Off the cuff: This was Dick Vitale's first UNC game this year though he predicted the Heels to win it all before the season. Prior to the game he said, "I think this team is determined this year to win it all." If you watched the Tar Heels football game against Duke earlier in the day on ESPNU and the basketball game on ESPN2, you got to watch a continuous scroll of the same scores and same information at the bottom of the screen. Do we really need to be reminded more than 200 times during the two games that Nebraska fired coach Bill Callahan? Give us the scroll every 20 minutes or something but that's ridiculous. I'm not sure how many times the announcers mentioned that the BYU players were older and mature and married. It started sounding so much like me that I thought I was pulling for the wrong team for a while there. Plus, being a white boy myself, I could relate. The racial makeup of the game - I know it's politically incorrect to even mention it - did bring back some old memories there for a few minutes. When Hansbrough failed to return to the floor after a TV timeout, there were five black UNC players against five white BYU players. When I was a kid in Rocky Mount, N.C., I and a few other of my white buddies would go to south Rocky Mount and play pickup games against all black players. It wasn't exactly the opposite of Texas Western vs. Kentucky but our underdog team, probably because we played together all the time, usually won. And, we didn't have to do shirts and skins. By the way, did you know that Nebraska fired coach Bill Callahan? I thought about reminding you every three or four sentences throughout my game analysis but hopefully I've made my point. |
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