NCAA Hoops Today

Thank you Al Skinner for almost beating the Dookies! It was close, oh so close! Now you have soften them Dookies up, and prepared them for a nice beating by their nemesis, the Fighting Garys! This will make it an ever better win for Maryland, and mark the "Return of the Gary" to the NCAA tournament!

Go Maryland, go! Beat those nasty dirty Dookies! The game will tip off around 340pm eastern tomorrow on ESPN. It is semifinal #2, so the exact tipoff time will depend on when the first game ends (Florida State vs North Carolina)

Great job BC Eagles! Great job Al Skinner! Everyone should have clam chowder tonight! The BC Eagles have completed a home-court sweep of the two Carolina schools but the most exciting of both is the WIN over the Puke Dirt Devils! Go BC Go Eagles!

The expression on Ratzilla's face at the end of the game? PRICELESS!

Thank you Al Skinner! Thank you Boston College!

And they storm the court!

And the latest ACC standings? The crowning of UNC as the queen of the ACC - once again!

As we mentioned when Roy Williams took the UNC job, Ol'Roy would SMOKE Coach Ratzilla recruiting-wise, and we were VERY right. Look at the recruits, the rankings and more importantly, the SCOREBOARD!

Yes basketball fans, Harvard is the best team in the country! Harvard beat Boston College tonight on the road, and Boston College beat #1 North Carolina on the road on Sunday night. Therefore, Harvard is twice as good as North Carolina and Tommy Amaker is the best coach in the world ;-)

Good things come to those who prepare, plan and wait. That was the case for the Boston Collage Eagles. And collage this team is - a collage of Al Skinner type players, players the elite David Telep schmoozing coaches won't recruit for one reason or another ;-) BC said no to the McDonald burgers and instead had a nice bowl of clam chowder ;-)

It was a game of destiny (if such a thing exists for basketball), the free throws were not falling, the threes were not falling, the 50-50 players were going BCs way. Unlike last year's BC game, this one did not have any UNC momentum of any sorts.

So how did they beat North Carolina? And how can other teams do it? The recipe is simple:

+ have a faster point guard than Tywon Lawson
+ get Danny Green in foul trouble
+ beg Deon Thompson to have a very very quiet game
+ ask all the UNC three-point shooters to miss
+ beg the UNC team to shoot close to 50% in free throws
+ beg the UNC coaches to fail to count the fouls
+ have a strong, tall, wide and long center who can bear-hug and box Psycho-T

And there you have it, a guaranteed way to beat UNC!

Hold the Mayo! Bring on the Rice! Hot Rice! Wild Rice! Tyrese Rice! He scored 23 points or so in the first seven or eight minutes of the game. Oh my! He ended the half with 34 points and eight three-pointers made. Oh my!

The good news for Boston College? They were blowing out North Carolina on national TV, on ABC Sports powered by ESPN. The bad news? They lost the game! The good news? They had a guy score 40+ in a wild offensive frenzy. The bad news? They lost the game! The good news? It's a young team with lots of promise for the future. The bad news? The future is not now.

Meanwhile North Carolina had Tywon Lawson come back, and he played more than just a few minutes. He played and played. But it was the collective team onions they showed that allowed them to withstand the Wild Rice three pointer barrage and slowly but steadily chip away at the lead and then go in burst mode and grab a ten point victory from the jaws of a blowout.

Are the newly developed onions the difference between the 2007 UNC team having a meltdown against Georgetown and the 2008 team that may go to the Final Four and have a good chance of one or two victories once they get there? It's too early to tell yet, but this game was certainly promising. An even bigger test will be how they play and how they handle the Duke crowd. We won't have to wait long for that, just six days, the game will be played March 8, 2008, on ESPN's Gameday Primetime showcase, at 6pm pacific (9pm eastern), on ESPN and ESPN-HD.

This North Carolina team with the Roy Williams style of play went from stumbling all over the place to a blow out win in just minutes. Defense was once again the achilles ...heel of the Tar Heels, with an ole four-minute stretch. Ole Roy went to a hockey substitution, the message was sent, and the stumbling all over on defense was over.

Poor Boston College is trapped in the flex (that sounds like a farscape reference). It's really hard for a beep-beeper like Rice to be trapped in a flex style of play, but that's what Al Skinner wants to play and that may make the game more entertaining from a Majerus perspective, but most people would rather see the BC Eagles run and gun if they can.

So what about UNC? I've been mentioning for a while now that I feel there's something missing for this team. And I continue to do so. Starting next week, I will be introducing an additional way of ranking teams, in additional to the usual rumblings of my blog poll vote. More on that later. For now, I would say that the Tar Heels right now look like an Elite 8 team to me.

Random Factoids you learn in a blowout
And if you were wandering how old Jimmy Dykes is, he is 44 - according to him. And if you were wondering how long it takes him to go coast to coast with the ball, it is 5 seconds and change.