Ten things to determine who to pull for in the NCAA Men's BBall title game!

OK, time to kick this thing back into gear.

Could you ask for a better David vs. Goliath matchup than Duke vs. Butler? The little unknowns...a presumably non-super athletic group of young kids that make up the poster child for the Mid Majors, vs. the Emperor himself, Coach K, and his squadron of...well, non-super athletic dudes who won't razzle-dazzle you with feats of freakdom but instead will fundamental-ize you to death (think Shane Battier).

Well, maybe Duke doesn't quite embody the typical Yankees-esque favorite persona, but as far as polarizing the nation's college basketball rooting sentiments, I'd say no one does it better than Duke.

Presuming that you are not an alum of either school, and that the fate of your first child does not lie on one team or the other winning, I present you ten "things" to help you determine who you should pull for in tomorrow's Championship tilt:

10. Your bracket.
I actually kind of find it a lame reason to pull for a team based on your bracket, but it's true.... people have pride and/or money riding on these things, so I can cut you a little slack.
Verdict: Self-explanatory. If Duke winning helps your bracket, logically you'll pull for Duke. If Butler winning helps your bracket, then logically you'll pull for Butler.

9. Butler's location. As in, where the heck is this school??
Actually, if you've been paying attention to Final Four coverage, you might've heard that Butler is located in the same city as the Final Four site (Indianapolis), a mere 6 miles from Lucas Oil Stadium.
Verdict: If you fear the unknown, you might be the kind of person to play it safe here and pull for Duke, which you know is for sure in North Carolina....somewhere! If, on the other hand, you embrace the unknown, then you are a risk taker, and you will enjoy pulling for Butler, a team you know nothing about!

8. Pat Neshek.
As a sports fan and as a blog fan, I must pay props to the Butler alum and current Minnesota Twins reliever who was one of the OG athletes to run an actual blog. Kid is sick and a pretty awesome dude too.
Verdict: If you like the Twins, if you are a fan of strikeout-to-walk ratio, or if you read his blog, then your affinities lie with Butler. If, on the other hand, you hate the Twins, love walks, and hate reading, then your affinities lie with Duke.

7. Kurt Vonnegut.
As an English major, I must pay props to the former Butler attendee who simultaneously weirded me out and blew my mind with Cat's Cradle.
Verdict: If you like his books, you'll probably pull for his alma mater, Butler. If his books somehow scarred you for life, you can pay him back now by pulling against his team and go for the Dukies.

6. Academics.
US News ranked Duke the #10 college in America. Butler isn't listed in the national rankings but is a top ten Midwestern college.
Verdict: This seems like a push.

5. Richard Nixon and/or Ron Paul
The former President graduated from Duke with a law degree. Ron Paul also graduated from Duke.
Verdict: If you love scandals and/or somewhat crazy ideas, Duke is your team. If you are a scandal stopper and want to quash quirkiness, Butler is a little more your style.

4. Shane Battier.
The man does it all and seems to go totally underappreciated. Gotta love his non-glamorous contributions, especially if you own him in fantasy basketball.
Verdict: If you like Shane Battier, you like Duke. If you can't stand Shane Battier, then you can pull against Duke, Kobe Bryant.

3. You are American.
How can you NOT pull for the underdog? It's the American thing to do! See: America vs. the British, 1776, 1812, 2008, etc. On the other hand, America does enjoy quite a nice position atop the world in just about... well, everything. You might be used to being the best, and Duke, whether you like them or not, has come to embody "the best" in college basketball.
Verdict: If you like to align yourself with things American, pulling for the underdog is one of those things, and you will pull for Butler. If, however, you hate aligning yourself with such things - you are from a different country, for example -you are free to pull for the favorite and are a Duke backer.

2. Wunderkind coach Brad Stevens.
He's only 33, and in only his 3rd season as Butler's head coach, all he has done is compile an 89-14 record while leading his Bulldogs to the tourney 3 years in a row, not to mention Butler's first NCAA title game in school history. And oh yeah, there's all that stuff about how he grew up only minutes from Butler, and this is his dream job, blah-bl-blah-bl-blah.
Verdict: If you like feel-good stories, Butler is your team. If Brad Stevens is the kind of guy you'd just love to punch because he's just got everything figured out, then you might be going with Duke on this one!

1. Coach K.
Some people think he's the best thing to happen to college basketball coaching since John Wooden. Other people think he's the devil. Note: he did lead Team USA to Olympic Gold in Beijing...so your feelings for Thing #3 might come into play here.
Verdict: Your call.

So there you have it. I didn't bother coming up with a point system here, but my guess is... if you have more points in favor for you to pull for one team or the other.... well, go ahead and pull for that team!

Encounter with cursed item #274

Of course I would run into this at some novelty shop in the middle of nowhere.... aka Upland... I keeeeed!

Shopkeeper: "Take this plate.... but beware, it carries a terrible curse!"
Homer: "Ooh... that's bad."
Shopkeeper: "But it comes with a free season pass!"
Homer: "That's good!"
Shopkeeper: "The season pass means you'll have to go to ALL Clippers games."
Homer: "That's bad..."
Shopkeeper: "But it comes with a choice of every best amateur player ever!"
Homer: "That's good!"
Shopkeeper: "The last time the Clippers had their choice, they selected Michael Olowakandi."
Homer: [blank stare]
Shopkeeper: ..."That's bad."

Yee Man's Top 10 Ways to Approach a Female at the Gym!

So I've been kickin' it at the local gym for a little while now, hangin' out with my ladies Agnes and Gertrude, and takin' down numbers left and right, as always! After a few heart-to-hearts with these lady folk, I really feel like I'm learning something about women! I decided it was time to take some of this wisdom and make a relevant blog post that should benefit us all:

Yee Man's Top 10 Ways to Approach a Female at the Gym!
* Disclaimer: Use at your own risk. I assume no liability for personal injuries caused to either yourself or your female target!

10. She's booking it on the treadmill.
When better to work in a few...... words..... at ..... a ...... slow...... and .................incomprehensible.......rate??!

9. She's benching.
Bonus points if she just assumed the bench from you and has to adjust the weight from your 80 to her 220!

8. You're on the treadmill. She walks in.
You trip and face plant.
If that doesn't ooze of the word "dashing," I don't know what does!

7. Yell REALLY LOUDLY for no apparent reason. Also, start banging on the walls/re-arranging all the dumbbells rampantly/jumping around like a gorilla.
They always say, if you can get her attention, you're in!
At worst, security will have to come in and kick you out.... and we all know that ladies love an outlaw!

6. She's on the elliptical. You walk up to her and start talking to her about how the planets orbit the sun in an elliptical shape, not a circular one.
Ladies love it when you talk about the stars 'n crap!

5. She's stretching. Or doing some obscene yoga pose.
You're staring.
Works like a charm, every time!

4. Do something awesomely manly... like belch... or better!
Ladies love a good cave man!

3. She's doing sit-ups. You're workin' the dumbbells right next to her. You can't think of a line so you do the next best thing you can think of: DROP ONE ON HER!
Smooth, baby!


2. She's on the bike. You walk up to her and ask her, "Are you tired?"
"From what?" she responds.
"From biking around my mind all day!" you say.
"Actually, this is a stationary bike... it doesn't move, so technically it's impossible for me to be biking around anywhere, let alone your mind," she says.
You pause for a few seconds.
"Hey!" you restart. "Are you tired?"
Eye roll.
Nice talkin' to ya!

and..... Yee Man's #1 Way to Approach a Female at the Gym!.....................

1. She's in between sets/stretching/milling about. You smile, walk up to her, and ask, "How's it going?"
No, wait a second... this one might actually work!!!

Feel free to share YOUR best ideas too!

Pac-10 basketball as hotels: the Washington schools

Continued from my previous post in which I began comparing Pac-10 men's basketball teams to hotels... this post: the Washington schools!

Washington State (15-8, 5-6, 7th): Luxor, Las Vegas.

Remember that one place that used to be cool not too long ago... the place that was kinda hip because it had something novel to it ("How about a Pyramid topped by a GIANT-ASSED BEAM that shoots into space???")...and then, with almost a blink of an eye, it became old news?

Yeah. That's Wazzu for you.

It seems like only yesterday that wunderkind head coach Tony Bennett was drawing up crazy defensive schemes for the likes of Derrick Low, Kyle Weaver, and Robbie Cowgill to employ to terrorize the Pac-10.

It also seems not too long ago that the Luxor was the hippest new joint on the Strip. (Humor me!)

Fast-forward to 2010.

Unfortunately for the Pullman faithful, Bennett is now the head coach at Virginia after 3 solid seasons (69-33 W-L) with the Cougars, including a Sweet Sixteen appearance in 2008. Most of the players who thrived under Bennett are gone as well.

Likewise, today the Luxor is overshadowed by bigger, fancier hotels like Mandalay Bay and the Venetian. When you think "Vegas," pretty much the only reason "Luxor" comes to mind is if you're looking for dirt-cheap rooms.

But of course, I like to look on the bright side of things.

At the very least, the current Wazzu squad still has one thing going for them: a sophomore named Klay Thompson. If you check out the team stats, you'll notice that Klay is pretty much carrying the team. Cougars fans can think to themselves, "Maybe, just maybe Klay will bring us back to the promised land!"

Similarly, anytime you're cruising the Strip, you still can't help but notice the Luxor, if for nothing more than the aforementioned monster of a beam shooting up from its roof. I'm sure Mr. and Mrs. Luxor are hoping against hope that all those moths that the beam attracts will someday translate into one thing: MORE PATRONS.

So there you have it: Wazzu & Luxor. Two entities. Both once glorious, both now fallen from grace. But both still holding onto that one ray of hope!

Washington (16-7, 6-5, 2nd): RMS Titanic, somewhere over the Atlantic.

It started with UW sophomore guard Isaiah Thomas being delivered to my door in the form of SI cover boy for the 09-10 college basketball preview issue. It continued with the Huskies opening the year ranked in the low teens in both polls. It REALLY got going when Cal took only a couple weeks to fall out of the rankings and UW held steady. Yup, by mid-December it sure looked like Lorenzo Romar's boys were the class of the Pac-10!

Woops.

Now I admit that invoking one of the greatest disasters of all time might be overdoing it a bit. No one in their right mind is calling for Romar's head - not yet at least. No one is signing Leo or Kate up to dramatize the sinking of this U-Dub team. But I do think that a team SI picked in its Top 10 that is now hoping to make the NIT represents quite the plummet.

There were some sexy names that went into the Titanic too: JP Morgan funded its construction. Some rich folks named Astor and Guggenheim were abord the ship for its maiden voyage.

Likewise, U-Dub has produced some sexy names in the NBA, most notably and most recently Brandon Roy and Nate Robinson.

But a lotta good that sexiness is doing now, right???

Perhaps I'm jumping the gun a bit with this call, and maybe the Huskies will turn it around in the last few weeks of the season. But as far as failing to live up to the hype and things not ending well, I'd say UW and the Titanic are in the same boat!

Buddum chhh!!!!

Next up: the Arizona schools!

Uh, hey, Katie Uhlaender..... Hollaaaaa!

This morning I read this LA Times article by Candus Thomson on US Skeleton athlete Katie Uhlaender, former world championships silver medalist and two-time World Cup champion. Immediately two thoughts came to mind: 1) Ms. Uhlaender's story is worth sharing, and, perhaps more importantly 2) Ms. Uhlaender's holla-ness is worth sharing.

Seeing as how I started this blog with which I can do's whatever I want's .... the first Hollaaaaa! was born!

Before I lose sight of how touching the story is, I'll tell you that the article focuses on the inspiration she draws from her late father, a former Major League outfielder, and how their bond continues to drive her to compete. Some of his advice was pretty straight up (i.e. legit), in my opinion. I implore you to read Thomson's article and be inspired by it as you so will, if you haven't done so already.

Anyhow, we all know that skeleton is one dangerous-assed sport, so Katie deserves a Holla! based on pure bravery alone. As it is now, I contemplate wearing a helmet while driving a car ... and that's inside a two-ton death machine! Katie and her colleagues lie supine and ROCKET face-first down mountains at 80 miles an hour!

With the 2010 Winter Olympics only a couple days away (yes, the Opening Ceremony is Friday, Feb. 12, at 7:30p ET/PT on NBC!), I thought I could pass along another reason for peeps to tune in.

Move over, Lindsey Vonn, Katie Uhlaender is here to kick some cold-weather ass!

Big Red to Pac-10: "Weak."

For the second week in a row, the Cornell Big Red men's basketball team (20-3, 6-0) is ranked in the USA Today/ESPN poll, while nary a Pac-10 team garnered a single vote in either poll. After entering the rankings last week for the first time since Harry Truman was in office, Ithaca's Finest check in this week at #22 in the ESPN poll and just outside the AP Top 25 at #27.

I'm not sure what's more impressive: Cornell coach Steve Donahue's Coach K-like ability to take an (almost) all-white guy team and make them awesome, or the Pac-10's overall crappiness this year. Let us not forget that, as a member of the Ivy League, Cornell does not award athletic scholarships, which makes the accomplishments of Donahue's boys even MORE remarkable. (Take that, unnamed Pac-10 players driving around in "donated" SUVs!)

Anyhow, in honor of Cornell's achievement and the Pac-10's collective ineptitude, I decided to do the only thing a man could do in such a situation: find a way to make fun of it!

Now, I don't know about you, but when I think of Cornell, I think "School of Hotel Administration." (If some guy named Hilton once called your hotel school "the greatest hotel school in the world," you're probably doing something right, right?)

So what better way to commemorate this occasion than compare the Pac-10 teams to places of lodging???

I'll start today with the two Oregon schools. Here we go:

Oregon (12-10, 4-6, 8th): Wynn, Las Vegas.

We all know about the goofy football uniforms.

Just an FYI: Nike founder/Oregon alum Phil Knight doesn't skimp on the basketball unis either.

So why the Wynn?

Well, I had the privilege of lodging there a few years ago (cramming 8 people into a room in which there were officially 2 people staying, yes!), and while it feels quite comfortable - I mean, really, nothing says "luxury" like a plasma screen TV in the bathroom - there's still something a liiiittle tacky about the place.

Maybe it was the virtual smorgasbord of colors splashed everywhere with no regard for the possibility that some color combinations can cause human blindness.

Or maybe it was the random fluorescent fake animals (not sure if they still have those).

Whatever it was, the Wynn seemed to capture perfectly the decadence of a cushy American vacation combined with a decor that was just a little off.

Compare this with the Ducks, who have just about every luxury known to sports-mankind provided to them by Mr. Nike himself, and yet the things they choose to wear on TV are juuuuust a little off.

Voila, we have ourselves a Wynn-ar!

Oregon State (10-12, 4-6, 9th): Blair House, Washington, DC.

Also known as the President's Guest House, this one was too easy, since OSU coach Craig Robinson, aka First Lady Michelle (Robinson) Obama's brother, has actually stayed here.

Upon further thought though, OSU's "struggles" through the Pac-10 may parallel Craig's slightly more famous bro-in-law's "struggle" to push the healthcare bill through.

Now I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that I'm some kind of political expert, but I do know that trying to earn a road win in the rugged Pac-10 can be just as difficult, if not MORE so, than convincing a bunch of people who hate you to agree with you. Yeah???

Tune in (some time later) for the next pair of schools!

How college basketball reminded me that I have a heart

After a buddy mentioned an old, familiar name in Trent Johnson, I was perusing the ol' NCAA Men's Basketball standings to check up on how our (Stanford's) former coach was faring in his second season at LSU. I had heard earlier in the year that the Tigers were struggling, and the professional researcher in me wanted to re-confirm such intelligence.

Sure enough, my spidey senses were correct, as Trent's Tigers are sitting in last place in the SEC with an 0-9 conference record, a disappointing turnaround from last year's regular season conference champs. Though they did manage to rack up a respectable 9-5 non-conf record, LSU's last win came on January 4 against small conference McNeese St., and since then Trent's squad has proceeded to lose its first 9 SEC games by an average of more than 13 points a game (pretty much a blowout in college basketball).

Maybe we can partially credit LSU's performance to the specter of facing one Mr. John Wall...but of course, he can only beat you one game at a time, and most likely that is limited to the games in which his team is actually playing yours. Maybe, though, the Tigers were so spooked at the thought of trying to contain him that they figured they might as well lose every conference game leading up to their tilt with Kentucky, just in case, so they'd be used to the feeling if Mr. Wall made it happen to them too. Anything's possible, right??

Whatever it is, this year's Tigers unfortunately seem to lack most, if not all of the punch that earned them a #8 seed in last year's tourney, and at this point, LSU's outlook for even an NIT bid looks bleak at best.

While counting down the games until LSU gets off its SEC-schnide may prove to be a thrill ride [and I'm being facetious - I can hold no ill will against the man who brought us the Lopezes (pronounced "Lo-PEEZ-us") and my personal favorite, Lawrence "The Law" Hill], I stumbled upon a couple situations even more dire than the... "Let's Wait Quietly Until Spring Practice To Start Talking Unwarranted and Unjustified Smack Again"-fest going on in Baton Rouge.

I was but a few seconds into singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" in honor of LSU's "defeated" conference record when my eyes caught a pair of other names: Alcorn State and Bryant. No, it wasn't the idea that Kobe somehow started his own college somewhere, (which would be sweet, by the way... I can imagine it now, "Court Tactics 101: Dunking Is Your Friend", etc.); what literally caught my eye were the extra 0s in the win columns next to the names.

Yes, the Braves of Alcorn State and the Bulldogs of Bryant University (and yes, I had to google their mascots) have the dubious distinction of being entirely winless on the season. Alcorn State, of the Southwestern Athletic Conference, is 0-11 in conference play and 0-24 on the year, while Bryant is "one-upping" Alcorn State with an 0-12 record in the Northeast Conference and an 0-24 mark on the year.

Now, I am not the type to mock a winless team. Not only did I sweat out a 1-11 football team on the Farm, I played baseball in high school for a team that won MAYBE 10 games in 3 years...in a league full of smaller, private schools! And that's not even to mention the kickball team I played in a couple months ago that won a measly ONE GAME in league play. (Though it was still a lot of fun!) Needless to say, I know what it's like to be on the wrong side of a Win-Loss record in which one of those values is a "0".

This being the internet (or "intarwebs" as it is better known), I figured I could draw something interesting or meaningful from my 2 minutes of NCAA-related research. So it is here that I will begin writing up and following the progress of my two new teams to watch: Alcorn State and Bryant.

Alcorn State has 7 games left on the season, while Bryant has 6. I will be pulling for each of them to pull off a win, not just for the fans, but mostly for the kids who are putting in the hours of practice and leaving their sweat on the court. While my time might be limited before either or both of these teams break into the wins column, I would like to take this opportunity to delve a little deeper into their stories and provide some insight into my feelings for them. Thanks for reading!

Next up for the Alcorn St. Braves (0-24, 0-11): Saturday, 2/13 vs. Miss. Valley St (6-18, 5-6)
Next up for the Bryant Bulldogs (0-24, 0-12): Thursday, 2/11 vs. St. Francis (PA) (7-16, 5-7)