March Blandness

It seems like Shank's off the NCAA Tournament bandwagon, and maybe with good reason:

The men’s NCAA tournament used to be great. But now that it’s professional basketball? No thanks.

March Madness! How’s your bracket looking? Got tickets to the big subregional in Providence this coming weekend? Do you think Rick Pitino and Coach Cal could match up on Saturday? Is Cooper Flagg better than Bill Walton? How about that Dan Hurley, huh? Think we’ll see a No. 16 beat a No. 1? Do you hate Duke?

Sweet 16 . . . Elite Eight . . . Final Four . . . Whee!

No thanks, Basketball America. I’ll be sitting this one out. I’m not sure I’d watch the men’s championship game if they played it in my driveway on Monday, April 7.

Seriously. The NCAA men’s basketball tournament used to be great, but I have a hard time understanding how folks invest dollars and emotions in today’s farce that has almost nothing to do with colleges and universities.

“With the Power Four conferences, it’s fraud in terms of terminology,” says Leo Papile, former player personnel director of the Celtics (14 seasons) and presently a senior adviser with the Clippers who founded the Boston Athletic Basketball Club (BABC) 48 years ago. “They use the term ‘student-athletes.’ That’s fraud. If you brought that to trial, it would be very easy to prove that that does not exist. I’m not a scholar, but I know that in order to get a degree, you can’t bounce around three or four schools in four years.”

True that. Not that anyone cares anymore, but when we watch the big schools in this tournament, it’s impossible to buy the notion that we are watching students at play. Oregon traveled more than 26,000 miles to play its Big Ten schedule — yes, Oregon is in the Big Ten — this season. That’s more than the circumference of the Earth. Think those kids are cracking the books or interacting with their schoolmates?

Today’s NCAA basketball is unregulated professional basketball. Frothy fans boost their favorite school, screaming their heads off for skilled professional players, most of whom have zero allegiance to said college, and some of whom maybe never set foot in a classroom or interacted with anyone on campus outside of the athletic department and compliance office.

I largely agree with this, because it is really stupid having a West Coast college like Oregon in the Big Ten (Stanford's also in the Big Ten, or maybe it's the Big Sixteen now) and the NIL money's why all this is happening.

What's This 'We' Shit, Kemosabe?

Shank feels left out (or he's feigning it again) of this year's NCAA basketball tournament:

We’re feeling left out of the men’s March Madness — and it wasn’t always like this

No white sport coat. No pink carnation. We are Big Dance wallflowers.

It’s March Madness season across the USA, but here in Greater Boston, we’re not involved. We are the ultimate outsiders. We are landline folks in a SmartPhone World.

The NCAA men’s Division 1 basketball tournament is more popular than ever and launches in full fury Thursday and Friday with subregionals in Columbus, Greensboro, Orlando, Sacramento, Des Moines, Albany, Denver, and Birmingham.

Here in the Hub of the Universe, we have no Terriers or Huskies in this fight. Also, no Eagles, Minutemen, Crimson, or Crusaders.

New England is represented. Sort of. On Friday, 15th-seeded Vermont plays Marquette in Columbus, fourth-seeded UConn faces Rick Pitino’s Iona in Albany, and 11th-seeded Providence plays John Calipari’s Kentucky Wildcats in Greensboro.

Once again, Shank writes a column whose tone is unmistakably provincial and arrogant - it's all about Boston / New England. The kicker is the use of John Calipari's picture to head the column; Shank hates this fucking guy, yet he'll use the picture to help sell the column. I was watching an ESPN '30 for 30' show about John Calipari a few days ago, and at one point it showed a picture of one of Shank's columns bashing Calipari during the end of Calipari's tenure at UMass, otherwise known as the 'run him out of town' phase of the relationship. Utterly shameless.

DHL Dan CL - Charlie At The NCAA

Shank's quick to point out the obvious flaw in this plan:

Good luck, Charlie Baker, you’ve got your work cut out at the NCAA, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces from a week on the dusty trail in Arizona . . .

▪ Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker Thursday was named the new president of the NCAA.

Sheesh. The man who looks like Roger Goodell is now going to try to fix something far more broken than any professional sports league.

As far as them being effective or even innovative managers, I don't see it in either guy. Guys like Goddell and Baker are simply yes-men, have zero history at turning companies / organizations around and nothing of note will happen with Baker heading the NCAA.

Good luck, Charlie. Big-time college sports is a cesspool. The NCAA makes the MBTA look like a well-oiled machine.

When Baker, who could have been governor for life (wrong! - ed.), announced he was stepping down after two terms, I assumed he was preparing to run for president of the United States.

Just what the 2024 field needs - Massachusetts' answer to Jeb Bush in 2016.

No. He’s now president of the NCAA, which could be more challenging than sitting in the Oval Office.

Baker’s now got to deal with the billion-dollar, blatantly professional, borderline criminal greed of big-time college sports while at the same time trying to serve worthy, Division 3 programs with true amateurs playing for the love of the game. It’s like overseeing Brookline Booksmith and Amazon Prime simultaneously.

How unlikely is Charlie Baker to succeed here?

Good luck, Charlie. Your first day on the job is March 1. By Easter you’ll be longing for those golden days of trying to fix the Orange Line.

Fight Night

I was watching this very game the other night but wound up flipping channels when the shit hit the fan. Fortunately, Shank's here with a recap of things:

Juwan Howard isn’t the first coach to lose control, but he was definitely out of line

By now you’ve probably seen the video of Michigan basketball coach and former NBAer Juwan Howard getting into a postgame dustup with members of the Wisconsin basketball staff after losing to the Badgers Sunday afternoon. The lowlight of the clip unfolds when the 6-foot-9-inch Howard reaches over a pack of police officers, players, and coaches and slaps Wisconsin assistant Joe Krabbenhoft upside the head.

Wow. Big-time college basketball coaches going at one another after a hard-fought game in February? Never seen anything like it … except for what happened at the Mullins Center in Amherst 28 years ago.

Local sports fans of a certain age certainly remember that one. No actual punches were landed, but those who were there won’t forget hearing enraged Temple coach John Chaney yelling, “I’ll kill you!,” as he charged UMass coach John Calipari.

“You remember that — when I see you, I’m going to kick your ass!,” Chaney hollered as he was restrained by UMass player Mike Williams while Calipari stood at the postgame podium.

Video goodnewss of the Calipari / Chaney interaction can be found here, and read on for more coach on coach dustups!

Gettin' Paid

The Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA and in favor of student athletes when it comes to compensation / renumeration:

Paying college athletes is incredibly complicated, and the Supreme Court did not untangle it

There were big headlines Monday when the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA violates US antitrust law when it limits compensating college athletes.

The 9-0 vote led to a flurry of knee-jerk reaction and flamboyant hot takes. And why not? Everybody hates the sanctimonious, greedy governing body of college athletics. Dumping on the NCAA is like trashing the IRS and the Fake News Media. It’s easy and it feels good.

But there was something misleading about this dance on the heads of the lords of college sports.

The Globe’s Page 1 headline was, “Justices back payments to NCAA athletes,” while the vaunted New York Times went with “College Athletes Cannot Be Denied Pay, Justices Rule.”

A Righteous Rick Pitino Column

Rick Pitino, coaching in his 2,000th college basketball game (or so it seems) gets back into the NCAA tournament yet again. Shank, in one of his better columns in quite some time, pays the proper tribute to the guy who destroyed the Celtics in the 1990's:

Rick Pitino, basketball survivor, is back in the NCAA Tournament

Rick Pitino: basketball savant, basketball survivor.

His name is mud in man caves and and saloons across New England. He is a bad memory of a dark time in Boston Celtics history. I mentioned him alongside M.L. Carr in a column carving up the 2021 Celtics a couple of weeks ago, and Carr objected, saying, “Do not put my name in the same paragraph with Rick Pitino.”

Pitino became a punch line in the college basketball world a few years ago after his latest scandal (this one involving an FBI investigation) got him bounced from a lucrative lifetime gig at Louisville. In addition, his 2013 NCAA championship at Louisville was vacated.

Still, Pitino could not quit, and his Basketball Jones took him to Athens. Like Michael Corleone in fictional exile in Sicily, real-life Pitino coached Panathinaikos for a season while things cooled down back in the States.

Now Pitino is back in the Big Dance with Iona, a school with a 1-14 lifetime NCAA Tournament record (the win was against Holy Cross when Jim Valvano and Jeff Ruland were Iona’s coach and star). Iona was the only NCAA school that would take a chance on Pitino. He is Norman Dale in “Hoosiers,” getting a shot at Hickory after nefarious activity banished him from every other coaching opportunity.

One of the few things I'm with Shank on - some respect for him (begrudging, of course) but definitely a dislike of this guy.

The Internet - How Does It Work?

With Google, Bing (and other internet search engines) and the Globe sports newsrooms at his disposal, Shank can't readily find the answer to the following question:

Help! I can't find this. Which NCAA game is first next Saturday?

— Dan Shaughnessy (@Dan_Shaughnessy) April 1, 2019

Fortunately, his Twitter 'followers' are there to bail his helpless ass out:

Google it

— Scott Zolak(@scottzolak) April 1, 2019

Virginia 6:09
Michigan St 8:49

— Jack Lamar (@JackLamar619) April 1, 2019

For the win:

And you call yourself a journalist

— Phil Mitchell (@philflare) April 1, 2019

Shank On The NCAA Tournament

Caution - some slightly contradictory statements ahead:

Zion Williamson.

There. Now you have a reason to watch the NCAA Tournament.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve lost interest in March Madness in recent decades. Living in Greater Boston, we are increasingly removed from big-time college sports. When the NCAA tourney unfolds, it feels like the rest of the country is having a party without us.

I'm not buying that. There's absolutely nothing preventing you from turning on a freakin' TV set and tuning into these games. Since Thursday, I've watched about a dozen tournament games, and I'll agree that Zion Williamson is an awesome player. What Shank is trying to sell here, as usual, is lazy provincialism.

For folks in North Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, and most of sports-watching America, the NCAA tourney is a three-week Super Bowl Sunday.

Not here. Sure, we have office pools and young folks obsessed with bracketology. Gamblers and fantasy players (is there any difference?) study every nuance of Gonzaga and Iowa State. But we have no dog in the fight.

Go, Northeastern!

Apathy Noted

A Boston sports columnist who doesn't give a rats ass about college basketball writes a column to complain about Boston's alleged apathy towards college basketball:

There’s an annual three-week party about to start in our country, and back here in Greater Boston, we are pointedly not invited. We might not even watch it on TV. Why bother? It has nothing to do with us.

Selection Sunday is upon us and we are like tobacco-spittin’, old-timey baseball scouts with an unopened invitation to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. We are like “The Biggest Loser” contestants being asked to watch a DirecTV video on the making of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

March Madness? It’s March Apathy on our regional sports landscape.

The only time Shank gives a flying fuck about the NCAA basketball tournament is when his alma mater, Holy Cross, is in the tournament. Funny how that works, isn't it?

Holy Cross - Fin

Holy Cross played their real NCAA tournament game early Friday evening against #1 seed Oregon. By real, I mean this - the 68 to 64 games played before Thursday's and tonight's meaningful games can be successfully argued as bullshit games, given their recent contrivance designed to get a few extra games on the tele and increase those all important revenue numbers that the Boston Globe wishes it had. And yes, they got smoked, badly. Point spreads between #1 and #16 seeds are usually in the 30 point range and they couldn't even cover that. Shank, as of this writing, didn't even bother to tweet anything like 'good going, HC' even if it wouldn't have been entirely convincing.

Hope Shank's keeping up on current events, because we are!

Holy Cross - II

The NCAA men's basketball tournament started this week. Since 2011, there have been 68 teams invited to the tournament. The bottom eight teams played on Tuesday and Wednesday, and Shank's alma mater was one of the winners:

We are Holy Cross yahoos. We are Bob Cousy, Tommy Heinsohn, Ronnie Perry, Clarence Thomas, Ted Wells, John Morris, Eddie Jenkins, Gordie Lockbaum, Dick Berardino, Chris Matthews, John Provost, Mark Shriver, Clark Booth, Bill Simmons, and Nick Lovullo.

Me, too.

We are proud progeny of the oldest Jesuit school in New England (1843) and there was a time when we were a national NCAA sports power. That day has passed. So it is a big deal when a Holy Cross team makes a mark on the national sports landscape.

Holy Cross will now get slaughtered by play #1 seed Oregon on Friday night. Expect another column extolling the virtues of an old Jesuit school, or something.

UPDATE AT 1:45 PM - Isn't it interesting that Shank's been deriding Boston sports fans for years for being 'yahoos', but now it's okay as long as you're on the Holy Cross bandwagon? Thanks for the ammo, Shank!

New Column Fodder

Now that the University of Kentucky has lost in the Final Four and thus deprived of their quest of a perfect season, do we have even money on the odds of a Shank column taking his last shit on coach John Calipari for the calendar year?

Grinding The Ax

The Kentucky Wildcats won their first two games of this year's NCAA tournament. As sure as the sun rising every day, you can count on Shank to take another shit on coach John Calipari.

Kentucky wins. Again and again.

I love this story. I love to poke fun at coach John Calipari, Kentucky superfan Ashley Judd, and citizens of BBN (Big Blue Nation, didn’t you know?).

No you don't - you just like taking steaming dumps on Calipari. You have yet to say a word either way about Ashley Judd, and anything you say about Big Blue Nation is simply cover fire for taking shots at the coach.

I love the idea that we have a team in the NCAA Tournament that is 36-0, with a maximum of four games remaining. If the Wildcats run the table they will be the eighth NCAA men’s team to finish undefeated, and the first in 39 years. No team has ever finished 40-0.

From there it's a long, drawn out discussion of perfect NCAA teams, Shank noting that Calipari's suit was 'right out of "Goodfellas"', and that there "may be more NCAA Tournament vacancies in Calipari’s future". No shot too cheap for this columnist.

That Was A Close One

Shank writes a follow-up column on Northeastern's loss to Notre Dame on Thursday:

PITTSBURGH — Sometimes it feels as though we are on the outside of this magical American three-week hoop holiday. It’s like the Miss America pageant, the national Mickey Rourke Tanning Championships, or a competition to see who can make the best chicken fried steak.

Technically, our quaint little Boston schools are eligible, and usually one or two earn an invitation to the Big Dance, but nobody really takes us seriously. We are spectators in this Bracket Bonanza, like folks in Miami watching the Winter Olympics.

The Obligatory 'NU In The Big Dance' Column

Taking a break from ripping the local professional sports teams, Shank writes a decent column about Northeastern University's athletic director, Peter Roby.

PITTSBURGH — Athletic director Peter Roby is not with the Northeastern Huskies at the Consol Energy Center this week. Roby was in Dayton for NCAA first-round games Tuesday and Wednesday, then drove to Columbus to oversee the NCAA subregional at Nationwide Arena in the heart of Buckeye Nation. He says he’ll watch the Huskies’ NCAA Tournament game vs. Notre Dame on television or his iPad Thursday.

Roby wears a lot of hats. In addition to being Northeastern’s AD, he’s also in the middle of a five-year term as a member of the NCAA’s tournament selection committee, and the latter role supersedes his job as Husky sports boss during this first week of the tournament.

UPDATE at 2:25 PM - Well, that sucked - #14 Northeastern loses a close one to #3 Notre Dame, 69-65.

Low Hanging Fruit

The more wins John Calipari racks up with the Kentucky Wildcats, the more chances Shank gets to take a dump on the guy, this being the second one of the year:

Here we are. Kentucky, the No. 1-ranked team in the country — coached by John Calipari — is on the cusp of NCAA history, 31-0 after Saturday’s win over Florida. Meanwhile, the folks at UMass have decided to retire Coach Cal’s “number,” and this weekend marks the 20th anniversary of him refusing to allow a Globe reporter to visit his home for Selection Sunday (nope, no animosity here! - ed).

Sometimes there is not enough space in our newspaper to articulate all the thoughts, and state all the points, that need to be made.

Let’s start with this: John Calipari is a magnetic figure, undoubtedly the greatest college basketball recruiter of the 21st century. He works the NCAA’s cesspool system better than any man alive. He is charismatic. He came to Amherst more than a quarter of a century ago as a Rick Pitino wannabe, but now he has vaulted over Pitino, and created the Brand of Cal. He is probably going to win a second national championship with Kentucky this year and is no doubt a swell dancer and would make for a fine dinner companion.

But as a Massachusetts taxpayer, I have a problem with UMass “retiring” Coach Cal’s number.

The only time Shank pretends to give a rat's ass about sports at UMass is when he can use it to take shots at John Calipari. That said, there's little to debate with respect to Calipari's tenure at both UMass and Memphis, where he and / or the team were hit with NCAA sanctions both times. He's not exactly Coach K in the ethics department.

What's interesting here is the italicized part above. When the New England Patriots played in their second Super Bowl in 1997, the Patriots threw a party and Shank was not invited. We believe this to be the point where Shank became a lifelong bête noire of the Patriots. If he disliked the Patriots at that point (or, more specifically, owner Robert Kraft), this snub was the proverbial nail in the coffin.

In much the same manner, if Shank disliked Calipari in 1995, this snub of a fellow Boston Globe reporter pretty much sealed the deal from that point until now.

Harvard Homerism

With a 61 - 57 win over the Cincinnati Bearcats, Shank whips it out and shows us his Harvard hard-on.

SPOKANE, Wash. — Let’s start by dismissing the notion that Harvard’s 61-57 victory over Cincinnati Thursday was any kind of an upset.

Sure thing - #12 seeds beat #5 seeds all the time!

Sure, this was a No. 12 seed beating a No. 5 seed in the NCAA Tournament, and Cincinnati is among the 25 winningest college hoop programs in NCAA history. The Bearcats produced Oscar Robertson, won two national championships, and filled NBA rosters with rugged rebounders in the days when bag man Bob Huggins put the program on probation because of a “loss of institutional control.’’

Harvard has no such hoop history. Until 1981, the Johnnies played their games on the fourth floor of the Indoor Athletic Building (the gym was above the pool, and Princeton players complained that the Harvard players smelled like chlorine). In its first 111 years of organized basketball, Harvard appeared in only one NCAA Tournament, losing to Ohio State and NYU in 1946.

From there, you get the standard Shank wrapup - a description of the rest of the game and a few quotes from players. It might have been interesting for Shank to offer a reason or two for Harvard's recent tournament success (yesterday's column didn't discuss it either), but that would require additional work for Shank, so...

Faking It, By Dan Shaughnessy

Last week, Shank unconvincingly pretended to care for the New England Patriots. This week, he pretends to care about college basketball (with a local angle, naturally).

SPOKANE, Wash. — This is a big bowl of awkward.

Tommy Amaker is set to coach No. 12 seed Harvard against No. 5 seed Cincinnati in the first round of the NCAA Tournament Thursday, and when the Crimson lose their next game, Amaker is gone. He’s Jacoby Ellsbury gone. Harvard’s loss will be Boston College’s gain.

This is not official, mind you. Maybe Amaker can push the Crimson all the way to the Sweet Sixteen this year. Folks at Mr. Bartley’s are hoping Amaker will still be at Harvard next year, and the year after, and the year after that. Maybe he’ll be there long enough to get his own statue in the Yard, alongside John Harvard.

But I’m betting he’s gone as soon as the Crimson lose their next game. The Boston College job opened up Tuesday when BC fired Steve Donahue, and Amaker is the odds-on favorite to be taking his talents to Chestnut Hill.

If Shank feels like stepping up his weekly column output past the single column mark, and he writes a few more columns about college basketball and the NCAA tournament, look for him to turn his firehose towards Kentucky coach John Calipari (who Shank despises) and Louisville coach Rick 'Minuteman' Pitino, who destroyed the Celtics in the 1990's.

Phi Slamma Jamma II

Shank is all over the latest Cinderella story of this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament.

FORT MYERS, Fla. — They play in the newly chartered Dunk City. They play on a campus that’s only been open since 1997. The oldest alums are in their early 30s. They play in the Atlantic Sun Conference. They are the lowest-seeded team (15) in the history of the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet 16.

And now they belong to the universe.

Florida Gulf Coast University is the home of the hottest sports story in the land. The Eagles just routed Georgetown and San Diego State in the Philadelphia sub-regional. Friday night they’ll play the University of Florida in Arlington, Texas, for a shot to advance to the Elite Eight. Not bad for a school that didn’t exist 20 years ago.

There never has been anything like this in sleepy Fort Myers. This is bigger than Deion Sanders. It’s bigger than the opening of Mike Greenwell’s amusement park. It’s bigger than Lou Gorman serving as grand marshal of the City of Lights Festival parade. It’s bigger than Red Sox vs. Twins in the rubber game of the Mayor’s Cup Series.

The only thing of note is the heavy doses of hyperbole throughout the column.

Now Get Off My Lawn!

The NCAA men's basketball tournament is fast approaching, and Shank gives the subject the contemporary treatment it deserves.

Just kidding! Shank instead goes back nearly four decades to his favorite decade (the Seventies) to let today's young whippersnappers know how good they have it now:

We will hear the noise a week from Sunday night when the NCAA men’s basketball draw is announced. Bubble teams will cry foul. Schools with double-digit losses will claim they were “snubbed” by the tournament selection committee.

Please.

You want to hear about a worthy team that didn’t make it to the NCAA Tournament? Hop into the wayback machine and let me tell you about the 1973-74 Maryland Terrapins.

They might have been the best team in the country. They had three of the top 10 players in the nation. They had six NBA draft picks. They were ranked in the top five all season. In December, they lost a 1-point decision to Bill Walton’s defending champion UCLA Bruins (the team that won 88 straight).

Then they lost the final game of the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament, 103-100, in overtime to North Carolina State. Some have called it the greatest college basketball game ever played. Maryland shot 61 percent from the floor in the losing effort.

The Wolfpack, led by David Thompson, went on to defeat UCLA in the Final Four, and won the NCAA championship.

All snark aside, this is a pretty good column; it's an example of the writer Shaughnessy is when he puts his mind to it.