College basketball thread...

Welcome back to underachievement, Tigers.

 

Legends of the Fall: Tigers are 48-11 non-conference, 21-31 ACC under Oliver Purnell.

 

I watched the OU-Tech game with King's retirement of his jersey. I was just as stupified that he never got recognition nearly 20 years since he left. It would be easy to pinpoint Sampson, but that's on the OU athletic department for never getting around to doing it. Besides, Sampson wasn't going to waste a phone call to let Stacey King know anyway.

While I'm still ranting, I have been thinking about how schools wait so damn long to retire someone's jersey, or honoring them (or a team) for their accomplishments. Case in point was this past Wednesday night. JB, BigRed, and Armchair can vouch for this: Iowa St. retired Barry Stevens' jersey during halftime of the ISU-Mizzou game. Sad thing is that ISU was doing this nearly a year after his sudden death (died of a heart attack last March). It make no sense to me that Stevens wasn't honored before Jeff Grayer, Jeff Hornacek, and Fred Hoiberg. Stevens created "Hilton Magic" under Johnny Orr with his 43-point game and GW shot over Norm Stewart, Stipanovich, and the Tigers in 1983.

 

They've lost to Duke and UNC in the league. They start losing to the Wake Forests and Miamis of the ACC, then we can call them underachieving.

 

Maybe Clemson won't this season. But seeing is believing.

Better free-throw shooting would help the Tigers. They were 14-for-27 against Chapel Hill in Littlejohn and 10-for-23 against Duke in Cameron. That's embarrassingly bad.

 

The problem is he hasn't recruited good enough guards to play with all the big guys he has.

A.J. Price has clearly failed to live up to the hype, although he is improved this year. Jerome Dyson is solid, but better in a complementary role. Doug Wiggins, well, who knows why Calhoun went through all that trouble of stealing him away from St. John's -- he's not that good. Craig Austrie? Please. Plus, none of them can shoot.

Calhoun's got more talented bigs sitting on the bench racking up DNPs -- Gavin Edwards and Jonathan Mandeldove -- than teams like Marquette have on their entire roster. Get Adrien, Thabeet and Robinson some real running mates and the Huskies can be pretty damned good again.

 

Wazzu guts one out tonight. Outplayed most of the night by Oregon but still manages to win by nine. The Ducks' schemes totally confound Wazzu's defensive philosophy. Kent spreads the floor and makes Wazzu cover all of it, leaving way too many open treys and giving that freaking midget Porter room to get to the rack over and over again. Cougs gave up six weak-side offensive rebounds for bunnies ... I haven't seen them give up that many all year. They didn't deserve to win but still did, which is kind of what Top 10 teams do, I guess.

If you only watched Maarty Leunen play against Wazzu you'd think he was Christian Freaking Laettner.

 

Stilled bummed over Syracuse's first conference loss of the season that happened on Saturday at the hands of Villanova.

 

Man, voting in the AP poll this week was a bear, especially from about 11-20.

 

Umm, are you not counting the losses to West Virginia and Cincinnati? I think they'll stay with Georgetown for a half tonight, but they don't have the depth to stay with them for whole game so the Hoyas probably end up winning by about 15.

 

She's probably talking about Syracuse's hockey team. She's Canadian, you know

 

Yeah, still bummed out over those losses too. They will lose the game to Georgetown.

Even though I am a Canuck, don't like their hockey team.