This alum would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the passing of the streak. With its loss to UCLA today, the Arizona Wildcats ended their run of 25 consecutive trips to the NCAA tournament. They ended the season at 16-15 and stand no chance of an at-large bid.
Arizona had been there every year beginning in 1985 — twelve times to the Sweet 16 or better, four times to the Final Four — and the national championship in 1997.
Give it a couple of seconds to start. You don’t need to click or anything.
[And yes, I realize the pins on the center lane are not set in the normal arrangement.]
… who apparently scored often, did particularly well on this date in 1962, when he scored 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors vs. the Knicks. The game was played in Hershey, Pennsylvania, before 4,124 witnesses. Wilt was 36 for 63 from the field and 28 for 32 from the line.
The Warriors won the game 169-147.
… were proven correct on the last day. Phil Mushnick puts it best at NYPOST.com. An excerpt:
Many of us sat down for Sunday dinner after that fabulous game, almost like the Nelsons, the Cleavers, the Waltons, the Huxtables, the Munsters.
When’s the last time you could say that about a World Series game or an NBA final? The CBS-leased NCAA basketball championship now tips at 9:22 on a Monday night. Baseball’s Opening Day, sold at auction to ESPN, is now at night, this year’s first pitch after 8 p.m. in Boston — on April 4.
If NBC, or any commercial network, yesterday had been able to shuffle and deal, Canada-USA would have begun at about 9 p.m. ET to maximize coast-to-coast primetime ad revenues.
And NBC would have much preferred that we watched the game alone — more TV sets tuned in, that way — certainly not in groups.
In other words, NBC (and CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox) would have preferred that we watched from the same place we now watch most games of national interest: that same chair or from bed, lights out, pillows up.
I watched with friends in a crowded bar where people cheered (for Canada, too). It’s a whole different and vastly better experience to share moments like these. (Ten of us watched the Super Bowl together at Jill’s. Same phenomenon — a wonderful shared experience.)
Seventeen days after it began, the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver are now complete. A total of 258 medals were awarded, with the United States, Germany, and Canada collecting the most medals. The second half of the games went much smoother than the glitchy first week, with many memorable performances by athletes from all over the world. Last night, a crowd of 60,000 filled BC Place in Vancouver for the Closing Ceremony, which took place shortly after the final event – a Gold Medal win by host nation Canada’s ice hockey team over the U.S. The Olympic flame will next pass to London, England in 2012 for the Summer Games, and to Sochi, Russia in 2014 for the next Winter games. Collected here are photos from the second half of this year’s events in Vancouver (see Part 1 for the first half). (45 photos total)
Some great photography.
In light of the great Olympic hockey game Sunday, it seems to me the National Hockey League is missing a sure-winner by not having its annual all-star game be Canadian All-Stars vs. America/European All-Stars.
Canadians make up half of the approximately 740 players in the NHL. About 20 percent are American. The Czech Republic, Sweden and Finland contribute another 20 percent. The remaining 10% are from other European countries.
The Ligue nationale de hockey or National Hockey League was established with two Montreal teams, an Ottawa team and a Toronto franchise in 1917. The Boston Bruins joined in 1924, making the league’s name somewhat misleading. The Rangers, Red Wings and Black Hawks joined in 1926.
The NHL consisted of just six teams from 1944-1967 — the Canadiens, the Maple Leafs, the Bruins, the Rangers, the Red Wings and the Black Hawks. There are now 30 teams. You’d have to be a real fan to name all 30 cities and the team nicknames. (24 are in the U.S., six in Canada.)
Homer and Marge go to Vancouver with the Mixed Curling team.
“… I realized I’ve been getting cranky in the evenings, just from being blathered to death watching the Olympics. Last night, I started muting the sound, and had a much more pleasant time.”
This one is for a particular reader. He/she knows whom I mean.
Oddly enough, going online during big TV events has the bizarre effect of boosting the ratings of whatever everyone is watching. Like the Super Bowl or Grammys or the MTV Video Music Awards, all of which saw big boosts in popularity in the last year. You don’t care about the show, you care about being able to talk about the show. This is called “community,” which is also the name of a terrible show on a terribly out-of-touch network called NBC.
Seeking to capitalize on the online water-cooler effect, NBC showed the Golden Globes live on both coasts for the first time this year, and the network reportedly wants to do the same for the Emmy Awards this fall, so the entire country can watch (and chat online) simultaneously.Super-smart NBC has figured out that what all these big blockbuster Twitter-TV combo events have in common is that they are happening live. Shows that are broadcast at different times in different zones (and probably DVR’d anyway) don’t have the same effect. Yet, they have not applied this simple common sense approach to the Olympics.
Frustratingly, Olympic primetime ratings are also up this year and people are marveling about how sports fans will stay up long past their bedtime to watch events that they already know the outcome to, just so they can be a part of the phenomenon. It’s not because they prefer it that way. It’s because they have no other choice.
“Most emotional of all were probably the television executives who prefer to think of the Olympics as a two-week long soap opera filled with emotional turmoil, heartbreak, and redemption. It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s whether you overcame enough adversity to make your life story worth a three-minute interstitial package.”
Speaking of moms, can we talk about how offensive that Proctor and Gamble Olympic campaign is? Not because it completely ignores the contributions of abusive, overbearing fathers in the creation of great athletes or glamorizes the most annoying tendencies of stage/soccer parents, but because the underlying message of every single ad is, “Thanks for supporting me, Mom. Now go clean my socks.”
Laundry detergent is for ladies. Don’t ever forget that.
“Unfortunately, no one could block out the music of the sibling couple from Great Britain who chose Linkin Park as their backing music and were somehow not disqualified.”
I’m beginning to think Evgeni Plushenko should take a luge run.
And yet, in its infinite wisdom, the NBC mother network gave us another retrospective on the 1980 Lake Placid miracle in the middle of which Al Michaels–who, at this point, seems firmly to believe that he landed on Omaha Beach or something 30 years ago–said, “It seemed like we went from burning flags to waving them.”
Oh, Jesus H. Christ On A Power Play, just shut up already, please?
“Yes, our NHL All-Star team beat another country’s NHL All-Star team in a tough hard-fought non-elimination game that is seriously being compared to the most important international sporting victory in our nation’s history.”
An analysis of NBC’s 3 ½-hour program Friday night showed that there were 56 minutes, 41 seconds of commercials over 24 breaks—that’s three more minutes than actual event action that was showed. Ski jumping, which took up about 30 minutes of the broadcast, featured less than two minutes of action, compared with four minutes, 46 seconds of replays (there was, on average, more than one replay per jump). More than half the time during the compulsory-dancing segments showed action, but good luck getting into a rhythm watching the sport: A commercial break separated each routine.
Wouldn’t it be cool if the Olympic figure skating judges gave their opinions like Simon, Randy and whoever do on American Idol?
[First gleaned at Sideline Chatter during the last winter Olympics.]
“The people NBC needs to woo aren’t sports fans. They broadcast the Olympics for people who like stories about polar bears and gymnasts with rare diseases and speed skaters whose sisters have cancer. Yes, these people are out there and to justify the insane investment dollars they have to watch too. It’s a mini-series that happens to have some sports in it.”
The other problem I had was the ski jump. People speeding down an incline and then launching farther than a football field through the air has to be about the coolest thing, right? Not if you watch on NBC! The shot of every competitor was a close up that fit just them in the screen. You know in how in The Aviator, Howard Hughes puts his movie on hold because there are no clouds in the sky and planes flying without clouds around provides no frame of reference and you can’t tell they are moving? That’s what this was like, basically you have a stationary guy first crouching, then pointed awkwardly, then suddenly landing. What is the point of this close up? Does the average person have enough knowledge of this sport to look at these people’s technical performance? “Oh, I don’t like how his ankle is cocked there. He’s making a big pocket in the middle!” No, just show people flying through the air already!
Always have. Always will I’m afraid. Just hate it. Roone Arledge, the creator of all this highlights-based, personality-featured sports coverage should rot in hell forever IMHO. All those channels; why can’t we (if we wanted to) see every performance by every athlete from every country LIVE?
Henry Blodget agrees with me. This is part of a longer rant:
What NBC Sports apparently doesn’t understand (because it has done this to us before, again and again) is that we don’t care who is televising the Olympics.
We don’t want to watch NBC’s “Olympics show”. We want to watch The Olympics. And like every other connected sports fan on the planet these days, we know exactly when the Olympics is taking place and what’s happening there–in real time.
So, right now, for us, NBC isn’t the network that brings us the Olympics. It’s the network that prevents us from watching the Olympics. And we hate NBC for that.
Henry Blodget has some Questions For NBC, The Network That Prevents You From Watching The Olympics. Among them:
3. How much money would you lose (or do you think you would lose) if you showed the events live on a subsidiary network and then showed highlights again in your prime time broadcast? To us, this seems like the best solution. If you did this, sports fans could get their fix, and the “general audience” you’re obviously trying to appeal to in prime time with segments on polar bears can watch the “Olympics Show” you put on every night without wanting to throw their remote controls through the TV.
Pitchers and catchers begin reporting to Spring Training on Wednesday.
Why are the American skiers wearing their jammies?
OK, I’m cheating. I didn’t take this photo (and neither did Jill). It comes from the AP.
Number 85, Pierre Garçon is American-born of Haitian parents. Yesterday he caught more passes than any receiver in AFC championship game history; 11 for 151 yards. The record was nine.
And then there is this, from the Palm Beach Post:
Even amid the bedlam of 67,650 screaming fans Sunday, that rang true. Dwight Lowery was one of a few Jets who took a shot at containing Garcon, the two of them fighting for something only one could have, yet even then, even amid the usual trash-talk, Lowery pulled Garcon aside.
“He said he was going to help me out with Haiti,” Garcon said. “He told me during the game, man. He said to get in contact with him and a couple of guys on their team.”
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