Archive for November, 2008

Big East Basketball Brawl

November 30, 2008 at 6:00 am · Filed under college basketball ·Tagged

Man, I love conference basketball tournaments. I’m biased towards the east coast editions, specifically, the ACC Basketball Tournament and the Big East Tournament, for different reasons. The ACC tournament is often the most loaded with talent, but the Big East is no slouch and plays on the big stage of Madison Square Garden.

I would like to attend both the ACC Tournament and the Big East Tournament, but since almost all of the conference tournaments in the country occur almost simultaneously, it just isn’t possible. I guess the best I could do is do the early sessions of the Big East and the later sessions of the ACC in the same year, but in reality, I think I’d like to get my Big East Tournament Tickets for one year and the ACC Tournament Tickets the next.

I think this season might be the year of the ACC on the national scene, because after watching the North Carolina Tar Heels basketball team dismantle Kentucky and Notre Dame without even breaking a sweat, I gotta think the only thing that could stop them would be injuries. Duke has looked really good so far as well. I honestly haven’t seen a team as good as UNC looks right now, as loaded as they are, in college basketball…well, maybe ever. The 2005 Tar Heels were pretty loaded, considering how many players went to the NBA and pro ball elsewhere.

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The Best Basketball Recruiting Blog

November 29, 2008 at 6:00 am · Filed under basketball recruiting, great sports blogs, great sports sites ·Tagged , , ,

My favorite basketball recruiting blog specializes in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and specifically, basketball recruiting for the ACC, and I wish they covered even more. The cool thing is that this site never reports things as facts when they are just rumors, and they are very careful to point out that they aren’t really in the business of predicting where a certain player might decide to go to school.

I first heard about the site while listening to the Al Woods Show over the summer and I went to check it out, because the guy who was being interviewed by Al really knew what he was talking about. It was obvious that he understood not just how to judge basketball talent but how those guys fit into a basketball system.

But even after saying that, they have shown several times that they have a pulse on where players are going and how good those players are going to be. The rating of players on the site is designed to gauge where a player might end up, success-wise, in their basketball career. Most (well, all) recruiting sites pretty much rate any player who will end up at a DI school as a four-star or five-star player, but that doesn’t really tell how that player will contribute. There are hundreds of four and five star high school players who never even start in college and certainly never sniff the pros.

The guys over at ACCBasketballRecruiting.com do a terrific job of analyzing the actual impact of a player. For instance, they didn’t just pick Wake Forest commitment (and current freshman) Al-Farouq Aminu as a ‘five star player’, they said specifically that Aminu would start right away and probably go be able to turn pro after one year, AND that he has the potential to start in the pros at some point. That tells Wake Forest fans a LOT more than he’s ‘five-star’. Pretty awesome. I also like how they run through the entire ACC basketball schedule and break out the ticket options for teams by each game. This is their link for UNC Basketball Tickets, you can see what I mean.

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BCS Watch

November 28, 2008 at 9:39 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

I haven’t been watching the BCS as much as I normally do, but it looks like Texas is making a real run at getting into the national championship game, which means (this year), the Orange Bowl.  The whole bowl system is overly complex and that complexity makes a lot of it meaningless, and the bowl system boils down to a two-team playoff. That’s what it is. Two teams get picked to play in a single game playoff for the national championship.

But a two game playoff only works in things like sudden death golf matches where the final two players have played the same course on the same day. Choosing two teams bease on the…well, fictitious…ranking system is just silly and the NCAA, BCS, and every major media outlet should be ashamed for continuing to support the current system.

Nobody should be legitimizing the BCS system, not the college teams, not the media, not the fans, no one. Millions of fans provide the gobs of cash that flows into the BCS system and the NCAA, and what they get in return is an amatuerish shell game of a championship. I wish the fans had the power to create their own ranking, bowls and invite teams to their own playoffs, outside of the NCAA. Now that would be something.

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