Stanford Columnist Goes Off

Dan McCarthy, of the Stanford student paper, had a bit of fun
at Duke's expense, dispensing insults and zingers with great glee. But he
might have gone too far when he said this: "TV commentators love to go on and on about Duke’s academic prowess in addition to their athletic skill, as if being called “the Harvard of the South” wasn’t an insult. That’s like being the hottest girl at Cal Tech, or having the largest penis in Japan."

You'd think someone living in California wouldn't fall into
such easy racial stereotypes about Japanese, but whatever. He'll be
getting the hate mail, not us. Since he put his e-mail in his article,
here's where you can reach him: dmcc23@stanford.edu.

Among his other insults, he calls Coach K "Polish K." It's
not exactly an insult, particularly not if you're proud of your ancestry as
Coach K clearly is, but again: what's the point? Mentioning someone's ethnicity just seems like a cheap shot, particularly from someone with such a sarcastic streak.

And for a whack at Cameron, here's his best shot: "Actually, Duke is
worse in that Yankee fans typically have a solid understanding of baseball,
while the Cameron Crazies are usually nerds with no athletic background who have
decided to go watch basketball because it’s the cool thing to do. Plus, it
can’t hurt their cause when ESPN.com, along with every other major sports
media source, has had its face glued to the Devils’ collective ass all year."

He also insults St. Joe's, saying that wins in the A-10 are pretty
meaningless. Okay, but the A-10 is a collection of mostly private
schools. As far as we know, only UMass and Rhode Island are state schools,
and, yes, they are egregiously bad.

But for a PAC-10 guy to say another conference sucks, well,
that's just kind being willfully obtuse. We could say that all Stanford
undergrads lack descended testes and secondary sexual characteristics, but so
what?

The fact is that neither Stanford nor St. Joe's could dominate
their usually admirable conferences if they did not suck so horribly this
year. And in fact, given the disparity in resources between schools like
Stanford, Arizona, UCLA, Cal, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, Washington
State, USC, and Arizona State on the one hand and St. Joe's, Temple, Rhode
Island, UMass, Fordham, St. Bonnie's, Dayton, George Washington, Xavier,
Richmond, Duquesne and LaSalle on the other, the only fair thing to say is that
the PAC-10 sucks much worse than anyone ever imagined possible, and if Stanford
can't go undefeated against this bunch of hosers, they don't deserve to put up a
peach basket.

Look at the table over there - only four teams over .500. Our guess is that
Duke, State, Wake Forest, Tech, UNC, and maybe Florida State could go undefeated
in that excuse for a conference. Certainly, at worst, they'd lose only to Stanford, and probably only on the road.

So Stanford gets their undefeated props, along with a four point win over
Rice, and a might 17 point triumph over Florida International.

We'll repeat our previous belief: Stanford's minimally competitive schedule
has done little to prepare them for March. We'll look forward to his
column after Stanford concludes the tournament.