A Particular Set Of Skills

So South Carolina won the NCAA women's basketball championship.

As a reminder, South Carolina did NOT win the SEC tournament championship. That was won by Kentucky. And what happened to Kentucky? Well, Princeton knocked off the Wildcats in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

You know. Just a reminder. 

Anyway, TigerBlog would like to move on to what might be the greatest single tweet of all time.

It comes from his colleague Chas Dorman, the father of twins who apparently are just starting out in the world of youth sports. Here it is: 

Other parents: "How'd you get them all to sit still?"

Me: "I'm a man of a particular set of skills. Let me tell you about football media day..." pic.twitter.com/ULnp9dekMH

— Chas Dorman (@ChasDorman) April 2, 2022

If you've ever been part of trying to get a college football team photo taken, then you can relate to this. It can be as arduous a process as anything in the world of college athletic communications. You have more than 100 people, and they need to be wearing the right things (uniforms or coaches' gear) and be in the right place at the right time with the right smile. 

And there's never been a photographer who didn't want to move No. 64 over there and No. 47 up one row and have No. 11 move to the center. It's usually enough to make you lose your mind.

TigerBlog's favorite football team photo moment might have been in the mid-1990s, when an exacerbated Hank Towns, the legendary former equipment manager, finally had enough and snapped at everyone to basically shut up and get the picture done so he could get back to work. He got everyone's attention.

Ah, but the Princeton football team photo of 2021? It ran smooth as silk. Chas is right. He does have a particular set of skills.

In other youth sports news, Saturday was the first lacrosse game ever for Mason Sachson, whose father Craig is a legendary former member of the Office of Athletic Communications. If you're reading this, odds are really, really good that you've read a lot of Craig's stuff.

Mason, as it turned out, scored a goal the first time he touched the ball. When he scored again, Craig texted this to TB: "Looking up the county rookie record." Ah, you can take the boy out of athletic communications, but you can't really take the athletic communications out of the boy.

Anyway, TB wanted to share the tweet from Chas. He wasn't sure what it had to do with anything current with Princeton Athletics, other than it was very well done. 

Meanwhile, the NCAA men's basketball tournament is down to its final two teams, and none of those two teams is Duke. The Blue Devils went out in the semifinals Saturday night, falling 81-77 to North Carolina. If you are a UNC fan – or if you are one of the 80-90 percent of the people in the country rooting for the Tar Heels – there was no better script that could have been written to end the career of Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski.

Yes, Krzyzewski has been a great coach who has won five NCAA titles. No, he doesn't get to go out with a championship, like John Wooden did at UCLA in 1975. And the loss came to North Carolina? Can it get sweeter for that fan base?

By the way, Hubert Davis spent some time as an ESPN announcer, and he did one of the Princeton men's games from Jadwin. He was about as nice a guy as you can imagine. 

As for Krzyzewski, he does not come across as one of the nicest guys you can imagine. He's turned off most average college fans, who find him to be a bully with a large degree of phoniness. Maybe that's how he is. Maybe that isn't. TB just thinks that there were a lot more people happy Duke lost Saturday than sad that the game ended the way it did.

One thing TB is unflinching about is his belief that nobody who's ever coached college basketball is a better coach than Pete Carril was during his 29 years at Princeton. One of the best things that TB ever heard from Carril is when he talked about how he knew he had no chance of winning an NCAA title at Princeton, saying something like "One day I'll be dead, and two guys will walk by my grave and say 'poor guy; never won a national championship,' and I won't hear a word they say."

Had Wooden and Krzyzewski coached for 29 years at Princeton, they, too, would not have won any NCAA championships. It's just how it is. Princeton has an incredible history in men's basketball, not to mention a present that connects to that past through head coach Mitch Henderson, who led the Tigers to the Ivy League championship this year and who was a starter on Carril's final Princeton team in 1996.

What would that history look like had Wooden or Krzyzewski been the coach during those Carril years? 

There's no way to know what college basketball history would look like had they coached at Princeton and Carril coached at their schools. On the other hand, Carril is every bit as much a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame as they are. 

Anyway, maybe it's just Princeton bias. No matter what, it's an interesting thing to consider. 

In the meantime, good for the Tar Heels.