This announcer is the anti-Joe Buck.
Category Archives: NCAA Basketball
50 Greatest
Chuck Klosterman writes about the 50 greatest college basketball players ever.
The Shame of College Sports
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch has taken a long look at college sports and the NCAA. Must reading for any college sports fan or educator.
The College Connection
The single best discussion I’ve ever read of why we have big time college sports and what it means.
An absolute must read if you follow college football and basketball.
Did you know?
That the NCAA requires student-athletes to sign over all future licensing rights? And that those rights reportedly generate around $4 billion a year for the NCAA? And that the athletes whose likenesses and names are used earn nothing?
Some former athletes are suing, but it’s about time the NCAA was dismantled.
Lorenzo Charles and the Shot
Best line of the day
“Looked at that way, players who are compensated beyond what the NCAA thinks is correct are simply finding a way to get paid for their work. This should surprise nobody. Time and again, the ‘amateur’ concept – a foul vestige of the British class system — has failed in this country because it is unsustainable in a nation that believes, even today, and even in Wisconsin, that hard work should return a fair wage. It was unsustainable in golf and in tennis. It was even unsustainable in the Olympics. It is unsustainable in college mega-sport as well. The only question is when the collapse will come, and how thorough the damage will be.”
Go read Pierce’s last paragraph, as good an assessment as you’ll read of college sports.
Best line of the day
“Pro Tip: Do not pay full price for a Kansas 2011 NCAA National Champions t-shirt.”
Longer reads
A moment-by-moment account of Butler’s win over Pittsburgh. It begins:
On Saturday night, Shelvin Mack became the 12th-leading scorer in Butler history, passing long-ago Bulldogs star Bobby Plump. Though Plump starred for Butler in the 1950s, he was already a legend before he arrived on campus. In 1954, he made the jumper that earned Milan High the Indiana state championship—the shot and the season that inspired Hoosiers.
The erosion of the Civil War consensus. It begins:
As someone who has studied the Civil War for all of my adult life, I never once contemplated that I would ever hear any American raise once more the issue of secession or the doctrine of nullification, or suggest that the 14th Amendment should be rescinded.
Best March Madness line of the day
“You will never see a better example of two teams being gassed than you saw at the end of the Temple-San Diego State game. It looked like the Temple guards were unsure if they had the strength to get a dribble to hit the floor at the end.”