These are pale days for college basketball, and not just because the Bastard Plague has taken its vermin-infested sledgehammer to team schedules and conference races and even entire seasons in some cases.
That would be bad enough if you could still hate the way you used to. But, nooooo.
See, it's the next-to-last Sunday in January, and Kansas has now lost three in a row. Kentucky is a sorry 4-9 after losing to Georgia. And Duke -- Duke! -- is a barely less sorry 5-5 after also losing again, this time to Louisville.
Man. Has Overdog Hate ever had more meager pickings than in this hollow winter?
The Blob would say no, because especially in Duke's case, the chronically haughty Blue Devils are more to be pitied these days than despised. What's the point of sneering at a .500 team? A team that scraped past 2-8 Boston College by one, in Cameron Indoor? A team that only beat Coppin State by 10, and so far has lost to unranked Louisville, unranked Pittsburgh, No. 16 Virginia Tech and No. 22 Illinois?
This is hardly the sort of resume that makes the Dukies worth your usual contempt. Where's Grayson Allen tripping people as the Blue Devils win again? Where's Christian Laettner stomping on a guy's chest and then, blankety-blank it, making the last-second shot that the networks will not quit showing during March Madness?
Yeesh. At 5-5, Duke is just someone else to ignore these days. The Blue Devils are a knockoff of their usual selves in this bleak season, same as Kansas and Kentucky.
In their place, I guess you could always root (especially if you're an IU fan) against Kelvin Sampson and Houston, now 13-1 and ranked eighth in the latest Associated Press poll.
But come on now. That's just not the same.
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