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Browsing All Posts filed under »basketball«
“Great Team Chemistry No Match For Great Team Biology”
That was a recent headline from The Onion, and as usual, the short article that followed it pretty much wrote itself. “I’ve never seen a team work in sync with itself as well as A&M did tonight, but unfortunately, they were up against players who have bodies far better adapted for playing basketball,” ESPN’s Jay Bilas […]
Soccer vs American Sports, Part 3: Going with the flow
July 20, 2010
Dazzling offensive plays are the pop music of sports. Like catchy tunes, they are hard not to love. Even more, they are like the vocals and the melody of pop-music hooks. (You can sing these yourself in the shower or on the school bus, without realizing that the song was a hit because of the […]
Soccer vs American Sports, Part 2: In praise of defense
July 15, 2010
In Part 1 of this little series, I argued — well, asserted — that an appreciation of the individual and team defensive plays and strategies is an essential component of sports connoisseurship. As a corollary, a sport in which defense is either non-existent (say, bowling, golf, or most track-and-field events, for all intents and purposes), […]
Why the NCAA basketball Tournament is the “American Idol” of sports
April 25, 2010
[Warning: What follows is an overly long post, even by the standards of this rambling blog. It is summarized over the last 3 paragraphs or so.] At some point during the month-long March Madness gabfest on sports talk-radio Mike Greenberg (on ESPN’s “Mike and Mike in the Morning”) was railing against proposals to expand the tournament […]
Meet David, the new Goliath: Butler’s victory over Duke marks the dawn of a new era in college basketball
April 6, 2010
Move over Gonzaga, Villanova, George Mason, and the Western Texas Miners. There’s a new Cinderella in town. Take that, Goliath: there’s a new David. Butler’s unlikely run all the way to the National Championship last night was like cotton-candy-for-breakfast in the sports media this morning. Many in the American sports chattering class routinely profess their […]
Will the NCAA Tournament become the next asset bubble? The case against 96
March 14, 2010
In the previous post I suggested that a 65-team tournament could be justified not because it was more likely than a more exclusive tournament to crown a worthy champion, but because it helped the NCAA meet a number of its reasonable objectives — which include providing a great experience for the student-athletes, growing the sport, and […]
Meta-bracketology, part 2: Madness by design
March 12, 2010
I am willing to defend the NCAA’s current system for selecting the 65 teams in the national championship Tournament. But first a confession. I am also willing to admit that I know very little about basketball. I guess I know as much as most casual fans: I can follow the ball with the best of […]
Meta-bracketology: is there method behind March Madness?
March 11, 2010
There’s a 24-hr sports cycle in America, with several sports networks available on my cable menu any time of the day or night. ESPN alone gives me at least six, not including their virtual on-demand channels on the web. And yet most of the time no sporting matches are being played live. By even the […]
Bob Knight on How Good UConn Women’s Coach Gino Auriemma Is
March 9, 2010
Question on SportsCenter today: “He has 6 national titles, what are your thoughts on what Hall-of-Famer Gino Auriemma has done with this program?” Bob Knight: “I’ve said in the past, that if I were an athletic director looking for a basketball coach — I don’t care whether the team was going to be made up […]
Wayne Norman
This Sporting Life 
March 7, 2012
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