More NCAA tournament...and Utah!

Just got back from a little Spring Break trip to southern Utah to see some kinfolk, so into my thoughts about the NCAA tournament so far I will sprinkle in some items of interest (to me, anyway) from our journeyings in Zion (literally).

First, we went down to Avis to rent a mini-van during the break from games on Friday; I was home in plenty of time to see BSU get clobbered by an impressive looking Louisville team--admittedly more impressive now after they trounced Oklahoma as well. When we got to Avis, we were informed they had no mini-vans. The nearest thing they had was "one of those SUVs you see out there in the back row. Will that be all right?" It was. So we drove the Chrysler Aspen (check it out here) on our trip. Very nice--had 900 miles on it when we got it, room for eight, fancy interior, and Sirius satellite radio.

Sirius satellite radio. I know, I know, it is old news by now, but those of you who know me know I tend to be a little on the cheap side (for which I am sometimes treated as if I lived in Cheapside, if you know what I mean. And if you don't, go read your Austen!) So I don't have Sirius (yet). I may have it soon. No more listening to Colin Cowherd, Caves and Prater, the Budlightidahosteelheadshockeypregameshow, or any of the other stupid crap on the only Sports talk station in town. And FM radio? Please. I can see Sirius in my future. And driving my car more than I currently do.

Which brings me to this: What was the best decade for music? Don't waste your time, because there is not a counterargument you can make that will sway me. The eighties. Period. Don't react, don't resist. Accept it. Because when I say "best" I mean everything: the best stuff you like, the best garbage, and the best utter crap. It has it all. Get Sirius and listen to the 80s channel or "The Wave" during a ten or eleven hour drive. You will be convinced. I can't even begin to describe the true enjoyment I had listening to Sirius radio over the last few days, but here are a few high(and low)-lights:

"I got Spuds McKenzie. Alex from Stroh's. They won't leave my dog alone with that Medina, pal." - Tone Loc "Funky Cold Medina
"Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto, himitsu wo shiri tai" - Styx "Mr. Roboto" (I defy you to youtube that song and listen to it in its entirety without laughing out loud. I mean, someone seriously wrote, composed and released that song?)
Skid Row "I Remember You"
Adam and the Ants "Stand and Deliver"
Missing Persons "Walking in L.A."
Loverboy "Lovin' Every Minute of It" (Nice subtlety, guys.)
That's enough. You figure out ones I like and which ones I didn't.

On our trip we drove through Zion National Park, where I saw something interesting:


The part I find interesting is "If attacked, fight back." Never seen that before. And it makes me want to ask the animals of the world to come to some agreement about what to do when startled by a human. We play dead if chased by a bear, and fight back against mountain lions. If I come across something that says I should run toward an animal to scare it away, that will be too much. I might get confused and rush a bear, or play dead for a raccoon.

Now, more NCAA tournament. I guess I picked a few too many first round upsets, but I didn't get hurt too much. As you see below, I have 13 of the 16 left. And I am especially proud of Villanova and Davidson in the Midwest making me look like Nostradamus.
I am tempted to make new picks based on what teams are now left and how they have played, but I will stick with what I have. I am afraid of Louisville vs. Tennessee, and West Virginia looks good vs. Xavier, but overall I like what I have. I tried not to pick with my heart too much (see? I picked BYU and BSU to lose) but I may have overdone with Wisconsin over Kansas (I hate them). And although Arizona laid an egg, I am glad someone bounced Duke. I still like UNC in the East and all the way to the title, but who knows what will happen in the South. Any of the four still in it could come through and I wouldn't be surprised. Just hope Michigan State doesn't screw things up for me. If Memphis can get through, I think they will beat whoever comes from the West. UCLA had to work too hard against A&M for me to believe in them. And Xavier playing for the title? Doesn't sound right, does it? That's why it won't happen.

I will be planted on my couch for the games again tonight (and Friday and Saturday and Sunday). Wish me luck. Or tell me why I am crazy.

NCAA Tournament

I got this e-mail from someone who was apparently not very impressed with my last post:

"Hey Phyllis, your an idiot. Nice call on Boise State there. WAC tourny champs, baby! This team has the talent to do some damage in the big dance. I see them making it to the sweet 16. Go broncos!"

So let me respond: First of all, I think I said I couldn't see how BSU could beat Utah State. That's right. I couldn't see it. I doubt anyone else saw Garner coming out and killing it like he did. Dude hardly plays all year, comes in and scores ten points in about five minutes, and then promptly returns to obscurity on the bench. Crazy. If he doesn't do that, they don't win that game. Period.

And notice that Greene did not play in the USU game? Good call, Graham. So not only did "Nascar" Greene not put in his 10-15 minutes of substandard play, Garner took his place and excelled. Amazing.

I guess I am glad I made no prediction about the New Mexico State game, since I would have been doubtful BSU could pull it off in Las Cruces. But pull it off they did, and I am duly impressed. The one area of concern from that game (which will help me answer the e-mailer's claim BSU can make some noise in the tournament) is that the bench scored a whopping six points in fifty-five minutes. I maintain that having five good players is nice, but I think they need some support (perhaps someone will come in and pull a Garner in the tournament) in order to beat anyone they might face in Alabama. Again, I will be rooting and hoping and yelling, but the bracket I filled out says "LOU" right below "St. Joe's." (For the record, my two youngest sons stepped up and picked Boise State in the first round--let's see what happens.)

Ahhh...The NCAA tournament: I look forward to it all year. I put in for time off at my job so I can soak it all in for twelve hours two days in a row. I will order some pizza, put on my sweats, and stare at college basketball in HDTV until my eyes burn. But although I am excitedly waiting for Thursday to get here, I know what will happen. "Alas! how far the promise of anticipation exceeds the pleasure of possession!" Rosalie Ashby said that to Agnes in Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, and something similar will happen to me. Teams I hate will win, others I want to win will not, and I will be mad at myself at how much I eat. Then Friday's games will be over and I will survey the carnage that my brackets have become. Then there is the friend issue: I have none, so I will be doing all this by myself in my living room. My family doesn't even really like to watch any of the games, either. So I am trying to really enjoy these last few hours I have anticipating the pleasure before I experience (or possess) it.

A few quick predictions before I sign off: You already know what BYU will do. And I won't bore you with my whole bracket, but I have picked the following first round upsets (10 seed or higher winning): St. Joseph's over Oklahoma. Villanova over Clemson. Davidson over Gonzaga. St. Mary's over Miami. Western Kentucky over Drake. Baylor over Purdue. Arizona over West Virginia. Yes, I am a fan of the underdog. Who do you have?

One more. Four of the ESPN experts have Kansas winning it all: read here.
Won't happen. Mark it down.

Career Change

I'm thinking I need one. It occurred to me the other day when I was listening to Colin Cowherd on the way to work. (What a nimrod, by the way. And couldn't he have changed his stage name at some point? I cringe every time I hear it.) Anyway, he and Doug Gottlieb (now there's a name) were talking about the NCAA tournament. It got me thinking.

I've given a couple of careers a got shot: I've worked for more than ten years now as a Computer Technician/Network Administrator/IT Guy and have learned a great deal. I know how to reset passwords, plug things in properly, and believe someone when they say they had nothing to do with what is currently the problem. But can I say I love what I do? Not really.

I worked for a few years in Texas as a long-haul truck dispatcher, too. That was an education unto itself. I listened to gravelly voices on the phone say, "Come on, man, I don't get paid to sit. I get paid to roll." Or "Gimme something with lotsa miles and not a lot of drops." I even heard more than I cared to about the goings on of some seedy truck stop somewhere. But aside from the pager going off in the middle of the night and the stress I carried around wondering if all the loads where going to be delivered on time (for some reason, I was responsible to Sales whenever a driver was delayed or if our Shipping department was behind), it was the trip out to our scales to see why a truck was overweight on his tandem axle that told me to get out of there. I sat and watched as the driver locked up his rear brakes while his buddy crouched under the trailer to remove the locking pin for his sliding axles. He stood under there holding the pin out as the driver gassed it gently (if eighty-thousand pounds can be moved gently) to slide the trailer forward. That was enough. Let's get back to Idaho, I said.

So what do I want to do? I am not certain, but I know this: I bet I am in the vast minority of people who watched all four games from the WAC men's basketball tournament yesterday. Yes, all of them. I will allow that my willingness to watch the games, in and of itself, is not qualification for a job. But I am, I daresay, able to speak intelligently on what I see--more intelligently than some of the wingnuts I hear on the radio (or those broadcasting the WAC tournament. Is 'fustrated' a word? Is a Mack truck the only object that can be used to describe the space between an open player and his defender?)

And I wouldn't be a complete homer, either. I live in Boise and graduated from BSU, and although I want them to win, I don't see how they can beat Utah State tonight. A few reasons why: Have you seen Jaycee Carroll shoot? My man is nasty. He appears to have only two offensive shortcomings: He cannot make a basket if he is (a) punched in the face or (b) kicking the ball toward the goal with his left foot. USU's bench seems to be far superior, as well. BSU has guys like Greene (or as I like to call him, 'No Right Hand'), Cunningham (well, he takes up a lot of space), and Sanchez (Spazzy). BSU's starting five is good, but it takes more than that to win.

One more piece of evidence I'm not a homer: I went to BYU and I would love to see them do well. But although they are a 'lock' to go to the NCAA tournament, you can pencil them down for a first round exit. Count on it. I will watch the game and root for them and get excited when they get ahead, but I am not deceived. They will lose.

I had to type this quickly--you know before the game starts. But I also gotta go, gotta focus on my job, my career. But someday I will have a job that has something to do with sports. Count on that, too.

[Rest assured that if either of my "predictions" fails to come true, I will come back and edit this post to make it look like they did.]

Scoring

I made the varsity basketball team in high school. See, looky here:

You go ahead and figure out which one is me. But also, if you can, figure out why I am pissed I got no playing time that year. Perhaps "no playing time" is a stretch; I probably played a total of twenty minutes during our whole season: garbage time during our first few losses. After about the eighth or ninth game, I never saw the court again. And it wasn't just me; about four other guys were in the same boat. It became almost comical. We would race after time-outs to make sure we got our favorite seat on the bench. And I am pretty sure we all got worse as basketball players during the course of the season. Why was it this way? Simple.

Our coach sucked.

For the purposes of this blog we will call him Kreg Gimball. Anyway, Coach Gimball was in his first year as head basketball coach at Caldwell High. Apparently winning the conference title and tournament when you are the smallest school in the conference isn't good enough to keep your job, because that's what the previous coach had accomplished in his last year. Admittedly, the previous coach did have some decent talent to work with: Danny was 6'8" and went and played basketball at Boise State; Mac was a good athlete who played football at BSU. Even made honorable mention at linebacker for BSU's all-time team: http://boisestate.scout.com/2/421948.html.

[I am not going to take the time right now to detail how I hooked up with Mac's girlfriend Bev during my junior year. Ah, the cold weekday nights and Saturdays parked out at Lake Lowell listening to Depeche Mode and The B52s in her yellow Honda Civic. And not just listening to music. We multi-tasked. Mmmm, the late nights at her house: she would make faces while talking on the phone with him while she carried on her own conversation with me. I saw it as all as quite an accomplishment. Bev was older than me and I totally dug her. She was, you know, a real clean cheese. But I said I wasn't going in to that part.]
So Coach Gimball came in to take over a program bereft of talent (and height, as you see. There was about three inches difference in height from the shortest guy on our team to the tallest. "Which one of you six-footers wants to play post?") But instead of constantly running all eleven guys in and out of the game--you know to wear the other team out with our quickness and conditioning--he played the same five guys the whole game every game. Even after he figured out our team sucked. We only won a handful of games and got killed in many others. But even then he left the same guys in. We could all see them totally spent and nearly delirious during every time-out, but I guess he couldn't.

My proudest moment as a Coug came when we were shut out in the third quarter by Bonneville. Yes, our team went an entire eight minute quarter without scoring a point. And still Coach followed his plan. Of course I am bitter about it. I look at it this way: how much better were the guys playing than the ones on the bench? We are talking about a high school basketball team in Caldwell, Idaho for crap sake! Maybe he was afraid his team would go 3 and 20 instead of 5 and 18.

So when I went to college and found I had decent game, it came as a surprise: my senior year in high school had consumed all my confidence. And for that I thank Coach Gimball.