2024-25 College Basketball Thread

I knew that times were changing when I first saw a point guard wearing 55 (Jason Williams).

 

The even/odd stuff started in the Fifties after the modern numbering system was adopted. Wilt Chamberlain wore 13 on the road, 12 at home at Kansas. Bill Russell, who entered college two years before Wilt, was grandfathered in wearing #6 at USF.

It was never a universal rule, more like a thing adopted by individual conferences. It phased out of use in the Eighties; I think Hakeem's team was one of the last I remember doing it.

Once or twice a season you'd hear about a team mixing up their home roster (even numbers) and away (odd numbers) when they entered the names in the scorebook. This would usually not be spotted until the first foul call of the game.

Now usually when this happened, the refs would assess one bench technical, scratch out the wrong numbers, write in the right ones, and move on from there.

If the refs were somewhat more prickish, they would call five technicals for the five starters, then slap on additional T's as more players entered the game.

And occasionally you'd run into some real hardcore stickler who would ring up one technical for every player in the scorebook. (By a strict literal reading of the rulebook, they were correct.)
I attended one such game -- which opened with 24 free throws.

 

I knew the reasoning for it, but it's still kind of silly.

At the high school level? Sure, who knows who you have keeping the scorebook?

At the college level? It's usually a lifer who knows what they're doing.

 

Also the officiating mechanic used to be a single hand flashing the numbers. So 6-9 were out because competent refs with the necessary birth defects were hard to find. But it’s been at least a couple of decades since they switched to using both hands at once.

 

I was a college SID for five years and worked with women's basketball for two years and men's for three. Most scoring table crews - scorekeeper, clock operator, shot clock operator - were, indeed, older guys who had been doing it forever. I rarely saw any screw-ups by those crews. They took their jobs seriously (but most of them didn't take themselves seriously and were pretty entertaining when the game wasn't going on).

 

Having worked on the scoring table many times for basketball and volleyball games, it's a blast. Yes, you pay attention and make sure not to screw up. But the wise cracks during the dead time, listening to the people in the production truck if it's a televised game and you're doing red hat or stats, seeing the action close up, and being able to hear the players and coaches talking, etc., are great experiences.

You can't appreciate just how hard some players can spike a volleyball if you're sitting in the stands.

 

A semi-retirement job for this guy?

 

I did some work on the stat crew for women's basketball on college and learned a lot about the game.

 

I typed play-by-play for women's basketball using an IBM Selectric typewriter. That was a challenge, but lots of fun.

 

Longtime Waco Tribune-Herald sports scribe John Werner (RIP) was once sitting courtside for a Baylor volleyball match. During warm-ups, he was looking down at his computer screen and a spike went off course and hit him square in the face and broke his glasses. He looked like the stereotypical nerd for a couple of days, because he repaired them with white athletic tape, which is all he could find.

 

Cooper Flagg looks as good as advertised. But Duke can’t shake an outmanned Kentucky.