NCAA Selection Committee Screwed Up Perfection

The Kentucky Wildcats are heading into the NCAA tournament as the number one overall seed on the men’s side and there was really no question about it. Kentucky is stacked and is the odds on favorite to win the madness. They are getting the respect that they deserve and that they have earned.

There’s another team in Division 1 college basketball that went undefeated. They didn’t get the respect that they deserve.

The Princeton Tigers women’s basketball team completed a perfect season. 30 wins and no losses. Perfection.

Princeton was seeded as an eight seed in the NCAA tournament. That means the selection committee thinks that at least 28 teams are better than the undefeated Tigers. The selection committee selected 28 teams before a team with the best record in the nation.

That’s ridiculous.

Princeton is a member of the Ivy league which isn’t an athletic power-conference, but it is respectable. Princeton even played a non-conference schedule full of schools that people have actually heard of including Wake Forest, Georgetown, Michigan and a Pittsburgh team that is a 10 seed in the bracket with a 9-7 record in their conference.

There’s an argument to be had that Princeton doesn’t deserve a one seed in the tournament. UConn only has one loss and Notre Dame, South Carolina and Maryland all have two losses, but those are the only records that possibly can squeak ahead of perfection.

Two seed Tennessee has five losses, Florida State has four losses, Baylor has three… all sort of acceptable, but Kentucky has nine losses with a 10-6 conference record. Princeton has to be better than that.

I am not going to claim that I am an expert on women’s college basketball, but I do believe that an undefeated record should be respected to some extent. Princeton might not win the tournament, but they deserve way better than a seed that says their season was middle of the pact. Just look at some of the scores they put up in their road to perfection.

The perfect season ending in a national championship has happened 11 times in women’s college basketball, only six times by a team that is not the Connecticut Huskies. Six more times a team has entered the tournament undefeated and lost in the tournament. My point is that an undefeated season is not exactly common.

It should be recognized and not just thrown in the middle of the tournament as an afterthought.

At least Princeton was thought of unlike the 1983 Oral Roberts women’s team. That year Oral Roberts also went undefeated, but was not selected to the tournament at all. 36 teams were deemed better than an undefeated team.

The NCAA is a screwed up collection of people, but who knew that they could screw up perfection.

Hey, Kevin Garnett, Are You Ever Going To Play?

Maybe I was naïve, but I thought the move bringing Kevin Garnett back to the Minnesota Timberwolves was, at a minimum, a decent move. A veteran defensive presence never really hurt anything, plus if it gets the young studs playing all the better.

The funny thing is that he Garnett been much of a presence… literally. The Timberwolves have played a total of nine games since he started playing with the Wolves and he has only played in a total of five games. Five.

The four games Garnett has missed have just by chance happened to be road contests, a contest in which the Timberwolves get no percentage of the gate. It’s real fishy.

I understand that Garnett isn’t a young man anymore and won’t play in every game, but he does actually need to play for this move to look legitimate. The Wolves have just played three straight road games, none in a back-to-back, and Garnett hasn’t played in any games.

He needs to get on the floor.

Garnett and the team can say he’ll do more teaching in practice, but that is also a double-edged sword. Garnett frankly doesn’t deserve practice minutes if he isn’t going to play in half of the games on the team’s schedule.

When this move came about, I was all for it. I realized that Garnett was not going to turn around the Wolves, but I was excited to see what he could do with the bushels of young talent on the roster. I can’t see that if he never plays.

The not playing epidemic is even worse when taking in the fact that the team still wants to give Garnett a contract extension. An NBA roster can only hold 15 players, each spot is valuable and each spot should be able to play for yoi every single game, apparently Garnett can no longer do that.

Garnett gave his heart and soul to basketball and this team years ago, but there’s not a whole lot of heart in anything going on with his playing after being acquired at the trade deadline.

It’s looking like the Timberwolves traded away Thad Young for a week’s worth of attention and two sellouts of Target Center. That’s not the only thing that sold out in this situation.

I Don’t Want To Be Bobby Knight

I had an anger issue when it came to basketball in my younger days. I don’t know where exactly I got that from. I loved, and still love, the clip of Bobby Knight tossing the chair across the floor, so maybe I just wanted to be Bobby Knight. I don’t want to be Bob Knight anymore.

I’d love his success. Three National Championships, plus one as a player. Five Final Four appearances. Eleven Big Ten titles. A 902-371 career coaching record.

All of that success, but all that my generation remembers him for is throwing that chair across the floor.

The Minnesota State Boys’ Basketball Championships came to a close this weekend and as usual, you will barely hear anything about the Single-A and Double-A schools. All you will hear about is De La Salle and Apple Valley defeating an before-the-game undefeated team.

Single-A saw Rushford-Peterson win the championship. It was Rushford-Peterson’s tenth appearance at the state tournament since 2000. Thomas Vix has been the coach for 30 years and has been at the helm of a lot of good teams. I’ve never seen him yell.

Between tight semi-finals and championship games, from the stands the man has never appeared to yell. I’m starting to doubt that he can actually physically yell.

Vix shows little to no emotion throughout the game, in a good way. The most powerful thing that is shown is a death glare to an official or one of his own players. The glare is usually reserved for a player that has done something against his liking and it works. That look could cut through steel.

He’s found a lot of success by never raising his voice during the game.

The same thing is happening in Ames, Iowa.

As we head into Selection Sunday, the Iowa State Cyclones have won five straight games after falling behind by double-digits. That tenacity brought the Cyclones to their second straight Big 12 Tournament Championship and a lot of momentum headed into the NCAA tournament.

When looking over at the sideline, Head Coach Fred Hoiberg has stayed cool, calm and collected during all of the ups and downs, the behinds and the comebacks.

There’s evidence that the Bob Knight style works, too.

While Rushford-Peterson’s Vix doesn’t show any emotion, Triple-A’s De La Salle just won their fourth straight championship under the watch of Dave Thorson. Thorson is a man who never sits down and is constantly yelling. Yelling to the point that a totally neutral party in attendance will want him to sit down, breathe and shut up.

A team imitates their coach. There’s a lot of different styles in basketball that are successful and a lot of different successful coaches as well, there’s no one true way to go to lead a team to the promised land, but I know what’s more impressive.

The cool, calm and collected coach.

It looks better. Plus it makes it appear that you’ve coached your team to the best of your ability to prepare for the game. If the kids haven’t bought in our caught on by mid-game, there’s a 99.9% chance that it isn’t going to happen that night.

I don’t know what Vix and Hoiberg are like behind closed doors. I don’t know if they yell their head off during practice, but I do know that I don’t want to be Bob Knight. I want to be Thomas Vix. I want to be Fred Hoiberg.

I’ll just throw my chair across the floor in celebration.

Kevin Garnett Can Come Back, But Not Too Much Back

Somewhere in rural Renville County there is a door that just regained relevance. The reality the door shows hasn’t been a reality since July 31, 2007. 2,760 days that door has sat there. 66,240 hours it has dreamed about a reunion. 3,974,400 and change minutes later, that door has seen its wish come true.

The door is not covered in supermodels. I didn’t have a huge thing for supermodels when I was eight.

It’s not cartoons, TV shows, movies or musicians, but it was a Big Ticket.

My door is covered with Kevin Garnett posters and pennants and articles from SI for Kids. I kind of liked the guy. He was the best basketball player on my favorite team that always somehow made the playoffs and somehow (almost) always got knocked out in the first round.

8-year-old Collin freaked out today. Kevin Garnett returning to the Wolves is like a glorious return to childhood. My childhood could be seen in a 22-minute episode of Rocket Power if they could put Kevin Garnett in it.

Young Collin was enough behind the return of Kevin Garnett to make college student Collin think it was a good idea. As a whole from the basketball perspective, it’s stupid. Completely stupid. Thad Young is younger and KG is old. Simple as that.

But I could still overlook it. A couple month KG retirement party would be fun and I could understand the ticket-buying part that the Timberwolves want from it. Then it was reported that the Wolves want to sign Garnett to a two-year extension.

Now it’s just crazy stupid. There’s nostalgia and then there’s stupidity.

Garnett’s productivity has fallen greatly. He is nowhere near the double-double machine he was with the Wolves once upon a time. He now averages six points and six rebounds a game.

Sign me up for the retirement party. I’m cool with that, I can handle seeing the KG I’m not used to for a couple months. Don’t make me see it for two years. That would feel like 2,760 days.

Jon Stewart: The Young Man’s Most Trusted Newsman

Dan Le Batard can be highly questionable, I had to do it, that being said he makes a good point every now and then. I know the feeling. Le Batard yesterday tweeted out the following:

It’s the series of unfortunate events for Brian Williams that makes him a punchline. Williams will continue to be a punchline for a couple weeks and then again in six months when he is scheduled to make his return to NBC Nightly News. If he makes that return, we’ll have to wait and see.

A man making those punchlines will be Jon Stewart. You know him from the critically acclaimed Jon Stewart Show on MTV… or if you are most people you know him from The Daily Show on Comedy Central. Stewart has been behind the desk there since 1999 replacing Craig Kilborn.

Stewart totally retooled The Daily Show. Kilborn’s Daily Show and Stewart’s Daily Show are totally different animals. One of these two won enough Emmys to give one to seemingly every resident in New Jersey; the other won as many Emmys as his beloved Minnesota Timberwolves have won NBA Championships.

This is not supposed to be a putdown fest of Kilborn, but more proof that what Stewart has done at The Daily Show is simply amazing. Stewart changed the way young people get the news, especially before the Twitter age and still strongly into it.

I could go around my college’s campus and ask fellow students who Brian Williams is and who Jon Stewart is and I am more than positive more would know the latter. I might get a couple, ‘Isn’t Brian Williams the guy that raps on Jimmy Fallon?’, but that’s the extent of Williams’ reach outside the retirement home demographic.

Stewart has never dumbed down the news. He’s brought comedy to it and shown a light on a lot of tough stories in a comedic way that almost everyone can understand it. There’s an Eminem line, which is kind of taken from a book, that I always go back to: I joke when I say I’m the best in the booth, but a lot of truth is said in jest.

Stewart has never said he is the best, but the jokes he delivers somehow put everything in the right light. Not everyone agrees with everything Stewart says, but he says it so beautifully that it is hard not to just sit and watch in awe of the man.

There was traction to a story that wanted Stewart to host NBC’s Meet The Press. A real show. It’s not a pretend one that I like to watch. It’s a real-life, political issues show. That’s how good Jon Stewart is. Stewart is so good at being a comedian, a political comedian, that people want him to host a real political show. If something goes screwy during Brian Williams’ suspension, I can guarantee that Stewart will be linked to the NBC Nightly News chair as well.

Stewart has made it as a comedian. He has transcended satirist and become one of the smartest political voices in the country.

There will be a lot of rumors about who will fill Stewart’s seat at The Daily Show, but the truth is that new person will have to do it their own way like Stewart did. Nobody can replace Stewart just like no one can quite replace David Letterman. Stephen Colbert will try and I believe he will succeed, but he will do it his own way. The same goes for whoever is next at 11 p.m./10 p.m. central on Comedy Central.

We’ll hear from Stewart once he leaves the show and we’ll keep watching The Daily Show, but when we watch it will just be with a little different Zen.