TigerBlog didn't watch the VCU-Southern Cal game nearly two weeks ago, and his only interest in the result that next day was generated by the fact that the winner played Georgetown.
"VCU?" TB probably thought. "Great. Easy win for Georgegtown."
That was before VCU went down the path of what is up there with the Giants run to the Super Bowl a few years ago as the second-greatest sporting accomplishment that TB has ever seen. Always, always keep in mind that nothing can touch the Miracle on Ice.
Still, a national championship for VCU would come pretty freaking close. And at this stage, who's to say it can't happen?
Virginia Commonwealth, in a span of just 10 days, won five NCAA tournament games, defeating team from the Pac 10 (USC), Big East (Georgetown), Big Ten (Purdue), ACC (Florida State) and Big 12 (Kansas).
Oh, and for everyone who's currently saying/writing that the Big East was overrated, those words would have a little more meaning had they been written during the season, rather than after the NCAA tournament started. And the Big East does have a Final Four team, which is more than any other BCS conference other than the SEC can say.
Meanwhile, back at what VCU has done, consider this is a team that lost by 10 to Georgia State, by 11 to Northeastern and just a month ago dropped four of five with losses to Old Dominion, George Mason, James Madison and Drexel.
The Rams, in fact, have lost 11 games this year, though they've also won 28, which means that their Final Four game Saturday will be their 40th of the season.
And that 40th game will be against Butler, which means that one of those two will have to be in the championship game.
And somewhat amazingly, VCU has turned Butler into a team that almost nobody is going to root for come Saturday.
So who's your favorite player on VCU anyway? You have to like Bradford Burgess and Jamie Skeen, who basically carried them offensively the last two games, but you have to love Joey Rodriguez, the point guard generously listed as 5' 10". And then there's the head coach, Shaka Smart, who much like Butler coach Brad Stevens, always reacts as if everything that's going on is exactly how he wants it.
Add it all up, and the Final Four is a team from the Big East (UConn) against a team from the SEC (Kentucky) and a team from the Horizon (Butler) against a team from the Colonial (VCU).
There are no No. 1 seeds, or No. 2 seeds for that matter. There's a three, a four, an eight and an 11, one that would have been a 12 had the field not expanded (and one that was blasted by many for being in the tournament in the first place).
The Horizon League? The Colonial?
Does that mean an Ivy League team could have made such a run?
Well, Butler beat the No. 1 seed (Pitt), the No. 2 seed (Florida) and the No. 4 seed (Wisconsin) in its region, as well as No. 9 Old Dominion in the first game. VCU's wins were over the other No. 11, No. 6, No. 3, No. 10 and then No. 1.
Could Princeton have done something like that?
Princeton, as everyone knows, lost by two points to Kentucky in the first round of the tournament. Kentucky then beat West Virginia by eight, top-seed Ohio State by two and second-seed North Carolina by seven.
On the one hand, it's true that Princeton played Kentucky as close as anyone in the tournament. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine Princeton could have run through West Virginia, Ohio State and UNC.
Then again, it's hard to believe that VCU did it.
A year ago, Cornell reached the Sweet 16, though TigerBlog continues to hold onto his firm belief - and grudge - that it was because of equal parts ability (Cornell had a great team), experience (the Big Red was senior dominated) and luck (the draw gave them Temple and Wisconsin, two teams that aren't quite the 2011 Kentucky team that Princeton played and nothing close to the 1998 Michigan State team Princeton played in the second round).
To get on the roll, you have to do just that - get on a roll. The VCU team that built a huge lead against Kansas and then turned it back on after the Jayhawks looked like they were going to storm all the way back was, TB assumes, a much different team than the one that lost four of five a month ago.
And the great thing about the tournament is that you don't have to win four of seven against a team. All you need is that one win. And with each one comes a greater sense of confidence.
On the women's side, Princeton wasn't looking so good after its loss to Georgetown, except now it looks much better since the Hoyas blew away Maryland in the second round and barely lost to UConn yesterday, falling by five.
So could Princeton's men have made the same kind of move had it gotten past Kentucky that VCU and Butler did?
Hey, did VCU think it was going to? Butler? Probably not.
It's not easy, but thanks to the Rams and Bulldogs, it's certainly doable.
Maybe an Ivy League team will be able to do the same one day.
In the meantime, Princeton can feel pretty better about its NCAA performances - both of them - based on what its opponents have since done.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Friday, March 25, 2011
Thinking About Crunch On Opening Day
Tomorrow marks opening day for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Youth Lacrosse Association, an organization that actually includes teams from New Jersey and Delaware as well as Pennsylvania.
TigerBlog Jr. first played in SEPYLA seven years ago, and this will be his final season before he reaches the age limit.
TigerBlog hit upon the brilliant idea of volunteering to make the schedule for SEPYLA's Northern Division, with the basic though being that he'd be able to make sure that none of TBJ's games (for which TB serves as a coach) conflicted with Princeton's games.
TB forgot one small thing, though. There are three age groups, with seven different divisions, with nearly 500 games to be scheduled. All of these games had to be compatible with field availability, and then they had to be stacked so that multiple games would be played on the same field back-to-back-to-back for the sake of assigning refs.
And that was before he got one email from other coaches, all of whom had their own scheduling requests and needs. In fact, TB would receive 350 emails in the last two weeks about scheduling, or 70% as many emails as there are games being played.
Forget for a minute that 15 years ago, almost all of these kids would be playing baseball. That's not really the issue right now.
TBJ's Lower Bucks team opens against Central Bucks, its biggest rival, at least in the spring. Central Bucks' coach is an amiable man named Brian Vetter, who also happens to be an outstanding youth lacrosse coach.
In the summer, TBJ plays on a different team, which consists of three Lower Bucks players, a few players from other teams that TBJ will play against this spring, a few who travel quite a distance to get to the summer team and a bunch of Central Bucks kids, and it is Vetter who coaches that team as well.
It's added a little something extra to the Lower Bucks-Central Bucks rivalry, since many of the kids know each other so well and because they spend much of their summer together.
Win or lose, the Central Bucks game is just the start of a spring season that runs past Memorial Day.
In fact, with the schedules for all of the teams finally done, all over the area, an army of kids and their parents will be heading to all the fields that TB had to enter to play lacrosse.
Through the years, TBJ has played against all kinds of teams in all kinds of areas. Robbinsville, which is about 15 minutes from Princeton, isn't a SEPYLA team, but Lower Bucks has played against that program a few times in non-league games.
Unlike college or, TB assumes, high school, where there is a ton of scouting information available, very little of that exists on the youth level. The game tomorrow, where the other team is so well known, is a rarity.
Also, because lacrosse is a sport where every kid has a helmet on, it's not always easy to recognize any particular kid, except for those who really stand out. And even then, they're known as, say, "No. 88, the face-off kid from the Skyhawks," rather than by their names.
Because of that, it's impossible for TigerBlog to know if he ever saw Christian Regulski play lacrosse.
Christian, who was known as "Crunch" to the Princeton men's basketball team, played for Robbinsville. He was two years younger than TBJ, which meant he would always have been in the age group under the one TBJ was in and so wouldn't have played in any of those games, but in the many trips to Robbinsville, it's possible that Crunch was practicing or playing on the next field.
Crunch, for those who don't know, came to the attention of the Princeton basketball team because he was suffering from a brain tumor. The relationship began as part of the Friends of Jaclyn program, which looked to match children with brain tumors to college athletic teams that could supply support and friendship.
It's unlikely the program ever produced a better match than Crunch and Princeton. They would hang out together, go to the movies together, sit on the Princeton bench during games together.
As the boy's health began to turn once again, Princeton's coaches and players were there with him the whole way.
Sadly, the story didn't end happily, as Crunch passed away - at the age of 11 - last month.
When Princeton played in the NCAA tournament in Tampa last week, TB received an email from a local news writer who was doing scene-setting pieces on the eight teams traveling to the site. He asked some questions, including:
* who are three famous alums? (TB gave him James Madison, Woodrow Wilson and Bill Bradley)
* what is a fun fact about your school? (TB said that three of the nine current Supreme Court Justices were Princeton grads).
He also asked for non-basketball stories about the team itself, and TB pointed him in the direction of Crunch and the "MARV" patches that the team wore in honor of Marv Bressler, who had passed away last summer.
As a result, the Tampa Tribune ended up with a story about the two and their influence on the Tigers. The writer - Rob Shaw - asked if the relationship between Crunch and the team was a real source of inspiration for the team and if they would be thinking about him during the tournament, and TB unhesitatingly said yes.
In fact, Shaw had gotten quotes from Regulski's father Matt about how much it meant to the whole family to have Princeton basketball's involvement with his son during his last months. Matt Regulski also posted this comment under TB's entry from when Crunch had passed away:
TB - your article was very moving and in the very best of taste. As Chris'(Crunch)dad, I had the honor of enjoying the same relationship with the team as Chris did, and yoiur observation of his appearance of pure joy is directly on target.Rather then repeat myself, perhaps you might want to visit caringbridge.org and enter "crunch" as the site you wish to visit.I think it will give you even more insight into how special these men were and are - but I believe you already know that. Thank you for your kind words.
TigerBlog remembers the day last month when he saw Princeton coach Sydney Johnson coming in the side door of Jadwin during the middle of a workday. Johnson was wearing a suit and holding a lacrosse stick, and TB at first thought it was some sort of joke.
Then Johnson told TB that he - and his whole team - had just come from Crunch's funeral and that the stick had been Crunch's and that he'd be finding a special place to put it.
Tomorrow morning, for opening day, TB's thoughts will be on Central Bucks and how to stop its great face-off guy Jack Auteri, its big lefty shooter Jeff Circuit and all the other really strong, really physical, really gifted young men on the team.
At the same time, he'll also think about another youth player, one who, in a more just world, would be getting ready to start his own season, getting ready to be another of the lucky kids outside playing a sport - any sport, for that matter - that they love to play.
Instead, his stick is wherever Sydney Johnson put it to honor Crunch's memory.
His stick is in good hands. It's just not in the right ones, his own.
TigerBlog Jr. first played in SEPYLA seven years ago, and this will be his final season before he reaches the age limit.
TigerBlog hit upon the brilliant idea of volunteering to make the schedule for SEPYLA's Northern Division, with the basic though being that he'd be able to make sure that none of TBJ's games (for which TB serves as a coach) conflicted with Princeton's games.
TB forgot one small thing, though. There are three age groups, with seven different divisions, with nearly 500 games to be scheduled. All of these games had to be compatible with field availability, and then they had to be stacked so that multiple games would be played on the same field back-to-back-to-back for the sake of assigning refs.
And that was before he got one email from other coaches, all of whom had their own scheduling requests and needs. In fact, TB would receive 350 emails in the last two weeks about scheduling, or 70% as many emails as there are games being played.
Forget for a minute that 15 years ago, almost all of these kids would be playing baseball. That's not really the issue right now.
TBJ's Lower Bucks team opens against Central Bucks, its biggest rival, at least in the spring. Central Bucks' coach is an amiable man named Brian Vetter, who also happens to be an outstanding youth lacrosse coach.
In the summer, TBJ plays on a different team, which consists of three Lower Bucks players, a few players from other teams that TBJ will play against this spring, a few who travel quite a distance to get to the summer team and a bunch of Central Bucks kids, and it is Vetter who coaches that team as well.
It's added a little something extra to the Lower Bucks-Central Bucks rivalry, since many of the kids know each other so well and because they spend much of their summer together.
Win or lose, the Central Bucks game is just the start of a spring season that runs past Memorial Day.
In fact, with the schedules for all of the teams finally done, all over the area, an army of kids and their parents will be heading to all the fields that TB had to enter to play lacrosse.
Through the years, TBJ has played against all kinds of teams in all kinds of areas. Robbinsville, which is about 15 minutes from Princeton, isn't a SEPYLA team, but Lower Bucks has played against that program a few times in non-league games.
Unlike college or, TB assumes, high school, where there is a ton of scouting information available, very little of that exists on the youth level. The game tomorrow, where the other team is so well known, is a rarity.
Also, because lacrosse is a sport where every kid has a helmet on, it's not always easy to recognize any particular kid, except for those who really stand out. And even then, they're known as, say, "No. 88, the face-off kid from the Skyhawks," rather than by their names.
Because of that, it's impossible for TigerBlog to know if he ever saw Christian Regulski play lacrosse.
Christian, who was known as "Crunch" to the Princeton men's basketball team, played for Robbinsville. He was two years younger than TBJ, which meant he would always have been in the age group under the one TBJ was in and so wouldn't have played in any of those games, but in the many trips to Robbinsville, it's possible that Crunch was practicing or playing on the next field.
Crunch, for those who don't know, came to the attention of the Princeton basketball team because he was suffering from a brain tumor. The relationship began as part of the Friends of Jaclyn program, which looked to match children with brain tumors to college athletic teams that could supply support and friendship.
It's unlikely the program ever produced a better match than Crunch and Princeton. They would hang out together, go to the movies together, sit on the Princeton bench during games together.
As the boy's health began to turn once again, Princeton's coaches and players were there with him the whole way.
Sadly, the story didn't end happily, as Crunch passed away - at the age of 11 - last month.
When Princeton played in the NCAA tournament in Tampa last week, TB received an email from a local news writer who was doing scene-setting pieces on the eight teams traveling to the site. He asked some questions, including:
* who are three famous alums? (TB gave him James Madison, Woodrow Wilson and Bill Bradley)
* what is a fun fact about your school? (TB said that three of the nine current Supreme Court Justices were Princeton grads).
He also asked for non-basketball stories about the team itself, and TB pointed him in the direction of Crunch and the "MARV" patches that the team wore in honor of Marv Bressler, who had passed away last summer.
As a result, the Tampa Tribune ended up with a story about the two and their influence on the Tigers. The writer - Rob Shaw - asked if the relationship between Crunch and the team was a real source of inspiration for the team and if they would be thinking about him during the tournament, and TB unhesitatingly said yes.
In fact, Shaw had gotten quotes from Regulski's father Matt about how much it meant to the whole family to have Princeton basketball's involvement with his son during his last months. Matt Regulski also posted this comment under TB's entry from when Crunch had passed away:
TB - your article was very moving and in the very best of taste. As Chris'(Crunch)dad, I had the honor of enjoying the same relationship with the team as Chris did, and yoiur observation of his appearance of pure joy is directly on target.Rather then repeat myself, perhaps you might want to visit caringbridge.org and enter "crunch" as the site you wish to visit.I think it will give you even more insight into how special these men were and are - but I believe you already know that. Thank you for your kind words.
TigerBlog remembers the day last month when he saw Princeton coach Sydney Johnson coming in the side door of Jadwin during the middle of a workday. Johnson was wearing a suit and holding a lacrosse stick, and TB at first thought it was some sort of joke.
Then Johnson told TB that he - and his whole team - had just come from Crunch's funeral and that the stick had been Crunch's and that he'd be finding a special place to put it.
Tomorrow morning, for opening day, TB's thoughts will be on Central Bucks and how to stop its great face-off guy Jack Auteri, its big lefty shooter Jeff Circuit and all the other really strong, really physical, really gifted young men on the team.
At the same time, he'll also think about another youth player, one who, in a more just world, would be getting ready to start his own season, getting ready to be another of the lucky kids outside playing a sport - any sport, for that matter - that they love to play.
Instead, his stick is wherever Sydney Johnson put it to honor Crunch's memory.
His stick is in good hands. It's just not in the right ones, his own.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
All Things Being Equal
As TigerBlog remembers the sweater, it was definitely something out of the early 1990s. It was black, and it had all kinds of color to the front.
When the 1992 Duke-Kentucky game was on ESPN Classic the other night, TigerBlog could see the sweater looking back at him from behind the Kentucky bench. TB was there covering the game for the newspaper, and he saw what is widely considered the greatest college basketball game ever played from a seat that put him almost in the middle of the Wildcat huddle, basically able to hear every word Rick Pitino said all night.
All while wearing what now would be considered a ghastly black sweater.
TigerBlog still gets rolled eyes and strange looks from people when he tells them that, if all sports were judged equally, then the 2009 national squash championship match between Princeton and Trinity would be considered among the greatest, if not the greatest, collegiate championship event of all-time.
In that match, Princeton fell just short of ending Trinity's winning streak, which had reached 202 at that point. The match took more than six tense hours in Jadwin Gym, and the team in control seemed to go back-and-forth every minute of those six hours.
Duke-Kentucky ends up on ESPN Classic. Trinity-Princeton gets rolled eyes.
Why? Because long ago, basketball became a mainstream sport, while most of the general sporting public doesn't know what squash is and has never seen it.
When TB worked at the newspaper, he found maybe the only person he's ever seen who looked at every sport as exactly equal, and that was Harvey Yavener. To Yav, a big squash match was equal to a big basketball game, and to some extent, it was that logic that led Yav to pass on Duke-Kentucky and send TB in the first place.
At Princeton, the mandate has always been to treat every sport equally, and for the most part, that's how it's done around here.
For instance, a look at the top seven stories on goprincetontigers.com at this moment shows that tennis, rowing, basketball, lacrosse, track and field, fencing and golf are all represented. No decision is ever made to feature one sport over another.
Of course, not everything is completely equal. For instance, Princeton only charges admission for five sports - football, men's and women's basketball, men's hockey and men's lacrosse, and almost all of the in-game promotions are centered around those five.
And back when media guides were produced, some sports had much bigger ones than others. And the football game program isn't quite the same as the one for, say, soccer or baseball or track and field.
Still, things around here at more egalitarian than they are at many places, and that's one of the best parts of working here. As TB loves to say, the football coach doesn't run the University.
And hey, let's pretend for a minute that everything is equal. In that case, today's bury-the-lead question is: In which sport is the Ivy League strongest nationally?
The usual answers are sports like squash and lacrosse and rowing, which make up the majority of the national championships Princeton has won during its current 40-year streak of having at least one team or individual win one.
TB will put men's soccer out there as well, with four teams having made the tournament a year ago and two of them having advanced to the quarterfinals.
Some others are as well, including wrestling and hockey.
One sport that gets overlooked, though, is fencing. Ivy League fencing is up there with any other sport.
As TB writes, the NCAA championships are just getting underway at Ohio State. Two things jumped out at TB from the release on goprincetontigers.com:
"In the final USFCA poll released Tuesday, March 22, the Ivy League champion Princeton women's team was ranked second behind Notre Dame, which received top billing in both polls. The Princeton men's team was ranked sixth. All seven Ivy League women's teams were ranked or receiving votes, as were five of the six Ivy men's programs."
and ...
"Princeton has had a Top 10 national finish in 18 straight trips to the finals."
TigerBlog will be the first to admit that he doesn't know much about fencing. Still, he has great respect for how competitive the Ivy League is and what a great job Zoltan Dudas and his staff have done of bringing Princeton back to the sport's elite.
Princeton has qualified the maximum number of fencers (12) that a school can, and it should be an interesting weekend in Columbus.
No, it'll never make ESPN Classic, and yes, the NCAA basketball tournaments, especially the men's, will completely eclipse the fencing as far as the public is concerned.
But in the Ivy League, it's different, and so fencing will have its share of the spotlight this weekend.
As it should be. It's part of why the Ivy League is a unique place.
When the 1992 Duke-Kentucky game was on ESPN Classic the other night, TigerBlog could see the sweater looking back at him from behind the Kentucky bench. TB was there covering the game for the newspaper, and he saw what is widely considered the greatest college basketball game ever played from a seat that put him almost in the middle of the Wildcat huddle, basically able to hear every word Rick Pitino said all night.
All while wearing what now would be considered a ghastly black sweater.
TigerBlog still gets rolled eyes and strange looks from people when he tells them that, if all sports were judged equally, then the 2009 national squash championship match between Princeton and Trinity would be considered among the greatest, if not the greatest, collegiate championship event of all-time.
In that match, Princeton fell just short of ending Trinity's winning streak, which had reached 202 at that point. The match took more than six tense hours in Jadwin Gym, and the team in control seemed to go back-and-forth every minute of those six hours.
Duke-Kentucky ends up on ESPN Classic. Trinity-Princeton gets rolled eyes.
Why? Because long ago, basketball became a mainstream sport, while most of the general sporting public doesn't know what squash is and has never seen it.
When TB worked at the newspaper, he found maybe the only person he's ever seen who looked at every sport as exactly equal, and that was Harvey Yavener. To Yav, a big squash match was equal to a big basketball game, and to some extent, it was that logic that led Yav to pass on Duke-Kentucky and send TB in the first place.
At Princeton, the mandate has always been to treat every sport equally, and for the most part, that's how it's done around here.
For instance, a look at the top seven stories on goprincetontigers.com at this moment shows that tennis, rowing, basketball, lacrosse, track and field, fencing and golf are all represented. No decision is ever made to feature one sport over another.
Of course, not everything is completely equal. For instance, Princeton only charges admission for five sports - football, men's and women's basketball, men's hockey and men's lacrosse, and almost all of the in-game promotions are centered around those five.
And back when media guides were produced, some sports had much bigger ones than others. And the football game program isn't quite the same as the one for, say, soccer or baseball or track and field.
Still, things around here at more egalitarian than they are at many places, and that's one of the best parts of working here. As TB loves to say, the football coach doesn't run the University.
And hey, let's pretend for a minute that everything is equal. In that case, today's bury-the-lead question is: In which sport is the Ivy League strongest nationally?
The usual answers are sports like squash and lacrosse and rowing, which make up the majority of the national championships Princeton has won during its current 40-year streak of having at least one team or individual win one.
TB will put men's soccer out there as well, with four teams having made the tournament a year ago and two of them having advanced to the quarterfinals.
Some others are as well, including wrestling and hockey.
One sport that gets overlooked, though, is fencing. Ivy League fencing is up there with any other sport.
As TB writes, the NCAA championships are just getting underway at Ohio State. Two things jumped out at TB from the release on goprincetontigers.com:
"In the final USFCA poll released Tuesday, March 22, the Ivy League champion Princeton women's team was ranked second behind Notre Dame, which received top billing in both polls. The Princeton men's team was ranked sixth. All seven Ivy League women's teams were ranked or receiving votes, as were five of the six Ivy men's programs."
and ...
"Princeton has had a Top 10 national finish in 18 straight trips to the finals."
TigerBlog will be the first to admit that he doesn't know much about fencing. Still, he has great respect for how competitive the Ivy League is and what a great job Zoltan Dudas and his staff have done of bringing Princeton back to the sport's elite.
Princeton has qualified the maximum number of fencers (12) that a school can, and it should be an interesting weekend in Columbus.
No, it'll never make ESPN Classic, and yes, the NCAA basketball tournaments, especially the men's, will completely eclipse the fencing as far as the public is concerned.
But in the Ivy League, it's different, and so fencing will have its share of the spotlight this weekend.
As it should be. It's part of why the Ivy League is a unique place.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
With Violet Eyes To Die For
Elizabeth Taylor, in case you didn't hear, died today at the age of 79.
She was a little before TigerBlog's time, though he certainly has seen enough of her movies through the years to appreciate that she was more than just her looks and body and propensity to get married, divorced and married again.
For much of the 1950s and ’60s, she was the heavyweight champ of Hollywood actresses, with no real competition out there at all. She burst onto the scene at the age of 12 when she was in National Velvet, which made her an international star, and she would go on to win two Academy Awards for Best Actress, as the rather-troubled Gloria in BUtterfield 8 and Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
She also played the title role in "Cleopatra," for which she earned $1 million - and the first of her two marriages to Richard Burton.
If TigerBlog had to name his two favorite Liz Taylor movies, he'd go with "Giant," set in the Texas oil fields (it was James Dean's third and last movie, and "A Place In The Sun," starring TB favorite Montgomery Clift.
By the time TB was watching TV on a regular basis, Taylor was mostly known for having been a huge star in her day, for her turbulent personal life and for her philanthropic activities.
There was also a Doonesbury strip from Jan. 11, 1979, that referred to her time married to John Warner, a senator from Virginia, and used the phrase "a tad overweight but with violet eyes to die for" to describe her.
Her healthy declined through the years, and she finally passed away earlier today. Her death marks the end of a career that will be nearly impossible in this day and age to duplicate.
Nearly to the end, Taylor's was a familiar face on television, mostly in commercials that made her look exceedingly glamorous.
That wasn't quite the look the NCAA was looking for when it came up with its "Still Think We're A Bunch Of Dumb Jocks?" campaign.
If you missed the commercials during the early rounds of the NCAA tournament, they show various former college athletes going through strenuous workout regimens, as they drip sweat throughout.
The voiceovers talk about the successes that college athletes have in terms of graduation rates, academic achievement and overall educational accomplishment, especially compared to non-athletes.
From the NCAA's website:
“NCAA student-athletes, particularly African-American males, are graduating at a higher percentage than their counterparts in the general student body in almost every category,” NCAA President Mark Emmert said. “In a 10-year timeframe that begins after high school, nearly 90 percent of student-athletes graduate. I am thrilled to share these facts with the world through our PSAs.”
TigerBlog has said this before, and he'll say it again: Whoever came up with "there are nearly 400,000 student-athletes, and almost all of us will be going pro in something other than sports" is a total genius.
The latest NCAA spot builds on that and makes it more to the point, which is that stereotypes notwithstanding, participation in college athletics overwhelmingly leads to staying in school, graduating and doing well post-graduation.
There is a perception that all of college athletics mirrors that of BCS football and big-time Division I men's basketball. Yes, those are by far the most visible sports on the college landscape, and they certainly are the ones that generate all of the revenue.
Unfortunately, much of the public's views of what college athletics is stems from those two sports. The result is that all college athletes are lumped together, with the idea that they're only on campus to pursue pro careers, that they all drop out once their eligibility is exhausted, that they aren't real students, that they didn't earn their way into school, that they are taking classes that lead to maintaining eligibility and not to being challenged, that they are segregated from the rest of the students on campus.
Certainly there are examples where this is the case. But it's such a small percentage of what college athletics is all about.
At Princeton, there are 38 varsity teams and nearly 1,000 athletes, or roughly 20 percent of the undergraduate population. The stereotypes that the athletes here fight against aren't that they're going to leave to pro but go to the question of why a school like Princeton would have Division I athletics in the first place.
The answers aren't that simple. For instance, if you were starting the Ivy League today, you probably wouldn't have Division I teams.
But Ivy League athletics started two centuries ago, and the amount of history and tradition coupled with the amazing successes that the teams continue to have and the example that they set across college athletics can never be minimized or taken away.
And of course, there's the reality that athletic success can bring a campus together in a way that nothing else can match. Don't believe TigerBlog? Ask anyone who saw Douglas Davis on campus last week.
Of course, all of the good about college athletics will never be enough for some people, and hey, they're certainly entitled to their opinion.
But that's also why spots like the NCAA's "Still Think We're A Bunch of Dumb Jocks" are so important, and why it's so important that they're done correctly.
Here at Princeton, there are roughly 1,000 athletes, and most of them will be going pro in something other than sports.
And before they do, they'll be some of the greatest examples of what makes Princeton University such a special place.
She was a little before TigerBlog's time, though he certainly has seen enough of her movies through the years to appreciate that she was more than just her looks and body and propensity to get married, divorced and married again.
For much of the 1950s and ’60s, she was the heavyweight champ of Hollywood actresses, with no real competition out there at all. She burst onto the scene at the age of 12 when she was in National Velvet, which made her an international star, and she would go on to win two Academy Awards for Best Actress, as the rather-troubled Gloria in BUtterfield 8 and Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
She also played the title role in "Cleopatra," for which she earned $1 million - and the first of her two marriages to Richard Burton.
If TigerBlog had to name his two favorite Liz Taylor movies, he'd go with "Giant," set in the Texas oil fields (it was James Dean's third and last movie, and "A Place In The Sun," starring TB favorite Montgomery Clift.
By the time TB was watching TV on a regular basis, Taylor was mostly known for having been a huge star in her day, for her turbulent personal life and for her philanthropic activities.
There was also a Doonesbury strip from Jan. 11, 1979, that referred to her time married to John Warner, a senator from Virginia, and used the phrase "a tad overweight but with violet eyes to die for" to describe her.
Her healthy declined through the years, and she finally passed away earlier today. Her death marks the end of a career that will be nearly impossible in this day and age to duplicate.
Nearly to the end, Taylor's was a familiar face on television, mostly in commercials that made her look exceedingly glamorous.
That wasn't quite the look the NCAA was looking for when it came up with its "Still Think We're A Bunch Of Dumb Jocks?" campaign.
If you missed the commercials during the early rounds of the NCAA tournament, they show various former college athletes going through strenuous workout regimens, as they drip sweat throughout.
The voiceovers talk about the successes that college athletes have in terms of graduation rates, academic achievement and overall educational accomplishment, especially compared to non-athletes.
From the NCAA's website:
“NCAA student-athletes, particularly African-American males, are graduating at a higher percentage than their counterparts in the general student body in almost every category,” NCAA President Mark Emmert said. “In a 10-year timeframe that begins after high school, nearly 90 percent of student-athletes graduate. I am thrilled to share these facts with the world through our PSAs.”
TigerBlog has said this before, and he'll say it again: Whoever came up with "there are nearly 400,000 student-athletes, and almost all of us will be going pro in something other than sports" is a total genius.
The latest NCAA spot builds on that and makes it more to the point, which is that stereotypes notwithstanding, participation in college athletics overwhelmingly leads to staying in school, graduating and doing well post-graduation.
There is a perception that all of college athletics mirrors that of BCS football and big-time Division I men's basketball. Yes, those are by far the most visible sports on the college landscape, and they certainly are the ones that generate all of the revenue.
Unfortunately, much of the public's views of what college athletics is stems from those two sports. The result is that all college athletes are lumped together, with the idea that they're only on campus to pursue pro careers, that they all drop out once their eligibility is exhausted, that they aren't real students, that they didn't earn their way into school, that they are taking classes that lead to maintaining eligibility and not to being challenged, that they are segregated from the rest of the students on campus.
Certainly there are examples where this is the case. But it's such a small percentage of what college athletics is all about.
At Princeton, there are 38 varsity teams and nearly 1,000 athletes, or roughly 20 percent of the undergraduate population. The stereotypes that the athletes here fight against aren't that they're going to leave to pro but go to the question of why a school like Princeton would have Division I athletics in the first place.
The answers aren't that simple. For instance, if you were starting the Ivy League today, you probably wouldn't have Division I teams.
But Ivy League athletics started two centuries ago, and the amount of history and tradition coupled with the amazing successes that the teams continue to have and the example that they set across college athletics can never be minimized or taken away.
And of course, there's the reality that athletic success can bring a campus together in a way that nothing else can match. Don't believe TigerBlog? Ask anyone who saw Douglas Davis on campus last week.
Of course, all of the good about college athletics will never be enough for some people, and hey, they're certainly entitled to their opinion.
But that's also why spots like the NCAA's "Still Think We're A Bunch of Dumb Jocks" are so important, and why it's so important that they're done correctly.
Here at Princeton, there are roughly 1,000 athletes, and most of them will be going pro in something other than sports.
And before they do, they'll be some of the greatest examples of what makes Princeton University such a special place.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Spring Ahead
TigerBlog knew it was officially spring yesterday when he wiped the snow off his windshield in the morning. Okay, it wasn't quite a blizzard or anything. Still, March of 2011 hasn't quite gotten this whole "comes in like a lion; goes out like a lamb" thing down.
If anything, this month has gone lion-lamb-lion-lion-lamb-verylamb-lion. Temperatures this month around here have ranged from the 20s to the 80s - and back.
For the first day of spring, there was a little of everything: rain, snow, sleet, sunshine, wind, no wind. Today is a fairly average day, though tomorrow's forecast includes snow showers.
Still, it is spring, and the winter is over, officially and in Princeton athletics. Only men's volleyball remains, and that sport is sort of a winter/spring hybrid.
The winter was a tremendous one for Princeton teams, and the Tigers enter the spring having won 11 Ivy League championships in the academic year, including seven that came in the winter.
The men's indoor track and field team set a Heps record for the most points ever scored; the women's team and the men's swimming and diving team won extraordinarily close championships of their own.
Women's basketball overcame the loss of a top player to win the league going away. Womens' fencing ran through the league undefeated, and women's swimming and diving also was the dominant Ivy team.
The men's basketball team used an epic moment at the end of the Ivy League playoff game to get into the NCAA tournament and then nearly knocked off powerhouse Kentucky, losing by two in the first round.
Men's squash player Todd Harrity did something that hadn't happened since 1990 - he became an American player who won the national collegiate championship. He also did so in style, without losing a single game in the tournament.
Hey, but that's all in the past. Ahead is the spring, and there's a lot on the line for Princeton in the next two-plus months.
Among the storylines:
* can Princeton break the Ivy League record for championships won in an academic year? The record is 14, something Princeton has done twice (1999-2000/2000-01) and Harvard has done once (2004-05). Can Princeton get three more to tie and four more to win?
* will Princeton have an NCAA individual track and field outdoor champion? Last year, Donn Cabral finished as the runner-up in the steeplechase, while Ashley Higginson was third on the women's side.
* what will crew season be like? The lightweight men are the two-time defending national champion; the women's open crew opens the season ranked second nationally.
* how will the softball team play in the aftermath of the death of teammate Khristin Kyllo?
* can the women's tennis team win a third-straight Ivy title? Will the men come out of a fairly even group?
* will the men's lacrosse team get healthy enough to make a run this season? Can the men or women reach the NCAA tournament, something that at least one of them has done every year since 1989?
There are other teams and athletes and storylines.
Aside from lacrosse, tennis and water polo, no spring team has had a home event yet, something that begins to change this weekend with softball and rowing.
Each season at Princeton has its own feel to it. The fall begins with hot weather and the promise of a new, uncertain academic year. The winter is a marathon, with events running from late October until this time.
As for the spring, it's something of a sprint to the finish. The weather starts out unpredictably and gets steadily better. Eventually, there will be events on days when it'll be sunny and 70 or 80, and the games will almost feel like they're being played on the beach.
Between now and then, Princeton teams have a lot that can be accomplished. History, for instance, should the spring yield at least three more Ivy championships.
If anything, this month has gone lion-lamb-lion-lion-lamb-verylamb-lion. Temperatures this month around here have ranged from the 20s to the 80s - and back.
For the first day of spring, there was a little of everything: rain, snow, sleet, sunshine, wind, no wind. Today is a fairly average day, though tomorrow's forecast includes snow showers.
Still, it is spring, and the winter is over, officially and in Princeton athletics. Only men's volleyball remains, and that sport is sort of a winter/spring hybrid.
The winter was a tremendous one for Princeton teams, and the Tigers enter the spring having won 11 Ivy League championships in the academic year, including seven that came in the winter.
The men's indoor track and field team set a Heps record for the most points ever scored; the women's team and the men's swimming and diving team won extraordinarily close championships of their own.
Women's basketball overcame the loss of a top player to win the league going away. Womens' fencing ran through the league undefeated, and women's swimming and diving also was the dominant Ivy team.
The men's basketball team used an epic moment at the end of the Ivy League playoff game to get into the NCAA tournament and then nearly knocked off powerhouse Kentucky, losing by two in the first round.
Men's squash player Todd Harrity did something that hadn't happened since 1990 - he became an American player who won the national collegiate championship. He also did so in style, without losing a single game in the tournament.
Hey, but that's all in the past. Ahead is the spring, and there's a lot on the line for Princeton in the next two-plus months.
Among the storylines:
* can Princeton break the Ivy League record for championships won in an academic year? The record is 14, something Princeton has done twice (1999-2000/2000-01) and Harvard has done once (2004-05). Can Princeton get three more to tie and four more to win?
* will Princeton have an NCAA individual track and field outdoor champion? Last year, Donn Cabral finished as the runner-up in the steeplechase, while Ashley Higginson was third on the women's side.
* what will crew season be like? The lightweight men are the two-time defending national champion; the women's open crew opens the season ranked second nationally.
* how will the softball team play in the aftermath of the death of teammate Khristin Kyllo?
* can the women's tennis team win a third-straight Ivy title? Will the men come out of a fairly even group?
* will the men's lacrosse team get healthy enough to make a run this season? Can the men or women reach the NCAA tournament, something that at least one of them has done every year since 1989?
There are other teams and athletes and storylines.
Aside from lacrosse, tennis and water polo, no spring team has had a home event yet, something that begins to change this weekend with softball and rowing.
Each season at Princeton has its own feel to it. The fall begins with hot weather and the promise of a new, uncertain academic year. The winter is a marathon, with events running from late October until this time.
As for the spring, it's something of a sprint to the finish. The weather starts out unpredictably and gets steadily better. Eventually, there will be events on days when it'll be sunny and 70 or 80, and the games will almost feel like they're being played on the beach.
Between now and then, Princeton teams have a lot that can be accomplished. History, for instance, should the spring yield at least three more Ivy championships.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Into The Shredder
TigerBlog has a shredder under his desk. Every now and then, for no reason at all, he'll take a few pieces of paper and put them in the shredder, which provides an unlikely source of entertainment.
The best thing to put in the shredder are unused tickets. Putting them in without separating them results in a long trail of shredding, which, again, is an unlikely source of entertainment.
TigerBlog might as well put his NCAA tournament bracket into the shredder right now. Oh, the compliance people can relax, as there are no money or prizes at stake in the OAC's annual NCAA tournament picking contest, which is dubbed "The Completely Compliant With The NCAA's No-Betting Policy Tournament Pool."
If you work in college athletics, you can't help but be inundated with anti-gambling messages, especially around the time of the Super Bowl and NCAA tournament. And this is rightfully so, especially considering what's at stake if it ever comes out that a coach or players were involved in gambling on the tournament.
Still, here in the OAC, everyone fills out a bracket, just for fun. There's not even a candy bar to the winner.
And TB's bracket? Well, consider his Final Four of North Carolina (still in), Notre Dame (gone), Pitt (gone) and Texas (gone).
The first two (okay, three) rounds of the men's tournament and the first round of the women's tournament show just how different the two events are.
On the men's side, a team like Virginia Commonwealth from the CAA can fly under the radar to the point of having to play in a play-in (okay, first round) game just to get into the main draw, and yet the Rams beat USC (from the Pac 10), Georgetown (from the Big East) and Purdue (from the Big Ten) - all by double figures - and do so in a five-day stretch. It's one of the most remarkable NCAA tournament feats TB can remember, as a matter of fact.
Speaking of Georgetown, TB was rooting hard for the Hoyas, who were never really in the game. Georgetown was one of 11 Big East teams to get a bid - and one of nine who's already lost. Only UConn and Marquette are left from the Big East, and both got to the Sweet 16 by beating another Big East team.
TB has a theory as to why: These teams beat each other up so badly all season that they were just too worn out to be effective this late into March. That makes UConn even more impressive, especially considering the Huskies won the Big East tournament with five games in five days.
And TB can't help but be happy for Richmond and head coach Chris Mooney, a 1994 Princeton grad and all-time TigerBlog favorite, as the Spiders have reached the Sweet 16.
Meanwhile, back at the difference between the men's tournament and the women's tournament, it can be summed up fairly easily.
On the women's side, three double-digit seeds won their first game, two 10s and an 11.
On the men's side, six double-digit seeds won their first game. That group was a 10, three 11s, a 12 and a 13. In addition, six other double digit seeds lost their first round game by three points or fewer, including, of course, No. 13 Princeton against No. 4 Kentucky.
Of the six double-digit seeds who won in the first (okay, second) round, four won again to reach the Sweet 16.
As an aside, any Princeton fan now has to root for Kentucky to get to the Final Four, something that would give the Tigers' performance even more credibility.
Anyway, the deck was stacked against 12th-seeded Princeton yesterday before it took on No. 5 Georgetown in the women's tournament.
While having a 12 beat a five on the men's side is somewhat routine, it's not something that happens for the women. All time in the women's tournament, No. 12 seeds are now 19-88, a winning percentage of .178. Seeds lower than 12, by the way, are 9-288, so at least the 12's have a small chance.
On the men's side, 12 seeds all-time are 55-107, which is a winning percentage of .340, or nearly twice that of the women's.
The difference between the number of good women's teams and good men's teams is still significant. Perhaps the gap will close in the next few decades, but it's not there yet.
For Princeton, there was the extra challenge of having played the Ivy League season the last two months. Yes, Princeton was challenged more this year than it was last year, but the Tigers, even after a loss to Harvard early, were the prohibitive favorites in the league.
As TB watched the women's game yesterday, he thought back to the game he saw at Rutgers, when Princeton lost a one-point game with four seconds left against a team that yesterday beat Louisiana Tech by 25 in its first NCAA game.
Against the Knights, Princeton was fast and physical, and it still had Niveen Rasheed at the time. If Princeton had a steady diet of Big East teams through January and February, it would have been ready for the quickness, pressure and physicality of the Georgetown women.
Unfortunately, Princeton got off to a tough start against that pressure, and the result was a 20-point halftime deficit.
Even with the loss, it was a great infomercial for Princeton women's basketball on ESPN yesterday, as announcers Bob Picozzi and Rebecca Lobo constantly talked about the great work that Princeton had done all year and what a great team it was.
The highlight was when they talked about how assistant coach Melanie Moore couldn't be at the game after giving birth last week. Picozzi mentioned that Tristan Moore was nine pounds, 15 ounces and then went on to talk about something else, and when he came back to Lobo - a mother of four - to ask her her thoughts, she said that she couldn't get past nine pounds, 15 ounces.
Still, the idea that Princeton's women basketball team could be disappointed after its NCAA tournament game shows you how far things have come around here. Not to offend anyone from years past, but Princeton had seven losing seasons in eight years before Courtney Banghart and her staff showed up, and of those seven losing seasons, five were single-digit wins.
Going from single-digit wins to a double-digit seed for the second straight year is very impressive.
Winning an NCAA tournament game is not easy. The Princeton men and women took their shot this year, and it'd be great if one or both will be back next year to try again.
The best thing to put in the shredder are unused tickets. Putting them in without separating them results in a long trail of shredding, which, again, is an unlikely source of entertainment.
TigerBlog might as well put his NCAA tournament bracket into the shredder right now. Oh, the compliance people can relax, as there are no money or prizes at stake in the OAC's annual NCAA tournament picking contest, which is dubbed "The Completely Compliant With The NCAA's No-Betting Policy Tournament Pool."
If you work in college athletics, you can't help but be inundated with anti-gambling messages, especially around the time of the Super Bowl and NCAA tournament. And this is rightfully so, especially considering what's at stake if it ever comes out that a coach or players were involved in gambling on the tournament.
Still, here in the OAC, everyone fills out a bracket, just for fun. There's not even a candy bar to the winner.
And TB's bracket? Well, consider his Final Four of North Carolina (still in), Notre Dame (gone), Pitt (gone) and Texas (gone).
The first two (okay, three) rounds of the men's tournament and the first round of the women's tournament show just how different the two events are.
On the men's side, a team like Virginia Commonwealth from the CAA can fly under the radar to the point of having to play in a play-in (okay, first round) game just to get into the main draw, and yet the Rams beat USC (from the Pac 10), Georgetown (from the Big East) and Purdue (from the Big Ten) - all by double figures - and do so in a five-day stretch. It's one of the most remarkable NCAA tournament feats TB can remember, as a matter of fact.
Speaking of Georgetown, TB was rooting hard for the Hoyas, who were never really in the game. Georgetown was one of 11 Big East teams to get a bid - and one of nine who's already lost. Only UConn and Marquette are left from the Big East, and both got to the Sweet 16 by beating another Big East team.
TB has a theory as to why: These teams beat each other up so badly all season that they were just too worn out to be effective this late into March. That makes UConn even more impressive, especially considering the Huskies won the Big East tournament with five games in five days.
And TB can't help but be happy for Richmond and head coach Chris Mooney, a 1994 Princeton grad and all-time TigerBlog favorite, as the Spiders have reached the Sweet 16.
Meanwhile, back at the difference between the men's tournament and the women's tournament, it can be summed up fairly easily.
On the women's side, three double-digit seeds won their first game, two 10s and an 11.
On the men's side, six double-digit seeds won their first game. That group was a 10, three 11s, a 12 and a 13. In addition, six other double digit seeds lost their first round game by three points or fewer, including, of course, No. 13 Princeton against No. 4 Kentucky.
Of the six double-digit seeds who won in the first (okay, second) round, four won again to reach the Sweet 16.
As an aside, any Princeton fan now has to root for Kentucky to get to the Final Four, something that would give the Tigers' performance even more credibility.
Anyway, the deck was stacked against 12th-seeded Princeton yesterday before it took on No. 5 Georgetown in the women's tournament.
While having a 12 beat a five on the men's side is somewhat routine, it's not something that happens for the women. All time in the women's tournament, No. 12 seeds are now 19-88, a winning percentage of .178. Seeds lower than 12, by the way, are 9-288, so at least the 12's have a small chance.
On the men's side, 12 seeds all-time are 55-107, which is a winning percentage of .340, or nearly twice that of the women's.
The difference between the number of good women's teams and good men's teams is still significant. Perhaps the gap will close in the next few decades, but it's not there yet.
For Princeton, there was the extra challenge of having played the Ivy League season the last two months. Yes, Princeton was challenged more this year than it was last year, but the Tigers, even after a loss to Harvard early, were the prohibitive favorites in the league.
As TB watched the women's game yesterday, he thought back to the game he saw at Rutgers, when Princeton lost a one-point game with four seconds left against a team that yesterday beat Louisiana Tech by 25 in its first NCAA game.
Against the Knights, Princeton was fast and physical, and it still had Niveen Rasheed at the time. If Princeton had a steady diet of Big East teams through January and February, it would have been ready for the quickness, pressure and physicality of the Georgetown women.
Unfortunately, Princeton got off to a tough start against that pressure, and the result was a 20-point halftime deficit.
Even with the loss, it was a great infomercial for Princeton women's basketball on ESPN yesterday, as announcers Bob Picozzi and Rebecca Lobo constantly talked about the great work that Princeton had done all year and what a great team it was.
The highlight was when they talked about how assistant coach Melanie Moore couldn't be at the game after giving birth last week. Picozzi mentioned that Tristan Moore was nine pounds, 15 ounces and then went on to talk about something else, and when he came back to Lobo - a mother of four - to ask her her thoughts, she said that she couldn't get past nine pounds, 15 ounces.
Still, the idea that Princeton's women basketball team could be disappointed after its NCAA tournament game shows you how far things have come around here. Not to offend anyone from years past, but Princeton had seven losing seasons in eight years before Courtney Banghart and her staff showed up, and of those seven losing seasons, five were single-digit wins.
Going from single-digit wins to a double-digit seed for the second straight year is very impressive.
Winning an NCAA tournament game is not easy. The Princeton men and women took their shot this year, and it'd be great if one or both will be back next year to try again.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Your Turn
TigerBlog's two favorite Thursdays of each year are Thanksgiving and the one that happened yesterday.
How can you beat either one? On Thanksgiving, you get turkey and football.
And yesterday? Wall-to-wall college basketball in the first round (excuse TB, the second round) of the NCAA tournament. The games begin at noon and run to midnight, with almost no breaks in between.
This year, the fact that the games were all on their own network made the quality of viewing go up about 100 percent, since viewers were no longer at the mercy of CBS to decide which game to show and when to go from game-to-game. All it took was a remote, and you too could be your own director.
Add to that the huge extra benefit of having Princeton play in the tournament, and it was a great day to have a television.
The Tigers' game against Kentucky tipped around 3, after the West Virginia-Clemson game.
By now, everyone knows what happened.
Princeton went toe-to-toe with the Southeastern Conference champion, and all that separated the two at the end was a tough floating layup that banked in with two seconds to go.
For Princeton, it was quite a run in a nine-day one.
Consider that Princeton was eight points down with 17 minutes to go against Penn last Tuesday at the Palestra in the regular-season finale. Think about that. That game was only nine days before the NCAA game. And yes, you're forgiven if you thought that game was a few weeks ago.
Had Princeton not turned that one around, then Harvard would have been the outright Ivy champ. Instead, Princeton won that one, setting up the trip to Yale for the playoff game for the NCAA bid.
For those who lost track, that game was five days before the Kentucky game. By itself, that game was one of the great ones in program history, with one of the signature plays ever by a Princeton athlete to win it at the buzzer just to get Princeton to the tournament.
As was the case in 1989 vs. Georgetown, 1990 vs. Arkansas, 1991 vs. Villanova and 1997 vs. California, Princeton in 2011 came oh-so-close to pulling off a big one. If anything, it shows why the 1996 game vs. UCLA is so special, because there's a big difference between doing what Princeton did yesterday and winning.
Still, the 2011 Princeton team didn't have the luxury of any previous NCAA tournament experience, or, for that matter, the luxury of having entered the program when either it or Penn was winning every year.
For a program that has so much history and such a great postseason tradition, there will always be something special about the 2011 team. This group of players and coaches did something great this year, something that will resonate forever.
When they stepped off their charter flight at Trenton-Mercer Airport late last night, they had every right to 1) be disappointed and 2) be proud.
The Princeton-Kentucky, as awesome as it was, will not rank as one of the two greatest NCAA tournament games in school history.
The Princeton-Georgetown women's game Sunday will be in the top two for that program. For that matter, it'll be the second ever, as opposed to the 41 the men have played.
In many ways, that's all you need to know about the job that Courtney Banghart and her assistants Milena Flores and Melanie Moore have done in their four years at Princeton. While the task for Sydney Johnson and his staff was to restore the program to its previous level, Banghart and her staff had no such tradition to build on.
And what has happened? A 7-23 first season became 14-14 and then 26-3 and now 24-4 heading into the tournament.
Princeton was an 11 seed last year and is a 12 seed this year, and those are the two best seedings an Ivy team has ever had.
Last year in Florida, Princeton struggled after the first few minutes against St. John's, and it's possible that the first NCAA tournament for the program was a bit overwhelming.
This year, it's a team dripping with experience, one playing closer to home in College Park, Md. Tip-off against Georgetown will be 2:30 Sunday.
Oh, by the way, if you want to watch the game, here's how it works:
* ESPN will be doing whiparound coverage of the four games going on at the time
* ESPN2 will be televising the four games in a regional fashion, which means Princeton will probably be on in this area
* ESPN3.com will have all four games in their entirety
Looking at Georgetown's results and comparing them to Princeton's is somewhat favorable for the Tigers - as well as utterly useless.
This will come down to making shots and getting off to a good start. If the game is close at halftime, then Princeton will be in it for good.
It's the second chance for a Princeton team to get an NCAA basketball win this season.
The first one might have broken a few hearts at the end, but it was still a great game. And a last performance by a very special team.
How can you beat either one? On Thanksgiving, you get turkey and football.
And yesterday? Wall-to-wall college basketball in the first round (excuse TB, the second round) of the NCAA tournament. The games begin at noon and run to midnight, with almost no breaks in between.
This year, the fact that the games were all on their own network made the quality of viewing go up about 100 percent, since viewers were no longer at the mercy of CBS to decide which game to show and when to go from game-to-game. All it took was a remote, and you too could be your own director.
Add to that the huge extra benefit of having Princeton play in the tournament, and it was a great day to have a television.
The Tigers' game against Kentucky tipped around 3, after the West Virginia-Clemson game.
By now, everyone knows what happened.
Princeton went toe-to-toe with the Southeastern Conference champion, and all that separated the two at the end was a tough floating layup that banked in with two seconds to go.
For Princeton, it was quite a run in a nine-day one.
Consider that Princeton was eight points down with 17 minutes to go against Penn last Tuesday at the Palestra in the regular-season finale. Think about that. That game was only nine days before the NCAA game. And yes, you're forgiven if you thought that game was a few weeks ago.
Had Princeton not turned that one around, then Harvard would have been the outright Ivy champ. Instead, Princeton won that one, setting up the trip to Yale for the playoff game for the NCAA bid.
For those who lost track, that game was five days before the Kentucky game. By itself, that game was one of the great ones in program history, with one of the signature plays ever by a Princeton athlete to win it at the buzzer just to get Princeton to the tournament.
As was the case in 1989 vs. Georgetown, 1990 vs. Arkansas, 1991 vs. Villanova and 1997 vs. California, Princeton in 2011 came oh-so-close to pulling off a big one. If anything, it shows why the 1996 game vs. UCLA is so special, because there's a big difference between doing what Princeton did yesterday and winning.
Still, the 2011 Princeton team didn't have the luxury of any previous NCAA tournament experience, or, for that matter, the luxury of having entered the program when either it or Penn was winning every year.
For a program that has so much history and such a great postseason tradition, there will always be something special about the 2011 team. This group of players and coaches did something great this year, something that will resonate forever.
When they stepped off their charter flight at Trenton-Mercer Airport late last night, they had every right to 1) be disappointed and 2) be proud.
The Princeton-Kentucky, as awesome as it was, will not rank as one of the two greatest NCAA tournament games in school history.
The Princeton-Georgetown women's game Sunday will be in the top two for that program. For that matter, it'll be the second ever, as opposed to the 41 the men have played.
In many ways, that's all you need to know about the job that Courtney Banghart and her assistants Milena Flores and Melanie Moore have done in their four years at Princeton. While the task for Sydney Johnson and his staff was to restore the program to its previous level, Banghart and her staff had no such tradition to build on.
And what has happened? A 7-23 first season became 14-14 and then 26-3 and now 24-4 heading into the tournament.
Princeton was an 11 seed last year and is a 12 seed this year, and those are the two best seedings an Ivy team has ever had.
Last year in Florida, Princeton struggled after the first few minutes against St. John's, and it's possible that the first NCAA tournament for the program was a bit overwhelming.
This year, it's a team dripping with experience, one playing closer to home in College Park, Md. Tip-off against Georgetown will be 2:30 Sunday.
Oh, by the way, if you want to watch the game, here's how it works:
* ESPN will be doing whiparound coverage of the four games going on at the time
* ESPN2 will be televising the four games in a regional fashion, which means Princeton will probably be on in this area
* ESPN3.com will have all four games in their entirety
Looking at Georgetown's results and comparing them to Princeton's is somewhat favorable for the Tigers - as well as utterly useless.
This will come down to making shots and getting off to a good start. If the game is close at halftime, then Princeton will be in it for good.
It's the second chance for a Princeton team to get an NCAA basketball win this season.
The first one might have broken a few hearts at the end, but it was still a great game. And a last performance by a very special team.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
History Lesson
Going back exactly 22 years from today, back to March 17, 1989, Princeton nearly knocked off Georgetown in the opening round of the NCAA men's basketball tournament.
The Tigers, seeded 16th, had barely scraped their way into the tournament that year, knocking off Harvard in Cambridge on the final night of the season - rebounding from losses to Penn and Dartmouth - to finish the Ivy League at 11-3, barely ahead of the 10-4 Big Green.
With a regular-season record of 19-7 (two of which were against Division III schools) and representing a league that had lost its three previous NCAA appearances by a combined 120 points (that'd be 40 points per game, by the way), Princeton was the lowest-regarded team in the field.
Georgetown, mighty Georgetown, was the biggest kid on the block. The Hoyas weren't just good; they were nasty, a bunch of vicious defenders and intimidating figures who were ranked No. 1 in the country.
The Hoyas were fresh off beating Boston College, Pitt and Syracuse - by an average of 21 points - to win the Big East tournament. They brought with them a 26-4 record into the NCAA tournament.
Nobody gave Princeton much of a chance. In fact, most of the talk before the tournament was about how league's like the Ivy League shouldn't have an automatic bid anymore, and there was a real chance that the future of the NCAA basketball tournament would resemble what the BCS football championship has become - something that is hard for a team from a non-power conference to crack.
Also, the Princeton-Georgetown game was ESPN, not CBS, which didn't feel that there was enough interest in the early rounds to justify the expense of televising them all. Instead, CBS would pick up the tournament in its later stages, when interest would rise.
And that was the scene heading into the game at the Providence Civic Center. As tip-off approached, TigerBlog was, well, not even paying attention.
TB was still a few months away from jumping on the college beat, and with his alma mater not in the tournament, he was barely interested in seeing how much Georgetown was going to beat Princeton by.
Instead, he was on a date in Philadelphia with a young woman he'd met a few weeks earlier at a Super Bowl party at his friend Frank's house. That was the Super Bowl between the 49ers and Bengals, by the way, the one where Joe Montana brought the Niners back in the final minutes and ultimately won it on a pass to John Taylor; legend has it that Montana said "isn't that John Candy?" to the team in the huddle before the start of the last drive.
Just to give you an idea of how long ago it was and all.
Anyway, TB saw none of the Princeton-Georgetown game on television, though he does remember hearing David Brody do the radio play-by-play until that faded away. By the time the radio signal was lost, it was clear that something special was happening in the game, especially when Princeton went up 29-21 at the half.
As TB recalls, getting additional scores from that point was tough. What he does remember clearly was that he heard that it was tight midway through the second half. As TB knows now, that was after Georgetown made its move back from being down 10 to create a back-and-forth game in which neither team had more than a two-point lead for the final 11:44.
Think about that. For the last 11:44 of an NCAA tournament game neither team ever led by more than two.
In the end, as everyone knows, Georgetown prevailed, 50-49, as Alonzo Mourning blocked shots by Kit Mueller and Bob Scrabis in the final six seconds. TigerBlog didn't know the final score until he got back in the car and heard it on a sports report.
By the start of next basketball season, TigerBlog was covering the team, and that began what is now a nearly-quarter-century odyssey with Princeton basketball.
TB has seen the Georgetown game on video or ESPN Classic a million times (Princeton should have won), and he's basically memorized the box score. He got to know every Princeton player and coach who participated in the game, and he routinely gets emails from several of them all these years later.
But on that day, TB was just another Penn alum who could care less about the Princeton-Georgetown game. He never would have guessed at that moment how close he would get to the Princeton program and how much he'd come to learn about a game he didn't pay attention to that night in Philadelphia.
That game, and the Princeton-UCLA game in 1996 that TB was very much at, have important historical contexts, but they also show exactly what it will take for Princeton to have a shot today against Kentucky in the 2011 NCAA tournament.
The prevailing theory is that Princeton needs to come out and shoot 10 for 15 from three-point range to have a chance. While that certainly would be great, it's not the main blueprint.
Princeton does not have to play a perfect offensive game. In fact, if you combine the Georgetown and UCLA games, the Tigers shot 38 for 90 (42.2%), including 13 for 43 (30%) from three-point range. Princeton also was 3 for 10 from the foul line and outscored 17-3 from the line in the two games combined.
Obviously, in neither game was Princeton an offensive machine.
Also, while Princeton led for most of the game against Georgetown, it had the lead for fewer than three minutes of the game against UCLA and trailed 7-0 at the first TV timeout, establishing early on that Princeton would have to play from behind.
So what's the key?
Well, there are two.
The first is that Kentucky has to miss shots. Some of them will be open ones, perhaps even ones that the Wildcats usually make. In this game, though, they have to not go in. Especially from three-point range.
Georgetown and UCLA combined to shoot 34 for 81 (41.9%), despite having a huge physical advantage that would figure to have allowed them to dump the ball inside for dunks and easy layups.
Even more importantly, the two were a combined 6 for 28 (21%) from three-point range.
The other key is tempo. The game cannot get out of the 50s, or Princeton will be in real trouble. For one thing, Kentucky averages 76.4 points per game, so playing a game where the points aren't coming like they normally do will frustrate the Cats.
Princeton doesn't figure to get many easy baskets. Against UCLA and Georgetown, Princeton was outrebounded 66-37, and the two opponents combined for 22 offensive rebounds to 11 for Princeton. In other words, the chance for some easy putbacks isn't what it normally is.
Yes, Princeton averages 69.6 points per game and is comfortable pushing the ball, and that's fine to a certain extent. But an up-tempo game will create way more easy chances for Kentucky than Princeton.
Basically, Princeton's best chance is to get into a game that is sloppy and mostly half-court.
If that's the case and Kentucky's missing, then that's the best chance for an upset.
In other words, it's more important that Kentucky shoot 35% than Princeton shoot 55%.
The Tigers, seeded 16th, had barely scraped their way into the tournament that year, knocking off Harvard in Cambridge on the final night of the season - rebounding from losses to Penn and Dartmouth - to finish the Ivy League at 11-3, barely ahead of the 10-4 Big Green.
With a regular-season record of 19-7 (two of which were against Division III schools) and representing a league that had lost its three previous NCAA appearances by a combined 120 points (that'd be 40 points per game, by the way), Princeton was the lowest-regarded team in the field.
Georgetown, mighty Georgetown, was the biggest kid on the block. The Hoyas weren't just good; they were nasty, a bunch of vicious defenders and intimidating figures who were ranked No. 1 in the country.
The Hoyas were fresh off beating Boston College, Pitt and Syracuse - by an average of 21 points - to win the Big East tournament. They brought with them a 26-4 record into the NCAA tournament.
Nobody gave Princeton much of a chance. In fact, most of the talk before the tournament was about how league's like the Ivy League shouldn't have an automatic bid anymore, and there was a real chance that the future of the NCAA basketball tournament would resemble what the BCS football championship has become - something that is hard for a team from a non-power conference to crack.
Also, the Princeton-Georgetown game was ESPN, not CBS, which didn't feel that there was enough interest in the early rounds to justify the expense of televising them all. Instead, CBS would pick up the tournament in its later stages, when interest would rise.
And that was the scene heading into the game at the Providence Civic Center. As tip-off approached, TigerBlog was, well, not even paying attention.
TB was still a few months away from jumping on the college beat, and with his alma mater not in the tournament, he was barely interested in seeing how much Georgetown was going to beat Princeton by.
Instead, he was on a date in Philadelphia with a young woman he'd met a few weeks earlier at a Super Bowl party at his friend Frank's house. That was the Super Bowl between the 49ers and Bengals, by the way, the one where Joe Montana brought the Niners back in the final minutes and ultimately won it on a pass to John Taylor; legend has it that Montana said "isn't that John Candy?" to the team in the huddle before the start of the last drive.
Just to give you an idea of how long ago it was and all.
Anyway, TB saw none of the Princeton-Georgetown game on television, though he does remember hearing David Brody do the radio play-by-play until that faded away. By the time the radio signal was lost, it was clear that something special was happening in the game, especially when Princeton went up 29-21 at the half.
As TB recalls, getting additional scores from that point was tough. What he does remember clearly was that he heard that it was tight midway through the second half. As TB knows now, that was after Georgetown made its move back from being down 10 to create a back-and-forth game in which neither team had more than a two-point lead for the final 11:44.
Think about that. For the last 11:44 of an NCAA tournament game neither team ever led by more than two.
In the end, as everyone knows, Georgetown prevailed, 50-49, as Alonzo Mourning blocked shots by Kit Mueller and Bob Scrabis in the final six seconds. TigerBlog didn't know the final score until he got back in the car and heard it on a sports report.
By the start of next basketball season, TigerBlog was covering the team, and that began what is now a nearly-quarter-century odyssey with Princeton basketball.
TB has seen the Georgetown game on video or ESPN Classic a million times (Princeton should have won), and he's basically memorized the box score. He got to know every Princeton player and coach who participated in the game, and he routinely gets emails from several of them all these years later.
But on that day, TB was just another Penn alum who could care less about the Princeton-Georgetown game. He never would have guessed at that moment how close he would get to the Princeton program and how much he'd come to learn about a game he didn't pay attention to that night in Philadelphia.
That game, and the Princeton-UCLA game in 1996 that TB was very much at, have important historical contexts, but they also show exactly what it will take for Princeton to have a shot today against Kentucky in the 2011 NCAA tournament.
The prevailing theory is that Princeton needs to come out and shoot 10 for 15 from three-point range to have a chance. While that certainly would be great, it's not the main blueprint.
Princeton does not have to play a perfect offensive game. In fact, if you combine the Georgetown and UCLA games, the Tigers shot 38 for 90 (42.2%), including 13 for 43 (30%) from three-point range. Princeton also was 3 for 10 from the foul line and outscored 17-3 from the line in the two games combined.
Obviously, in neither game was Princeton an offensive machine.
Also, while Princeton led for most of the game against Georgetown, it had the lead for fewer than three minutes of the game against UCLA and trailed 7-0 at the first TV timeout, establishing early on that Princeton would have to play from behind.
So what's the key?
Well, there are two.
The first is that Kentucky has to miss shots. Some of them will be open ones, perhaps even ones that the Wildcats usually make. In this game, though, they have to not go in. Especially from three-point range.
Georgetown and UCLA combined to shoot 34 for 81 (41.9%), despite having a huge physical advantage that would figure to have allowed them to dump the ball inside for dunks and easy layups.
Even more importantly, the two were a combined 6 for 28 (21%) from three-point range.
The other key is tempo. The game cannot get out of the 50s, or Princeton will be in real trouble. For one thing, Kentucky averages 76.4 points per game, so playing a game where the points aren't coming like they normally do will frustrate the Cats.
Princeton doesn't figure to get many easy baskets. Against UCLA and Georgetown, Princeton was outrebounded 66-37, and the two opponents combined for 22 offensive rebounds to 11 for Princeton. In other words, the chance for some easy putbacks isn't what it normally is.
Yes, Princeton averages 69.6 points per game and is comfortable pushing the ball, and that's fine to a certain extent. But an up-tempo game will create way more easy chances for Kentucky than Princeton.
Basically, Princeton's best chance is to get into a game that is sloppy and mostly half-court.
If that's the case and Kentucky's missing, then that's the best chance for an upset.
In other words, it's more important that Kentucky shoot 35% than Princeton shoot 55%.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Required Reading
Back when TigerBlog was in college, he was assigned a book called "Thomas Jefferson And The New Nation," written by a man named Merrill Peterson.
The book was a tan cover with yellow lettering, which TB supposes was done intentionally to make the book look old, even when it was new, and therefore, by extension, wise. TB also has a theory on the length of the book.
In all, TJ and the New Nation numbers 1,006 pages, and TB's assumption is that Mr. Peterson went to the publisher and asked that the type for the book be set so that it reached at least 1,000 pages.
The syllabus for the class asked for the book to be read in two weeks, half one week and half the next.
When TB graduated from college, he remembers taking all of his books and storing them in the basement at his Uncle Larry and Aunt Regina's house in Fair Lawn, and he has no memory of what happened to them next. As both Larry and Regina have since passed away and the house was long ago sold, TB surmises the books are long gone as well.
All except for "Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation," which TB still has. Because he never came close to reading the entire book for the class, TB vowed that one day he'd be able to say that he read the entire thing, cover to cover.
And so the book sits on a shelf, waiting for TB to get back at it. And hey, he only has, oh, 1,006 more pages to go.
That was required reading three decades ago.
Today's required reading comes from Sean Gregory on Time Magazine's website. If you are a fan of the NCAA basketball tournament and Princeton in particular, then you must stop whatever it is you're doing (which, obviously, is reading TigerBlog) and go read the story by the man whose nickname here was Bones.
The rest of TB will wait. Go ahead.
There. All finished? Very good.
What'd you think? TigerBlog will tell you what he thinks. It was an extraordinary piece of writing, well-researched and well-presented, and it tells the story of what transpired through that wild time 15 years ago in a way that brings it all back to anyone who saw it.
For TB, it also validates that he remembers everything pretty much as it happened, since all of the stories told by the many people that Bones spoke with confirm that TB's memory is good.
Bones does a great job of telling the story, and he does an equally great job framing it in the context of 1996, just before the explosion of the internet. It's hard to think back to a world without that kind of immediacy and volume of information, video, etc., because it's such an ingrained part of the world today.
Back then, though, the world was just on the cusp of it, and that is part of why this game was so special. It's because Princeton was unique, in that the "Princeton Offense" had not spread throughout basketball and in that almost nobody saw the Tigers except in the NCAA tournament.
The story in Time works best, though, because it's told from the inside, with a bit of self-deprecation that doesn't get tedious and with access to all of the key players in the drama - minus the kid from Duke who asked UCLA coach Jim Harrick if he'd been outcoached by Pete Carril.
Also, a distance of 15 years is a great vantage point for the story. It's old enough that its historical context is well-defined, yet not so long ago that nobody really remembers the details.
As for the details, TB remembers them all:
* the loss to Penn at the Palestra
* the conference call prior to the playoff game during which Carril, not realizing that the speaker phone was not on mute, insulted Penn during a rundown of the logistics
* the playoff game itself
* the postgame celebration/Carril retirement announcement
* the selection show
* the trip to Indy
* the game
* the aftermath
TB can see it all in his mind still. He can see the words that Carril scribbled on the blackboard in the lockerroom at Lehigh, his way of saying he was retiring, when only Carril and TB were in the room, which left TigerBlog knowing exactly what was about to happen and therefore in position to gauge reactions.
He can see the cavernous media room and interview area in the RCA Dome, which, by the way, no longer exists. He can see himself huddled with Andrea Joyce, kneeling in front off to the end of the court, waiting to grab Carril and the players should Princeton's 43-41 lead hold up (which it did), wondering during the seven-minute or so delay between Lewullis' basket and the end of the game, wondering the whole time if UCLA would pull it out and have this one hurt forever. In fact, TB remembers during that wait - through timeouts and officials' huddles - seeing a friend from the old neighborhood, a rather interesting figure named Brian Linky, who long ago had vanished from TB's world, coming down through the Mississippi State band yelling out TB's name; turns out Linky lived in Indianapolis.
When TB thinks back to Princeton-UCLA after all this time, he mostly realizes what an amazing few days it was and how unbelievably lucky he was to have seen it from the inside and been, in his way, a part of it.
So thanks, Bones, for bringing it all back.
The story, like the game, is a classic.
The book was a tan cover with yellow lettering, which TB supposes was done intentionally to make the book look old, even when it was new, and therefore, by extension, wise. TB also has a theory on the length of the book.
In all, TJ and the New Nation numbers 1,006 pages, and TB's assumption is that Mr. Peterson went to the publisher and asked that the type for the book be set so that it reached at least 1,000 pages.
The syllabus for the class asked for the book to be read in two weeks, half one week and half the next.
When TB graduated from college, he remembers taking all of his books and storing them in the basement at his Uncle Larry and Aunt Regina's house in Fair Lawn, and he has no memory of what happened to them next. As both Larry and Regina have since passed away and the house was long ago sold, TB surmises the books are long gone as well.
All except for "Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation," which TB still has. Because he never came close to reading the entire book for the class, TB vowed that one day he'd be able to say that he read the entire thing, cover to cover.
And so the book sits on a shelf, waiting for TB to get back at it. And hey, he only has, oh, 1,006 more pages to go.
That was required reading three decades ago.
Today's required reading comes from Sean Gregory on Time Magazine's website. If you are a fan of the NCAA basketball tournament and Princeton in particular, then you must stop whatever it is you're doing (which, obviously, is reading TigerBlog) and go read the story by the man whose nickname here was Bones.
The rest of TB will wait. Go ahead.
There. All finished? Very good.
What'd you think? TigerBlog will tell you what he thinks. It was an extraordinary piece of writing, well-researched and well-presented, and it tells the story of what transpired through that wild time 15 years ago in a way that brings it all back to anyone who saw it.
For TB, it also validates that he remembers everything pretty much as it happened, since all of the stories told by the many people that Bones spoke with confirm that TB's memory is good.
Bones does a great job of telling the story, and he does an equally great job framing it in the context of 1996, just before the explosion of the internet. It's hard to think back to a world without that kind of immediacy and volume of information, video, etc., because it's such an ingrained part of the world today.
Back then, though, the world was just on the cusp of it, and that is part of why this game was so special. It's because Princeton was unique, in that the "Princeton Offense" had not spread throughout basketball and in that almost nobody saw the Tigers except in the NCAA tournament.
The story in Time works best, though, because it's told from the inside, with a bit of self-deprecation that doesn't get tedious and with access to all of the key players in the drama - minus the kid from Duke who asked UCLA coach Jim Harrick if he'd been outcoached by Pete Carril.
Also, a distance of 15 years is a great vantage point for the story. It's old enough that its historical context is well-defined, yet not so long ago that nobody really remembers the details.
As for the details, TB remembers them all:
* the loss to Penn at the Palestra
* the conference call prior to the playoff game during which Carril, not realizing that the speaker phone was not on mute, insulted Penn during a rundown of the logistics
* the playoff game itself
* the postgame celebration/Carril retirement announcement
* the selection show
* the trip to Indy
* the game
* the aftermath
TB can see it all in his mind still. He can see the words that Carril scribbled on the blackboard in the lockerroom at Lehigh, his way of saying he was retiring, when only Carril and TB were in the room, which left TigerBlog knowing exactly what was about to happen and therefore in position to gauge reactions.
He can see the cavernous media room and interview area in the RCA Dome, which, by the way, no longer exists. He can see himself huddled with Andrea Joyce, kneeling in front off to the end of the court, waiting to grab Carril and the players should Princeton's 43-41 lead hold up (which it did), wondering during the seven-minute or so delay between Lewullis' basket and the end of the game, wondering the whole time if UCLA would pull it out and have this one hurt forever. In fact, TB remembers during that wait - through timeouts and officials' huddles - seeing a friend from the old neighborhood, a rather interesting figure named Brian Linky, who long ago had vanished from TB's world, coming down through the Mississippi State band yelling out TB's name; turns out Linky lived in Indianapolis.
When TB thinks back to Princeton-UCLA after all this time, he mostly realizes what an amazing few days it was and how unbelievably lucky he was to have seen it from the inside and been, in his way, a part of it.
So thanks, Bones, for bringing it all back.
The story, like the game, is a classic.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Hoop Heaven
Back before 660 AM in New York City was WFAN sports radio, it was WNBC radio, which played, as TigerBlog remembers, played top 40 music most of the day.
In fact, TB probably heard for the first time most of what now is called "classic rock" on that station.
Even way back then, though, the mornings on the station belonged to Don Imus, who was already doing a show called "Imus in the Morning." TB remembers listening to Imus probably from the first time he was on in New York, which was 1971.
Eventually, WNBC became WFAN, which may have been the first all-sports station (TB isn't sure about this one).
What TB is relatively sure of is that the station that would have failed completely had it stayed with Greg Gumbel as a morning sports talk host, no offense to Mr. Gumbel. Instead, the decision was made to revive "Imus in the Morning" from 5:30 - 9 each morning, even though it wasn't a sports-oriented show. Famously, Imus' show ended each day with a read that called it the "entertainment and revenue-generating portion of the broadcast day," and it wasn't that far from the truth.
As everyone knows, Imus was eventually taken off WFAN for the incident involving the Rutgers women's basketball team - which, TB said at the time, while not being a nice thing to say wasn't even in the top, oh, 50 or so offensive things that Imus had said on-air.
Of course, given his ability, Imus knew he'd be back on the air soon enough, and there he is today, on WABC AM 770 in New York, again with a whole network of stations and a TV simulcast.
The WFAN morning show is the Boomer and Carton Show, with Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton (if you go to Wikipedia, look at how Boomer's last name is spelled in the banner in the picture).
Boomer and Carton are no Imus, but then again, nobody is. They are more of a sports talk show than a news/politics/entertainment/sports show like Imus, and Boomer and Carton - like most on the radio - often confuse vulgar and funny.
Still, Boomer and Carton have a nice show, and TB will often flip back and forth between them and Imus on the drive into Jadwin.
This morning, Boomer and Carton interviewed Kenny Anderson, who had been a phenom at Georgia Tech 20 years ago before going on to a long career in the NBA.
Interestingly, Anderson said that even with his 14-year NBA career and all the money he made from it, there was nothing he'd ever done in basketball that compared with playing in the NCAA tournament. Even now, after all this time, the emotion was clear in his voice when he spoke about his experience in the tournament.
Anderson is not the first person TB has heard say this. In fact, it's true of pretty much anyone who has ever been a part of the NCAA basketball tournament.
Right now there are 68 men's teams and 64 women's teams heading ready to see what kind of run they can make. On the women's side, there are probably three teams with a legitimate chance to win the title, and on the men's side, there are probably 10-15.
By Sunday night, there will be 16 men's teams left, which means that 52 will already have lost. On the women's side, 48 of 64 will be out by a week from tonight.
For many of the teams, just getting out of the first round would be a huge accomplishment.
In fact, for the majority of the teams, the best part of the tournament is the part happening now, between the clinching of bids, the selection show and then the buildup to the games themselves.
Here at Princeton, with an athletic program that dates back to when Abraham Lincoln was President, there aren't too many things that can happen that haven't happened at least once before. Still, this week, there is.
For the first time ever, both the men's and women's basketball teams are in the NCAA tournament at the same time.
Sunday night was the men's turn, as they found out they'd be playing Kentucky in Tampa Thursday.
Last night, the women's draw was announced. Unlike the men's draw, in which Princeton was in the first half of the first bracket announced, the women were in the first half of the last bracket.
The Tigers, in their second NCAA trip, earned a 12 seed and will take on Georgetown in the first round Sunday at the University of Maryland. Princeton's experience against St. John's in last year's tournament will be a big plus this time around, though it would have been nice to have a healthy Niveen Rasheed.
Georgetown is 22-10 on the season, with only one win in its last five games. On the other hand, the Hoyas are out of the tough Big East, and Princeton saw a year ago against St. John's what that can be like.
Princeton lost to Rutgers by one; Georgetown lost to Rutgers by 17. Georgetown beat La Salle by four; Princeton beat La Salle by 40.
Of course, Georgetown beat Tennessee.
Can Princeton win? That's a question for Sunday for the women and Thursday for the men.
For now, it's about making travel arrangements, getting on a plane (for the men), scouting, doing interviews and taking in the excitement that is the NCAA tournament.
There is, quite simply, nothing like it.
Don't believe TigerBlog? Just ask Kenny Anderson.
In fact, TB probably heard for the first time most of what now is called "classic rock" on that station.
Even way back then, though, the mornings on the station belonged to Don Imus, who was already doing a show called "Imus in the Morning." TB remembers listening to Imus probably from the first time he was on in New York, which was 1971.
Eventually, WNBC became WFAN, which may have been the first all-sports station (TB isn't sure about this one).
What TB is relatively sure of is that the station that would have failed completely had it stayed with Greg Gumbel as a morning sports talk host, no offense to Mr. Gumbel. Instead, the decision was made to revive "Imus in the Morning" from 5:30 - 9 each morning, even though it wasn't a sports-oriented show. Famously, Imus' show ended each day with a read that called it the "entertainment and revenue-generating portion of the broadcast day," and it wasn't that far from the truth.
As everyone knows, Imus was eventually taken off WFAN for the incident involving the Rutgers women's basketball team - which, TB said at the time, while not being a nice thing to say wasn't even in the top, oh, 50 or so offensive things that Imus had said on-air.
Of course, given his ability, Imus knew he'd be back on the air soon enough, and there he is today, on WABC AM 770 in New York, again with a whole network of stations and a TV simulcast.
The WFAN morning show is the Boomer and Carton Show, with Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton (if you go to Wikipedia, look at how Boomer's last name is spelled in the banner in the picture).
Boomer and Carton are no Imus, but then again, nobody is. They are more of a sports talk show than a news/politics/entertainment/sports show like Imus, and Boomer and Carton - like most on the radio - often confuse vulgar and funny.
Still, Boomer and Carton have a nice show, and TB will often flip back and forth between them and Imus on the drive into Jadwin.
This morning, Boomer and Carton interviewed Kenny Anderson, who had been a phenom at Georgia Tech 20 years ago before going on to a long career in the NBA.
Interestingly, Anderson said that even with his 14-year NBA career and all the money he made from it, there was nothing he'd ever done in basketball that compared with playing in the NCAA tournament. Even now, after all this time, the emotion was clear in his voice when he spoke about his experience in the tournament.
Anderson is not the first person TB has heard say this. In fact, it's true of pretty much anyone who has ever been a part of the NCAA basketball tournament.
Right now there are 68 men's teams and 64 women's teams heading ready to see what kind of run they can make. On the women's side, there are probably three teams with a legitimate chance to win the title, and on the men's side, there are probably 10-15.
By Sunday night, there will be 16 men's teams left, which means that 52 will already have lost. On the women's side, 48 of 64 will be out by a week from tonight.
For many of the teams, just getting out of the first round would be a huge accomplishment.
In fact, for the majority of the teams, the best part of the tournament is the part happening now, between the clinching of bids, the selection show and then the buildup to the games themselves.
Here at Princeton, with an athletic program that dates back to when Abraham Lincoln was President, there aren't too many things that can happen that haven't happened at least once before. Still, this week, there is.
For the first time ever, both the men's and women's basketball teams are in the NCAA tournament at the same time.
Sunday night was the men's turn, as they found out they'd be playing Kentucky in Tampa Thursday.
Last night, the women's draw was announced. Unlike the men's draw, in which Princeton was in the first half of the first bracket announced, the women were in the first half of the last bracket.
The Tigers, in their second NCAA trip, earned a 12 seed and will take on Georgetown in the first round Sunday at the University of Maryland. Princeton's experience against St. John's in last year's tournament will be a big plus this time around, though it would have been nice to have a healthy Niveen Rasheed.
Georgetown is 22-10 on the season, with only one win in its last five games. On the other hand, the Hoyas are out of the tough Big East, and Princeton saw a year ago against St. John's what that can be like.
Princeton lost to Rutgers by one; Georgetown lost to Rutgers by 17. Georgetown beat La Salle by four; Princeton beat La Salle by 40.
Of course, Georgetown beat Tennessee.
Can Princeton win? That's a question for Sunday for the women and Thursday for the men.
For now, it's about making travel arrangements, getting on a plane (for the men), scouting, doing interviews and taking in the excitement that is the NCAA tournament.
There is, quite simply, nothing like it.
Don't believe TigerBlog? Just ask Kenny Anderson.
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