Hiatus...

If you haven't noticed I've completely given up on this site now that the season is over. It was a good run while it lasted. Thanks to all four of you who checked in regularly, it was an honor to try to make you laugh. We'll try to make a comeback for next season and also address the upcoming suspensions/probation/etc.

A final word on the season and the National Championship: We didn't deserve it, and it was really gravy to make it so far after the Dyson injury. God bless UNC, not just for the big -7.5 championship cover, but for their fans. Below is the clip of Franklin Street going crazy - 30k fans and TWO arrests depite about 50 mini bonfires.
Now if that is UCONN there are MAYBE 100 people running around campus because, 1- our school is now Lame, and 2- there would have been about 200 state police and Uconn police on horses and riot gear. One bonfire and the tear gas would have been flying. Disgusting...

Crazy People

One of my biggest problems, particularly when I someday get a job, is I still laugh uncontrollably at juvenile words. Let's say I was in a meeting and someone told me I needed to do 'double-duty.' Or better yet the commercials for 'super-duty' trucks. They get me every time. Anyway, I took great joy in seeing this coach go crazy earlier in the week. Yes- because she says 'poop.' Poop, my friends. That's another reason womens basketball cannot be taken seriously.
Other reasons: Breakaway Lay-ups, Fat chicks, Ugly chicks

As a result of nothing fun happening at the Final Four yet, I've decided to post this lady's rant and a bunch of other great coaching meltdowns.



By the way, how fearful was her husband (or life partner) of that woman coming home that night. That's gonna be some ROUGH sex, yikes...

Other fun ones...
-Denny Green
-Mike Gundy
-Jimmy C, I took Emeka!
-Jimmy C, reporter
-Herm Edwards
-Hal McRae
-Jim Mora
-Allen Iverson, and yes, I know he's not a coach - but I love the way he's faded this year while Ray continues to thrive.

Jesus!

While I take a quick break between playing 36 today - take that you cubicle ridden bitches, 65 and sunny, look how im livin America! - thought I would post the finishing touches of Ray's masterpiece from last night.

Randoms

April Fools Joke of the Day
Thabeet's Facebook Status this morning: "OMG!!! Why Me? SO I Failed Drug Test.. NOt GOIn To Detroit.. MY Boys Do IT for ME!!! fuckin suprise drug test!!! ahhh My Life SUCKS!!!!! damn!" I hate April Fools jokes, but I gotta admit thats a good one. Pretty fucking funny for a guy who barely speaks English.

-I'm hoping Tom Izzo's wife Lupe does something stupid this week so I can title a post "Lupe Fiasco" If not I'll just resort to making Mexican janitor jokes.

-VERY excited for the McDonald's All-American game tonight. Alex Oriakhi is on the East squad and should get some decent minutes, so that's cool. John Wall got left off the team, reportedly because he is a 5th year senior. I think the folks at McDonald's got hold of this VICIOUS dunk that DeQuan Jones threw on him and made up that whole 5th year thing. I cant find a line, but I'll make the East -3.5

-Im sorry, i got nothing today...still too hungover. I should have my fastball back in a couple days once Final Four practices start.

Synergy!

Florida guard Nick Calathes announced for the draft today.

Which... gives me the opportunity to post this video of the Florida professor who was stoned out of his mind - more likely tripping, in my professional opinion - and got fired because he filmed his own class and the administration saw it. Really worth the view.

Actual News!

Amazingly UConn was able to land 6-2 SG Darius Smith from Chicago today...without the help of Josh Nochimson! (presumably). Here's his scouts.com link

I don't know what the coaching staff told him because right now I'd be afraid of next years post-season ban. Oyyy. Anyway, I like players from the Bronx and Chicago when it comes to guards. So I'm excited.

Michigan St. 64, Louisville 52

Thank god that Detroit looks like this now and no locals have money to buy tickets and root for Michigan St. It's gonna be a virtual homegame...

Also, thanks to Rick Pitino for ordering Louisville to tank so that UConn could have a clear road to the championship game. I guess we beat them so thoroughly earlier this year that Pitino couldn't handle the embarrassment that next week would have brought.

Michigan St. is going to be an ideal matchup. I'm giddy. UConn will probably be a 3or4 point favorite even though the game is in Detroit. Unfortunately Gavin Edwards will probably have to play a lot because Thabeet CAN NOT be allowed to run around with Goran Sutan. Other than that I'm feelin...

so - Final Four next week and the Masters the week after. In honor of those two weeks here are some cart girls from MSU.

Ohhhhh Skeet skeet skeet skeet

UCONN 82, MIZZOU 75

An appropriate tribute to what these kids did this week in the face of amazing adversity. Take that, NCAA



That will be all until I can coherently gather my thoughts...

Get ya popcorn, er, iPod ready

Tonight is gonna be a music night - I'm muting the TV like Billy Packer is back behind the mic. Cause all you're going to hear about is this Miles/Majok thing. The bright side of things, should you choose to listen to the broadcast, is that Miles/Majok might keep the announcers from telling us that 'aj price's dad tony played at Penn and got to a Final Four' and 'here's gavin edwards, his father earl played in the NFL.' So we got that goin' for us..

Since I've been enrolled at UConn a few crazy things have happened. There was the girl killed in a crosswalk by that drunk dude, the teacher who got shot in the head last year, and a handful of rapes/sexual assaults. There is always a different feeling on campus the day after something like that happens. But yesterday afternoon and today it was like everyone's best friend got raped. It's just a very sad place to be right now...

Also, congratulations to Rocky Mountain College for winning the NAIA Championship last night. To pay homage to their school the players celebrated with these.

I Love AJ Price

The most dynamic scoring point guard in college basketball is a pretty good interview too...

Pedro Gomez: Is it a distraction at all?
AJ: uhh no, not at all.
Gomez: Even having to answer these questions like this that you normally wouldn't have to if this report wasn't out there?
AJ: no not at all. I like it. It gives me more face time. We're here to win games, that's all we care about.

Amen! Yesterday I was quite worried about this indeed being a distraction. Not anymore. If you think that AJ and Jeff Adrien are going to allow this team to lose - you are crazy. If anything I'm more confident in this team now than I was two days ago. Dare I say...

Top Ten Things I Never Thought I'd Say About ESPN Coverage

So I desperately need something to knock this Nate Miles story off the running loop that is all day Sportscenter. Without further delay...

#10 - Ohhh, Spring Training highlights!
#9 - Can Steven A Smith interview someone? i mean COME ON peeeple
#8 - Anyone got a photo of Michael Phelps snorting a line of coke?
#7 - Does Chris Connolly have a tear-jerker piece ready?
#6 - Can Rick Reilly do the Mount Rushmore of Sports again!?
#5 - Can the Yankees overpay someone else?
#4 - how the fuck does Letterman come up with 10 of these things...
#3 - people should really praise Coack K some more
#2 - Bowling should get more air time. That Pete Weber is Dynamic!
#1 - Can we get Brett Favre out of retirement??

ohhhhhh! that's your Top 10. Paul, play me out!

Death by 1000 paper cuts...on my dick

So now Pat Forde reports that Nochimson had his hands all over the Majok deal as well. As much as I hate to hear that, Forde is a really good reporter and does a nice job of putting this issue into context.

I don't get it...Rodney Guillory can somehow charge 10,000 just to get OJ Mayo to visit your school, and multiple coaches pay it - yet USC and the rest of the Pac-10 bagmen don't get in the slightest bit of trouble. But somehow this degenerate wanna be agent is going to blow up the entire UConn program. oyyyy

Over/under: 1.5 days until an active player is linked to Nochimson.
I'll take the under. Nothing gets the media witch hunting faster than blood in the water...

On a Lighter Note...

A few days ago I finally started utilizing Google Analytics. It shows you all kinds of cool stuff like how many people were on your site, from what town, and bunch more I can't even figure out. There is one section that shows the search terms people who got to the site used. One guy today searched " "jim calhoun" + "Asshole" " so, i thought that was awesome. It took the guy to my post a few days ago about jimmy magically re-hydrating, sans IV, by apologist fans licking his asshole. So I hope the guy who searched it got what he was looking for. Or maybe he has a fetish for naked Calhoun pics (none here!), in which case he probably was very disappointed, having thought his white whale had finally been found only to find this non-sense.
Anyway- bad day for the program, but not as bad as I thought it would be. Now all Hathaway has to do is start listening to my spin control...

Crisis Management 101

After taking a little while to come out of shock, I have managed to put together what the UConn SID should be distributing to every media outlet. They won't, because they are idiots and prefer the old no comment route. But if Jeff Hathaway had answered my screams from outside his office they could've saved the ship - or at least plugged some holes....

"official" statement: Over his 23 years of service to the University of Connecticut Jim Calhoun has excelled his two main objectives; winning basketball games and forming kids into productive young men. While the notoriety comes from wins, Coach Calhoun's greatest pride comes from taking troubled youth and turning them into men. When at 15 years old Coach lost his father he was basically adopted by his high school basketball coach. When Calhoun left college for manual labor in his hometown, it was that same high school coach who put Calhoun back on the path to higher education and made him a man.
So when Coach sees a person like a Caron Butler, who was arrested 15 times by age 15, he can't help but step in. It's ingrained in Coach because of his own life. After three years at UConn a tearful Caron bid the school adieu and has since set up countless charities and received significant accolades for them, including in 2006 when Sporting News named him to their "Good Guys in Sports" list. Caron would be the first to admit that none of this would have been possible without Jim Calhoun and the UConn family.
Sadly, not every kid that UConn recruits has the family structure and maturity of Emeka Okafor or Craig Austrie. So while there were many calls made to Nate Miles over the course of 2006 and 2007, they were calls to make sure that he was all right. To make sure things were going ok as Nate bounced around from high school to high school, constantly misunderstood and homesick. These were not calls to say - 'hey, come play for UConn.' Not every college coach is ruthless like Lane Kiffin. Some coaches, like Jim Calhoun, are real people. When UConn began recruiting Miles in 2006 they saw a basketball talent - that much is for sure. But they also saw a reclamation project and a kid who needed defending and guidance...because no one else was there to give it to him. If he landed at UConn, awesome. But if he went somewhere else and survived the hand he had been dealt, well, that was what was truly important.
We are all familiar with the Nate Miles saga and how it ended poorly at UConn. What not enough people realize is what Miles has gone through. His mother was an alcoholic and his father was no where to be found. That left Nate to raise his sister by himself. A sister who has cancer. No wonder he went to five different high schools (never kicked out of any, mind you- just homesick, which is tough for a kid who never really had a home.)
Jim Calhoun and UConn were going to provide the home Nate and his little sister needed. The phone calls need to be looked at in the bigger scheme of things. Nate committed to UConn in 2006, so it makes no sense that the program would have been still making "recruiting calls" in 2007. The program cared about him, and now, sadly, they may be punished.
This real issue here is another big time agent wannabe who STOLE A MILLION BUCKS FROM RIP is the crux of this Yahoo story. He went to school here and was on the absolute bottom of the team totem-pole, but that didn't keep him from using this "connection" to deceive others. He tricked Richard Hamilton, and tricking Nate Miles wasn't very difficult. The kid was vulnerable and looking for guidance. Add in a guardian in Sean Patterson who was in it for the money, and Josh Nochimson had an easy target. He is the real criminal here, and the one who should be targeted.

Other thoughts
-ok, so that got a little sloppy, but that would be the gist of my crisis management, not this bullshit UConn put out today. Hathaway - what a clown. The statement only covers their ass because Miles never played, so the NCAA can't take away any of our wins, etc. Just like the Not a Dime Back thing, Hathaway completely fails to come out and say Calhoun is our man and we stand by him. Just terrible. This is the kind of thing that is gonna agitate the old man right out of Storrs. He doesn't need this garbage from a university that owes everything it has to him.
-also, total bullshit hack ass journalism by Yahoo sports. According to the Uconn statement the responded to a yahoo FOI request in the fall, and they waited to pull it out now. This is some CBS Dan Rather/George W 2004 election stuff. If you want to be taken seriously as a journalist you cant do it by publishing ambushes.

Kelvin Sampson is Laughing

From ESPN.com

Connecticut potentially committed NCAA rules violations in its recruitment of former guard Nate Miles, Yahoo Sports reported Wednesday.

The Web site reported that according to multiple sources, between 2006 and 2008, Miles was provided with lodging, transportation, restaurant meals and representation by Josh Nochimson, a former UConn student manager who had become a professional sports agent and formerly represented ex-Huskies star Richard Hamilton.

The program may also have exceeded the number of phone calls allowed to Miles under NCAA regulations during its recruiting, Yahoo Sports reported, citing phone records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The NCAA allows a single phone call per month to a prospect or his family in a player's junior year of high school. Yahoo Sports reported that according to records, UConn coaches exceeded that limit over several months in 2006 and 2007 in the program's recruitment of Miles. In December of 2006 alone, former UConn assistant coach Tom Moore made 27 calls to Miles' guardian and a person Miles referred to as an uncle as well as three calls to Miles.

The Web site also reported that Moore, currently the coach at Quinnipiac, made Nochimson aware that UConn was recruiting Miles and that he knew Nochimson and Miles had talked.

According to records obtained by Yahoo Sports, over a two-year period, five different UConn coaches traded at least 1,565 phone and text messages with Nochimson, including 16 from coach Jim Calhoun.

Nochimson has moved to decertify himself as an agent after Hamilton fired him and accused him of stealing more than $1 million from him, according to the report.

My Quick First Take: I have no problem with them taking care of Nate Miles. He was essentially a homeless kid who went to at least 5 different high schools and had to support the family his parents refused to.
But as a program we are fucked. This is the kind of stuff that gets you serious penalties - look at Indiana this year. Worse it gives fuel for all those Calhoun haters and it's gonna be front page news for some time. At least Tom Moore seems to have been a big part of this and he's gone. So thanks for that, but this looks BAD. even i cant sugarcoat this one. Just when i start feeling great about this team, this happens. Forget this year, we could be in serious trouble for the next 2-3 years if all charge are as true and bad as they sound.