Friday, November 12, 2004
College basketball season is here again.
Oh, but whom to root for if you don't already have a team -- or if, like me, your team has been ranked 300+ in the RPIs forever, and you'd like to have some kind of psychic association with a real team for once in your life?
Process of elimination might help. SI gives a list of Top Ten Least Rootable Teams, from...
Call me a "Bearcat!"
Oh, but whom to root for if you don't already have a team -- or if, like me, your team has been ranked 300+ in the RPIs forever, and you'd like to have some kind of psychic association with a real team for once in your life?
Process of elimination might help. SI gives a list of Top Ten Least Rootable Teams, from...
#1) CINCINNATI. Every year without fail the Bearcats trot out a police, er, starting lineup stocked with juco transfers and miscreants. Cin City ballers have been charged with every crime in the book -- and some that aren't: Donald Little was kicked off the team in April 2002 for taping his roommate to a lawn chair, throwing weights at his head, clubbing him with a whiskey bottle and burning him with a heated coat hanger. Only then did Little stab him....... through the proverbial Team to Be Named Later...
Aw, that still leaves hundreds of teams. But wait ... what did it also say about Cincinnati?#10) JIM HARRICK'S NEXT SCHOOL ... there's always another major program willing to take a flier on a coach with a national championship on his resume. At this point Harrick's resiliency is bordering on comical; he's like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who keeps getting limbs lopped off but just won't die. Fired from UCLA for falsifying an expense report. ("'Tis but a scratch.") Academic fraud, overzealous boosters and a lawsuit charging sexual harassment against Harrick, settled out of court, at Rhode Island. ("Just a flesh wound.") Resigned from Georgia in 2003 after his players were given preferential academic treatment in a class taught by his son and assistant coach, Jim Harrick Jr. ("I'm invincible!") ...
Yes, Huggy Bear has taken Cincy to 12 straight NCAA tournaments; the problem is that "student-athlete" is not the preferred term for describing the players ...Heck, I have enough pride in the academic integrity of the student athletes who play for my alma mater as it goes 4-22 every year. I don't need any more. I just need someone to root for in the tournament. Twelve straight, did they say?
Call me a "Bearcat!"
