basketball Page 478 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Jimmer Left The Court With A Bandage On His Chin, But Kyle Singler Probably Saw His Mom Crying
Your morning roundup for March 25, the day rockhopper penguins fight for their oil-slicked lives....

Your Omnipresent Sweet Sixteen Starter Open Thread
Tourney games is comin', yo. UConn/San Diego State at 7:15 p.m. BYU/Florida a dozen minutes later. Arizona/Duke at 9:45 p.m.-ish. Finally, Butler and Wisconsin close out the Sweet Sixteen's first night starting at three minutes before 10 or thereabouts....

BYU And The Mid-Major Hype Cycle
Today's Sports Illustrated asks the question: Are the BYU Cougars America's Team? (They also have an awesome cover photo, by Robert Beck.) The answer is no, BYU's not America's Team, because that phrase really has no meaning beyond a marketing slogan formulated more than 30 years ago. But it speaks ...

Calculating The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air's Usage Rate, And What It Can Tell Us About Ball Hogs
This is Regressing, a numbers-minded column by our clever friends at the Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective. Over the next few days, they'll be applying rigorous statistical analysis to some of the finest basketball movies in the history of cinema (and also Hoosiers). Today we have some b...

NBA Scouts Agree: Jimmer Fredette Is Very, Very White
The best part about yesterday's foreseeable New York Times story on Jimmer Fredette wasn't the obvious notion that Fredette might make for a less-than-dominant NBA player. Far better and more obvious was the list of less-than-dominant NBA players that several front-office types used to assess Fredet...

The UConn Fans Ruined Geno Auriemma's Birthday
Hours before his 57th birthday, and just after his Huskies beat Purdue by 24 points in Storrs to advance to the Sweet 16, Geno Auriemma sat down in a press conference and found something to complain about. Only about 5,700 people — just about half the capacity of Gampel Pavilion — had come out to ...

Frank Martin Is The Most Terrifying Coach On Earth
Wisconsin beat Kansas State in the second round on Saturday, and in the post-game press conference, a reporter's question made Wildcat senior Jacob Pullen cry. Terrifying hero-coach Frank Martin came to his star's defense, and in that moment we were reminded that if Frank Martin wanted to, he coul...

Marquette's Campus Rappers Have Composed A Fight Song Worthy Of An 11 Seed
Well, since the Big East bellyflopped in the tourney's first weekend, we have two teams—UConn and, uh, Marquette—left reppin' the supposedly superior conference that started with 11 teams on Thursday....

Bruce Pearl's First Con, And The World That Created A Monster
Years before he got himself fired from Tennessee, an Iowa assistant named Bruce Pearl cut a dirty little swath across the Big Ten. A look back — with the help of some little-seen documents — at the recruiting saga that taught us everything we needed to know about Pearl and the business of college ba...

Bruce Pearl's First Con, And The World That Created A Monster
The first time I met Jimmy Collins was in 2004. I was working on a profile of UW-Milwaukee's ascendant basketball coach Bruce Pearl and had come to Chicago to get the other side of the story. Collins was coaching at the University of Illinois-Chicago, but by that point he was much better known as Pe...

Duke Alums Are Worried About Craziness Of The Young Cameron Crazies
There is a crisis in Durham. Dennis and Elizabeth Chen, '02 and '00 Duke grads and presumably husband and wife, wrote a letter to the Duke Chronicle proposing a Crazie-off challenge to the university's current student body. At the Michigan game on Sunday, the letter alleges, the Crazies practiced th...

Who Wants To See What The Chinese Dunk Contest Looks Like?
You know you were curious....

Spanish Announcer Goes Loco After Amazing Final 30 Seconds To Euroleague Basketball Game
We could attempt to recap the final 30 seconds of this Euroleague game between Real Madrid FC and Unicaja Malaga on Saturday, but we wouldn't really know where to begin. It's much better, we think, to listen to this Spanish sportscaster's telling of the epic finish, even if you can't understand hi...

The VCU Pep Band Makes Its Director Gyrate Uncontrollably And Sometimes Strip
This is Ryan Kopacsi, director of the very-popular VCU pep band and also, apparently, a male model. He's known around the university and amongst pep band circles for his overenthusiastic dancing and for often removing his clothing during games. At VCU, this is apparently called "TTS," or Time To S...

Even Through The Tears, Young Texas Fan Manages A Brave Hook 'Em Horns
Your morning roundup for March 21, the day shots were fired over the price of a Beefy Crunch Burrito....

Your NCAA Tournament Sweet Sixteen Finishing Touches Open Thread
In the next few hours, all attendees will have RSVP'd for the Sweet Sixteen extravaganza. The final five match-ups are Arizona vs. Texas; VCU vs. Purdue; Marquette vs. Syracuse; Illinois vs. Kansas; and in the weekend's final game, Florida State vs. Notre Dame....

Tar Heels Advance, Face Aggressive-Looking Fan En Route To Locker Room
The North Carolina Tar Heels defeated the Washington Huskies with some help from officials who didn't bother double-checking the shot clock before giving the latter their final shot to conceivably tie the game. They also didn't bother to make a questionable goaltending call on John Henson, which wo...

The Man Born Without A Right Leg Is America's Best 125-Pound Wrestler
Your morning roundup for March 20, the day Haitian frustrations still have a Fugee in hand pain....

Here's The Crazy Ending To Butler-Pitt, Featuring Two Of The Stupidest Fouls In March Madness History
Butler somehow escaped this one, 71-70, and will advance to the Sweet 16, while Pitt became the first one seed to get knocked out of this year's tournament in the worst way imaginable. Tim Brando and Mike Gminski declared that they'd never seen "an ending like this" before Gilbert Brown missed his...

Kentucky Fan Enters The Memorable Tournament-Time Hairstyle Fray
Tipster Jeffrey G. was kind enough to send in that screenshot from today's Kentucky/West Virginia game. He also asked, "When did George Washington become a Kentucky basketball fan"? A better question is, "Why do both haircentric-tip targets from the past nine days have a ginger boy next to them"?...