the sideline --- even with a few seconds remaining --- that shit stops and it's time to show your best face, typically one with a smile, not a condescending smirk and hand gestures.

 

We're in the age of influencers, and Angel Reese probably has tripled her followers this week. She wasn't speaking to the vast majority of us; she was speaking to/for those people. (I might say the same applies to Dawn Staley.)

I'm not going to line her up for the Nobel, but if she's fine with the alienation of part of the crowd while increasing the admiration of the rest, well, vaya con Dios.

 

Facebook decided overnight that "BTExpress really likes black women he doesn't know showing support for Angel Reese," so I had a bucketful of "suggested for you" posts like that in my feed this morning.

 

Someone with a brain in the White House got ahold of the Bidens.

White House clarifies LSU women's invitation

 

I swear to god, it seems like a lot of you have never heard the "walked a mile in their shoes" bit.

I've never walked a mile in Angel Reese's shoes, but I certainly saw the idiotic "Can't see me" shit that Caitlin Clark was doing the past few weeks, with zero blowback.

For the record, my two cents is that both Clark and Reese are immature poor sports for doing that shit. I can't stand it. Reese also did a "too small" gesture during the game. Silly me thought she'd get t'd up.

I don't see how any of that stuff advances us as a society. But Reese (and me) saw Clark doing that crap for weeks with zero pushback.

 

Why would anyone (here or anywhere) start trying to live by that very simple philosophy now?

 

swagger is as swagger does

 

Even in our take-ravaged time, this is an amazing amount of useless wrangling about two people 99.998 percent of the country had never heard of as of March 1 of this year.

 

Good for them. Maybe sporting events that end at midnight ET aren't the answer to everything.

 

This is exactly it.

The last few rounds of this tournament were publicly billed as the Caitlin Clark show. Even when she played against undefeated South Carolina and last year's player of the year, the entire story was "let's watch Caitlin Clark!"

And to be clear - I love Caitlin Clark. Great, fun player and a grade-A shit talker. She's impressive as hell.

But just for a moment, try to imagine what it's like to be a player for LSU or South Carolina. They see all the focus on Iowa -- a team that is far less accomplished than SC, and clearly not nearly as deep as LSU. Angel Reese makes the same gesture that Clark made and is suddenly a classless thug who was clearly raised wrong. After LSU kicks Iowa's ass in the final, the First Lady says Iowa should go to the White House too.

And if you are a player for SC or LSU, you are acutely aware of this: your teams are virtually all Black. Iowa, the darling of the tournament, is virtually all white.

And people are going to seriously argue that Angel Reese is "trying" to make this racial?

 

I mean, I get why the men's title game starts at 9:20. You don't want to start your signature event in the middle of rush hour on the West Coast. It's one of the downfalls of that game being on a Monday. That's even more true when a West Coast team is involved in the game. I thought putting the women's title game smack in the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday was brilliant. People are accustomed to watching some sort of high-level event on a Sunday afternoon, whether it's the NFL or an NBA showcase game. Burying that game at 8 p.m. on Sunday as it has been played in the past would have been a mistake. And yeah, people at my bar were watching, and I don't think anyone had much investment in either team.