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Armadillo: Wednesday's six-pack
-- Georgetown 74, Creighton 73-- Bluejays led 70-59 with 2:34 left to play.
-- Wisconsin 82, Indiana 79 OT-- Badgers are 15-1 in last 16 games vs Indiana.
-- LSU 89, Georgia 85-- Tigers were 37-55 on foul line. Georgia was 15-24.
-- San Diego State 57, Nevada 54-- Wolf Pack led most of way, couldn't finish.
-- Virginia 72, Wake Forest 71-- Cavaliers were down 71-64 with 0:16 left.
-- Thunder 128, Knicks 122 OT-- Knicks are more fun to watch without Anthony; they're not quite as good, but they play harder.
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Armadillo: Wednesday's List of 13: Mid-week Musings........
13) Blake Griffin has been out since Christmas with a quadriceps injury, now he is out another 4-6 weeks after breaking his hand when he punched a member of the team's equipment staff outside a Toronto restaurant. Not good.
Some advice for the equipment guy.........
-- Blake Griffin is a very large man. probably a bad idea to get him so mad that he wants to break his hand on your face.
-- No matter who is at fault here, Griffin is one of the team's stars; the other guy is a member of the equipment staff. Guess who is going to lose his job over this.
12) Why some teams win and some teams do not: You see Jonathan Simmons with the Spurs, you see how explosive he is going to the basket and you figure he will be their next guy to emerge as a star, after toiling in obscurity. Then you realize he was on the Nets' summer league team in Orlando last summer and you wonder why they let him go to the Spurs' summer league team a couple weeks later in Las Vegas.
The Nets should've signed him up when they has the chance, but they hesitated and then he was gone to the Alamo, playing for a better team that is smarter than the Nets.
11) Scapegoats: Green Bay fired their RB and TE coaches, Patriots fired their OL coach because, you know, someone has to get the blame for the team losing.
10) There is a new show on Showtime called Billions, about Wall Street and all the deals/cheating that goes on and the authorities who try and catch them. The main guy in the show usually wears t-shirts even though he is, as the title suggests, worth a lot of money. One of the storylines last week involved the t-shirt guy paying a college $100M to put his family's name on one of the buildings, which already had someone's name on it. The guy at the college didn't understand why it had to be THAT building
Turns out the t-shirt guy comes from modest means; he was a caddy at a country club as a kid-- a looper, as my friend Joe would say. Back in the day, t-shirt guy had been a caddy for the rich family whose name was on that college building and when the old man had a bad day golfing, he blamed it on his caddy and had t-shirt guy fired from the country club as a caddy. T-shirt guy never forgot that.
Thirty years later, the rich family had fallen on hard times; the old man was deceased, the rest of the family needed money fast or they were going to go broke and t-shirt guy found this out, so he paid the college off, then tossed the family $25M so they could see their name physically removed from the building and replaced by his. Vindictive.
Anyway, the show is on Sunday nights and it isn't bad.
9) Kansas basketball coach Bill Self was once college roommates with singer Garth Brooks, who was a javelin thrower at Oklahoma State- Self played basketball.
8) SNY in New York City televises Mets games all summer; they promote their channel as "just New York sports", which is fine, but the Loud Mouths program had a thing on the other night where they showed the pictures of four NBA head coaches, and the two hosts admitted they had no idea who three of them were. They both knew who Quin Snyder was, because he coached Missouri and played at Duke.
If you're running this station, do you want your hosts telling viewers how little they know about the NBA? Especially since Nuggets coach Michael Malone spent four years as an assistant coach with the Knicks? Guys get paid decent money to give their opinions on stuff and it turns out they're ignorant about one of the most popular sports. Not their finest moment.
7) Remember the movie Scent of a Woman, when Al Pacino plays a blind guy who had been injured in the Marines? Chris O'Donnell plays a prep school kid who serves as Pacino's aide for a while. In one scene, Pacino does the tango in a Manhattan restaurant with this beautiful young lady, who looked vaguely familiar to me.
So I look her up on the Interweb; her name is Gabrielle Anwar; she was the co-star in USA Network's Burn Notice that ran the last few years, about former spies who do special ops-type stuff in Miami to assist people who need their help. 20 years later and she is still quite beautiful.
6) This Saturday, the Big X and most of the SEC take time out from conference play for a series of televised games that should raise the RPI's of everyone involved. The Big X-SEC challnge should be fun. Some of the better games:
Ole Miss-Kansas State.....LSU-Oklahoma....Iowa State-Texas A&M.....and the best game of the day, Kentucky at Kansas.
5) Wayne Gretzky wore #99 thru his whole NHL career; the number has been retired by the league. But in his first game with the Edmonton Oilers, back in the old WHA, Gretzky wore #24. After that game, he requested #99 and that was the end of #24.
4) There have been 221 coaching changes in the NBA since Gregg Popovich has been coach of the San Antonio Spurs. 29 other teams- thats 7.6 changes per team.
3) George Karl has the Sacramento Kings contending for a playoff spot- don't read articles anymore about his impending dismissal. DeMarcus Cousins is playing really well and they have some solid players around him. Fun team to watch. Cousins has to be on the All-Star team or the thing is a joke.
2) Cardinals coach Bruce Arians was quoted recently as saying that spread offenses in college have hurt the development of offensive linemen for the NFL, because in a spread offense, linemen don't do lot of the things that NFL lineman have to do in an NFL-style offense, so when they move up to the pros, there is some remedial training that has to be done, which sets their development back some. Makes sense.
1) Dan Gable is the John Wooden of college wrestling; he won 15 national titles as the coach at Iowa, after he won a gold medal at the '72 Olympics himself. His career record as a college wrestler was 181-1. Pretty tough guy.
I mention this because 35 or so years ago, our paths crossed. The wrestling team at UAlbany had a triangular match with Springfield College and Iowa, a very big deal for them. Iowa was in midst of winning ten national titles in a row. There was only one problem- they needed someone to run the clock on the main scoreboard, since they didn't always have matches in the big gym.
I was the basketball manager at Albany, I was good at running the panel for the scoreboard over the basketball floor, so I was elected timekeeper for the day. About three minutes before the first match, with the legendary Gable standing about 20 feet from me, I realized that I had no idea how this all worked-- I had never seen an actual amateur wrestling match, only pro wrestling on TV. No clocks in the WWE.
When did I start the clock? Stop it? How would I know what points to put up? What if Gable passed one of his wrestlers a foreign object? Oh wait, that doesn't happen here, but panic set in. Actually, it was more like terror.
Luckily for me, the referee on the main court was the father of a friend of mine from high school-- I called him over and explained my anxiety. He was cool and explained that he would signal points to me and that the clock ran pretty much like basketball-- on the referee's signal. After that, it was fairly uneventful-- Gable didn't put me in a sleeper hold or anything, and that was my brush with one of the most successful coaches in the history of college sports.
-- Georgetown 74, Creighton 73-- Bluejays led 70-59 with 2:34 left to play.
-- Wisconsin 82, Indiana 79 OT-- Badgers are 15-1 in last 16 games vs Indiana.
-- LSU 89, Georgia 85-- Tigers were 37-55 on foul line. Georgia was 15-24.
-- San Diego State 57, Nevada 54-- Wolf Pack led most of way, couldn't finish.
-- Virginia 72, Wake Forest 71-- Cavaliers were down 71-64 with 0:16 left.
-- Thunder 128, Knicks 122 OT-- Knicks are more fun to watch without Anthony; they're not quite as good, but they play harder.
**********
Armadillo: Wednesday's List of 13: Mid-week Musings........
13) Blake Griffin has been out since Christmas with a quadriceps injury, now he is out another 4-6 weeks after breaking his hand when he punched a member of the team's equipment staff outside a Toronto restaurant. Not good.
Some advice for the equipment guy.........
-- Blake Griffin is a very large man. probably a bad idea to get him so mad that he wants to break his hand on your face.
-- No matter who is at fault here, Griffin is one of the team's stars; the other guy is a member of the equipment staff. Guess who is going to lose his job over this.
12) Why some teams win and some teams do not: You see Jonathan Simmons with the Spurs, you see how explosive he is going to the basket and you figure he will be their next guy to emerge as a star, after toiling in obscurity. Then you realize he was on the Nets' summer league team in Orlando last summer and you wonder why they let him go to the Spurs' summer league team a couple weeks later in Las Vegas.
The Nets should've signed him up when they has the chance, but they hesitated and then he was gone to the Alamo, playing for a better team that is smarter than the Nets.
11) Scapegoats: Green Bay fired their RB and TE coaches, Patriots fired their OL coach because, you know, someone has to get the blame for the team losing.
10) There is a new show on Showtime called Billions, about Wall Street and all the deals/cheating that goes on and the authorities who try and catch them. The main guy in the show usually wears t-shirts even though he is, as the title suggests, worth a lot of money. One of the storylines last week involved the t-shirt guy paying a college $100M to put his family's name on one of the buildings, which already had someone's name on it. The guy at the college didn't understand why it had to be THAT building
Turns out the t-shirt guy comes from modest means; he was a caddy at a country club as a kid-- a looper, as my friend Joe would say. Back in the day, t-shirt guy had been a caddy for the rich family whose name was on that college building and when the old man had a bad day golfing, he blamed it on his caddy and had t-shirt guy fired from the country club as a caddy. T-shirt guy never forgot that.
Thirty years later, the rich family had fallen on hard times; the old man was deceased, the rest of the family needed money fast or they were going to go broke and t-shirt guy found this out, so he paid the college off, then tossed the family $25M so they could see their name physically removed from the building and replaced by his. Vindictive.
Anyway, the show is on Sunday nights and it isn't bad.
9) Kansas basketball coach Bill Self was once college roommates with singer Garth Brooks, who was a javelin thrower at Oklahoma State- Self played basketball.
8) SNY in New York City televises Mets games all summer; they promote their channel as "just New York sports", which is fine, but the Loud Mouths program had a thing on the other night where they showed the pictures of four NBA head coaches, and the two hosts admitted they had no idea who three of them were. They both knew who Quin Snyder was, because he coached Missouri and played at Duke.
If you're running this station, do you want your hosts telling viewers how little they know about the NBA? Especially since Nuggets coach Michael Malone spent four years as an assistant coach with the Knicks? Guys get paid decent money to give their opinions on stuff and it turns out they're ignorant about one of the most popular sports. Not their finest moment.
7) Remember the movie Scent of a Woman, when Al Pacino plays a blind guy who had been injured in the Marines? Chris O'Donnell plays a prep school kid who serves as Pacino's aide for a while. In one scene, Pacino does the tango in a Manhattan restaurant with this beautiful young lady, who looked vaguely familiar to me.
So I look her up on the Interweb; her name is Gabrielle Anwar; she was the co-star in USA Network's Burn Notice that ran the last few years, about former spies who do special ops-type stuff in Miami to assist people who need their help. 20 years later and she is still quite beautiful.
6) This Saturday, the Big X and most of the SEC take time out from conference play for a series of televised games that should raise the RPI's of everyone involved. The Big X-SEC challnge should be fun. Some of the better games:
Ole Miss-Kansas State.....LSU-Oklahoma....Iowa State-Texas A&M.....and the best game of the day, Kentucky at Kansas.
5) Wayne Gretzky wore #99 thru his whole NHL career; the number has been retired by the league. But in his first game with the Edmonton Oilers, back in the old WHA, Gretzky wore #24. After that game, he requested #99 and that was the end of #24.
4) There have been 221 coaching changes in the NBA since Gregg Popovich has been coach of the San Antonio Spurs. 29 other teams- thats 7.6 changes per team.
3) George Karl has the Sacramento Kings contending for a playoff spot- don't read articles anymore about his impending dismissal. DeMarcus Cousins is playing really well and they have some solid players around him. Fun team to watch. Cousins has to be on the All-Star team or the thing is a joke.
2) Cardinals coach Bruce Arians was quoted recently as saying that spread offenses in college have hurt the development of offensive linemen for the NFL, because in a spread offense, linemen don't do lot of the things that NFL lineman have to do in an NFL-style offense, so when they move up to the pros, there is some remedial training that has to be done, which sets their development back some. Makes sense.
1) Dan Gable is the John Wooden of college wrestling; he won 15 national titles as the coach at Iowa, after he won a gold medal at the '72 Olympics himself. His career record as a college wrestler was 181-1. Pretty tough guy.
I mention this because 35 or so years ago, our paths crossed. The wrestling team at UAlbany had a triangular match with Springfield College and Iowa, a very big deal for them. Iowa was in midst of winning ten national titles in a row. There was only one problem- they needed someone to run the clock on the main scoreboard, since they didn't always have matches in the big gym.
I was the basketball manager at Albany, I was good at running the panel for the scoreboard over the basketball floor, so I was elected timekeeper for the day. About three minutes before the first match, with the legendary Gable standing about 20 feet from me, I realized that I had no idea how this all worked-- I had never seen an actual amateur wrestling match, only pro wrestling on TV. No clocks in the WWE.
When did I start the clock? Stop it? How would I know what points to put up? What if Gable passed one of his wrestlers a foreign object? Oh wait, that doesn't happen here, but panic set in. Actually, it was more like terror.
Luckily for me, the referee on the main court was the father of a friend of mine from high school-- I called him over and explained my anxiety. He was cool and explained that he would signal points to me and that the clock ran pretty much like basketball-- on the referee's signal. After that, it was fairly uneventful-- Gable didn't put me in a sleeper hold or anything, and that was my brush with one of the most successful coaches in the history of college sports.
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