NCAA Hoops Today

Impress your friends with your basketball knowledge by breaking down games like Digger Phelps. All you have to do is boil down each game to one of the four factors below:
* points in the paint
* this team is on a mission
* they went to a zone
* payback!

And voila, you are now a certified college basketball expert!

It is time CBS diversified their March Madness analysts. Enough of the "Billy Parker" clones and approved drones, and time to refresh their line-up of college basketball analysts.

One great addition would be Doris Burke, a great basketball analyst, who quite frequently was able to provide more basketball analysis in 30-second sound-bites as a sideline reporter than Dick Vitale during a whole game.

So, CBS, time to diversify, and draft Doris Burke as one of the March Madness analysts!

Other analysts that should be added to the rotation:
1. Marques Johnson of FSN for the West-coast region amd/or teams
2. Bob Knight
3. Rick Majerus


Analysts that should be dropped immediately:
1. Bob Wenzel (an idiot, W-style)
2. Jay Spinarkel and Ion Eagle - they should be doing division 2 - they make the most exciting games sound boring
3. Dan Bonner - boring


Play by play guy that needs to be dropped:
1. Tim Brando - a total idiot

It must be that high quality Duke education, especially those public-speaking classes the "teacher" Coach K teaches his players. After a handful of years on TV, former Dookie Jay (Jayson) Williams still talks too fast on TV and ends up eating his own words. Literally, not figuratively.

Can't any of the producers at ESPN pull him aside and teach him how to speak without eating his words? :-)

Dookie FAIL: +1

One funny tidbit from the Saturday games that just shows how "educated" our dear Doug Gottlieb is. He TRIED to use the french word "voila" in a sentence and instead he said "viOla". V-I-O-L-A! Such a tiny little thing, yet so revealing about one's cluelesness. Because you can't mispronounce it like that. It means that all this time he was READING the word as viola! Oh boy!

Granted, the "basketball analysts" are not hired to replace George Will or Peggy Noonan, but come on now, V-I-O-L-A!

You know each year, the basketball analysts start over-using particular terms or words. And this year is no exception. This year's buzzword: Ironman. Now just about every analyst feels almost contractually obligated to mention "ironman" at least once during a broadcast!

Are they all clones? :-) On a totally unrelated note, I will be launching the Ironman of the Year Awards, and start a weekly Ironman of the Week column ;-)

What other words did you notice getting overused by basketball analysts, commentators, play-by-play guys, announcers, sideline reports?

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