Basketball, Bagpipes, Buckeyes and Beer

It was pretty ironic that I flew to Miami to watch Louisville play a football game, but when the basketball team played in their NCAA tournament games in Lexington, I only made a token effort to find a ticket. Actually, I had valid reasons. Stanford was garbage and had no business being in the tournament, so paying $153 for a full day pass when I probably wouldn't have been able to make the other three games didn't make economic sense. I did look around for a ticket for Saturday, but (unfortunately, as I was to later learn) Ohio State fans had flooded Lexington to go with a very large contingent of Louisville fans. I wasn't going to pay an inflated price, especially since I hurt my knee bowling (my first bowling related injury) and sitting in a tight ass arena seat designed for someone half my size with a knee that wouldn't bend completely didn't seem too appealing. So, I took a two hour lunch and watched the Standford game at Donato's.

I did watch UK's first round game at McCarthy's Irish Pub with a bunch of people from work where a couple of Ohio State fans showed up and turned me into a big Xavier fan. Pretty sad because the first Buckeye fan I ran into there was a nice guy representing his state well. Then, Tweedledum and Tweedledumber showed up. First they wanted to argue basketball (take heart Tubby Smith fans, they said Tubby was one of the best coaches in the country, but they waffled when I asked if they would trade Thad Matta for him). I was kind of surprised they wanted to talk trash about OSU refusing to schedule Xavier in the regular season, because Xavier wasn't on OSU's level. Real bright. Last year was Ohio State's first appearance in the NCAA tournament since 1992. Real good basketball pedigree there. Xavier made the tournament nine times since 1992. Then the dickweed said Xavier had no shot of staying close with OSU (Xavier makes a late free throw, they win in regulation instead of losing in OT). If it weren't for the fact that I would have to see him again, I would have taken his 12 point spread. Then, the Dumbass Duo started arguing with a Michigan/UK fan because they were too stupid to realize all the UK fans were going to side with a cross-bred UK fan even though I'm still not sure what Michigan can crow about since they lost in the NIT and fired their coach. Then to top it off, these guys practically dry humped a couple of girls in our group before being invited to take their little party elsewhere. Needless to say, they were making the more obnoxious UK fans look good.

Well, the UK fans were looking good until "The Guy" showed up. This is the type of person who makes normal fans cringe with embarrassment. I know because all the hardcore UK fans in my group were praying to God that he would leave. To begin with, he was demonstrative to the point that you thought it was more for show as he would get down on the floor and pound it with his hands just because UK hit a shot. For God's sakes, he cheered when UK called a timeout because they got trapped. He was completely wasted, and he wasn't a funny drunk. He was a dumb drunk who stumbled around and kept getting in the way. Apparently, he was unaware that it really wasn't that crowded in there (it has TVs, but isn't the best place to watch basketball) or loud, because whenever he felt like talking to you (which was constantly), he leaned in to yell in your ear. That wasn't the worst part about him leaning in and opening his mouth. His breath was. At first, I thought he was drinking something funky, but I don't know of any alcohol that leads to that stench. My next thought was he had eaten something with a lot of onion flavor, like maybe a bag of onions. Or maybe he just likes to eat ass before going out. Or maybe he was talking out of his ass, because he made the statement that UK has more talent than any other team in the country and would win it all because of their perimeter defense. Not real sure what planet that theory came from. While UK may have enough talent to upset one of the big boys, I can't see them beating more than one of them. Fortunately, he developed a man crush on one of the others in the group, and I could avoid him.

One cool thing about the night was that the Irish Defense Forces Pipe Band showed up. They were in town for the St. Patrick's Day parade and decided to do a little impromptu concert at the local Irish pub in their full regalia. Which is great because I love to listen to bagpipes. They figured out the local customs pretty quick too. They knew to wait until after the basketball game before going on. They bitched about going outside to smoke. And they had a ready answer to the question about what they were wearing under their kilts (they said it was some form of flip-flop which I didn't stick around for a better description).

Sadly, Lexington doesn't seem to be too smart about hosting NCAA tournament games. The St. Patrick's Day parade still went off at 1:00pm which is about the same time that the first game at Rupp Arena began. Didn't anyone look at the calendar and think about moving the parade a couple of hours earlier? Then, there was the Weekender section of the Herald-Leader which listed places to go for out-of-towners coming in for the games. Under the "places to go dancing", they listed one - The Bar. I'm beginning to think that place has the Herald-Leader on retainer because it was also mentioned prominently in an article about how gay-friendly Lexington is. It would have been one thing for the paper to list them under places to dance, but it's quite another to not list any other place. Since I can't dance, I don't know the dancing hot spots, but I'm pretty sure there have to be others. I'm also pretty sure that your average Ohio State fan who wants to dance still doesn't want to a gay bar. I'm very sure the average Xavier fan wants nothing to do with a gay bar.

And I still haven't mentioned the tournament much. Most years I have a few questions about the choices the tournament committee makes, but this year, I couldn't believe a couple of the decisions. As I already pointed out, Stanford (18-12) had no business in the tournament. Sure, they had a couple of nice wins in the PAC-10, but they lost to Air Force by 34 points. This team was so confident going into the tournament that they left their pep band, cheerleaders and mascot at home. It wouldn't surprise me if they had Friday plane tickets. Another team that had no business being in the tournament was Arkansas. Not only were they fourth in the SEC West, they finished 7-9 there, and I don't think any team should get an at-large bid if they had a losing record in conference. I can think of about eight teams offhand that I would have put in before Arkansas (Miss St, Ole Miss, Drexel, West Virginia, Kansas St, OK St., Air Force, Syracuse), and I don't care if any of these teams didn't do squat in the NIT. It's a nothing tournament. A lot of teams that thought they were tourney bound don't want to be in the NIT. They've seen Girls Gone Wild. They want to go on spring break, not to a tournament no one will remember two days after it's over. Sure, the NC States of the world get up for it. They struggled before turning it up late, and this is something to build on for next year. Syracuse is the team that really got shafted. They were 10-6 in the Big East with wins over Georgetown, Marquette and Villanova. I wouldn't just put them in ahead of Arkansas or Stanford. I would have put them in before Arizona, Purdue, Illinois, Georgia Tech, Villanova, and Texas Tech.

Now, the luckiest team in the country was Louisville. Rick Pitino said that playing their first round game at Rupp Arena was not an advantage. Then his nose grew about six inches. How can he say this crap with a straight face, and how does anyone believe it? No team had a first/second round site closer to their home gym than Louisville, and their first round opponent was coming from California for a 9:30 Pacific time game. No wonder Stanford didn't bring anyone. It was a straight up home game for UL. Some people thought UK fans would go just to boo Pitino, but how many UK fans would spend $153 to boo someone, especially when they can probably re-sell the tickets with a nice little mark-up to UL and Ohio State fans? Texas A&M really got the shaft. For now. Why should a 3 seed have to play a 6 seed in what was basically a home game? I think having a home game feel is the main reason UL almost upset the Aggies. Of course, now Texas A&M has the advantage over 2 seed Memphis (assuming Memphis beats Nevada) because their Sweet Sixteen game is in San Antonio.

And I can't talk about the tournament without mentioning CBS' piss poor coverage. To begin with, the audio sucked on Saturday. The volume kept going down, then back up, then down again. I'm beginning to think they forget they have the ability to show replays. During the Ohio State/Xavier game, Greg Oden was called for basket interference, and instead of showing a replay to see if it was a good call, we got to watch OSU coach Thad Matta scream at the refs. Five minutes later, they finally show a replay, and it was a good call as the ball was in the cylinder. Then, at the end of the half, Oden did it again, but this time it wasn't called. One of the retarded announcers then said it shows the calls even out. So, the correct call in Xavier's favor needs to be offset with a bad call that goes against them? How stupid is that? Then there was the schedule. Okay, I understand that the local affiliate isn't going to flip to another game when UK is playing, but why not do it with other games? UNC and Michigan State were going at it in a back and forth game, but we had to watch a brutally ugly Indiana/UCLA game (although they did eventually switch, but at that point UNC had pulled ahead). And in Lexington, we should be in good shape for game watching because WKYT apparently has an arrangement to show games on the CW channel too. Yet, I don't know how many times I flipped to CW to see if a better game was being shown, and the same game on WKYT was on. Don't they coordinate this crap?