- The Toronto Maple Leafs won't go away. Mirtle figures it would take a 9-1 record to get in the post-season. That's where the discussion ought to end, no?
- Stephen Colbert portrays a hockey announcer in The Love Guru; but wouldn't he have trouble telling the teams apart because he doesn't see colour?
- Mike (Awesome) Wilner has some interesting stuff on the track record of pitchers coming back from a torn labrum in the wake of the news about the Jays' Casey Janssen. It's not encouraging.
- Stephen Brunt's tribute to J.I. Albrecht is a must-read.
- Quite the scandal in upstate New York: No, not Eliot Spitzer -- talking about Syracuse getting blown out by 19 points in the first round of the Big East tournament.
(Yes, it appears Up at 6 is back, after an absence of many months.)
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3 comments:
Orange fans always consoled themselves that, while their football team may have fallen on hard times, they always had basketball. Oops - not so much. This will be two years in a row that Syracuse goes to the NIT.
I'm not as familiar with college hoops as I am with football, but I know that in football Syracuse is really struggling due to the lack of true Division I-A players in their region. New York State produces about the lowest number of Div I players per capita of any state in the country. This means that Syracuse has to go outside of New York State to find talent, and competition on the recruiting trail is fierce to say the least. To make matters worse, Rutgers is now very competitive, taking away the New Jersey region where Syracuse used to find a lot of good kids. I can't imagine the situation in basketball is much different, save for the fact that in basketball, two good recruits can carry your entire team. Obviously football doesn't work that way.
Dennis,
Good points... whenever I've gone to an Orange game I'd check the program... you'd always look for who was their token walk-on from Watertown. They always recruited heavily in NY/NJ/Philly -- and now Rutgers is defending that turf after being fairly indifferent toward football and basketball for so long.
Throw in the depressed upstate NY economy, the weather there, it's a tough sell if the team isn't a perennial Sweet 16 team.
More and more there's cause to wonder if the 2003 team with 'Melo and Hakim Warrick was a supernova -- an exploded star that's visible in the heavens for years after it burns out.
Gentlemen,
A sad day in the 'Cuse, although the locals embraced the NIT last year.
As for the recruiting issue, it is a huge problem in football. And when there is a good local player - Mike Hart is from Syracuse - they don't want to stay. Also (Ray?) Rice, the excellent Rutgers RB, had committed to the Orange until they fired Pasqualoni.
The current basketball team has two players from Niagara Falls (Harris and Flynn), two from Philly (Jardine and Jackson), one from Syracuse (Rautins), one from Michigan (Devendorf), two from Baltimore (Greene and Onuaku), and one from Belgium by way of a California juco (Onganet). The big problem this year was injuries and inexperience. If Greene doesn't go pro, they should be ranked fairly high in next year's preseason poll, which, of course, counts for nothing.
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