After a lot of speculation and concern after the UK game,
UNC pulled together for a nice win over Miami. We only got to see a small
part of the game, but Miami looked terribly disorganized. Welcome
to Tobacco Road, fellas.
Ol' Roy Williams (by the way, we're delighted to see that nickname catching
on in the larger media) said "First part of the game, I
think our guys were really tight. Around here, when you lose a game,
people think it's about the end of the world."
Well, sort of, anyway, but it gets a lot worse when the
coach makes frickin' cracks about jumping out of the frickin' airplane and how
this is the worst experience of his coaching career. That'll jack
up the anxiety level. He continued it by saying "we're not Green
Acres." There was a buzz about McCants before all this, but Ol' Roy
has magnified it considerably. After saying how crazy his team made him
after the Kentucky game, he now says he "loves" them.
One of the big differences between Ol' Roy and El Deano
is that El Deano had superb emotional discipline, and rarely let down his guard
in public. It's inconceivable that he would have cursed on national TV or
fired off a half-dozen euphemisms for the F word in a press conference.
Dean's discipline made his lapses that much more memorable, because they were
not that common. Ol' Roy's lack of emotional discipline, by contrast, is
one of his distinguishing characteristics. If he's not blubbering about missing
Kansas, he's bawling because a 22 year old player mastered his cravat. Or
cursing about his soon-to-be employer on nationwide TV, or suggesting his team
will drive him to suicide. And it' sonly January of his first season!
By contrast, State's Herb Sendek keeps his emotions in a
daytight compartment. You rarely see him smile or laugh, much less get
weepy. The thought of him crying over a player learning to tie a tie is
just hilarious. But what the hey - people are different. To be fair,
Ol' Roy Williams has never been scared to play tough teams, and that's a trait
you wish Sendek would pick up on. BYU wasn't a bad opponent, but it wasn't
quite UConn or Stanford now, was it? Still, State
did win, and fairly impressively, so props to Herb and his pack of rats.
In Winston-Salem, where the coach neither blubbers nor
quakes at tough opponents, Skip Prosser had
to keep a straight face about playing Brown. Leave it to Prosser to bring
up a literary reference in his post-game comments, although if anyone has
actually read "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight," they've
probably forgotten it by now.
In a bit of pre butt-kicking butt kissing, Oliver Purnell
says Wake
might be the best team in the conference. He might be right, but we're
betting that at least three other teams want a piece of that argument.
Maryland made sure the state was safe for Terps,
including the Eastern Shore,
but beating UMES mercilessly. Wow, it just occurred to us who Gary
Williams reminds us of: Richard frickin' Nixon (note to ol' Roy -
now there's a great use of the faux F-word)! Same tense body language,
enemies list, and paranoia, not to mention a general sense of misanthropy.
Shoot, almost the same bio, albeit several decades apart.
A few years ago, we were at a rehab center visiting an elderly relative, when
two elderly black women started talking about people nowadays. "People
always talking about drugs," said one. "Yes," said the
other, "no point in that," the other rejoined solemnly.
"And this rap music. Disrespecting women, taking the Lord's name in
vain," said the first one. "Terrible things," said the
second, both very serious and concerned. "And don't come bothering me
with all this sex nonsense," said the first one. After a pause, she
said, "unless you do it right!" And both women just erupted into
hysterical giggles. One of the funniest things we've ever heard, and it
kind of sums up our feelings about the dunk: it's a waste of time unless
you do it right. And Tech's Isma'il Muhammad
is doing it right.