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By Brendan Loy
We're at Thompson-Boling Arena for Tennessee's men's basketball opener against Temple. Go Vols!
UPDATE: Tennessee won, 80-63. We had fun at the game. Great newly renovated arena. Here's a photo of me there:
That's Bruce Pearl's autograph on my shirt, BTW, from back in June.
Anyway, tomorrow, I go to Neyland Stadium for the UT-Arkansas football game! Woohoo!
P.S. Oh, and GOOOO IRISH! BEEEEAT FALCONS! ... and FIGHT ON TROJANS! BEAT THE BEARS!
By Brendan Loy
Remember that big artificial Christmas tree that I posted a picture of them building in downtown Knoxville last week? Well, it's up now.
By Brendan Loy
My (slightly premature) wrap-up of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season has been posted at Pajamas Media.
They asked me to write something about the slow hurricane season in the context of the global-warming debate. I'm not sure if they got exactly what they expected, but I tried to be fair, balanced, and honest in my assessment. I'm not the person to ask for a dissertation about the science of global warming itself, but if I can convince a few people on either side of the debate -- most likely the skeptics in this particular instance, given PJM's core audience -- to drop some of their more specious arguments, I would consider that a success.
By Brendan Loy
West Virginia beat Louisville yesterday -- in a game attended by Trojan CFB blog road-tripper Jonathan Tu, who will drive to Knoxville today for tomorrow's Tennessee-Arkansas game -- in Morgantown by a score of 38-31, thereby keeping the pressure on surprise Big East leader UConn. If WVU (3-1 Big East) had lost, UConn (4-0) would have had a two-game lead over everyone in the conference, meaning they could have lost any one of their final three games, including the November 24 game at West Virginia, and still won the conference. Instead, as things stand now, the Huskies can still finish 2-1 and win the conference, but one of the wins must be over West Virginia.
UConn plays Cincinnati, which is also still in the Big East hunt at 2-2, Saturday at Cincy. The Huskies have yet to prove they can beat a quality opponent on the road, so this is a big game, even though UConn could lose it and still win the conference by beating Syracuse and WVU. The Huskies' three consecutive wins over Louisville, South Florida and Rutgers were all at Rentschler Field; their only two victories away from East Hartford have been over Duke and Pitt, and their one loss was on the road against Virginia. Two of their final three games are on the road against tough opponents: the Bearcats on Saturday, the Mountaineers in two weeks.
Also, if UConn beats Cincinnati and follows it up with a home win over lowly Syracuse next week, and West Virginia loses at Cincy next week, the Huskies would clinch the conference before even taking the field against WVU.
I never got around to writing my planned "UConn is for real" post after they beat USF, but Sunday Morning Quarterback had a good post on Tuesday titled "Getting to know UConn." In it, SMQ examines how the Huskies have managed to achieve this level of success, and then asks, "is UConn good? Does it matter?" A comparison to 2006-07 Wake Forest is made. Those guys, you may recall, ended up in a BCS bowl.
By Brendan Loy
The Big East has decided to invite all 16 teams to its conference tournament in basketball, starting this season. Since the league expanded two years ago, the bottom four teams have been excluded from making the trip to Madison Square Garden, but not anymore. However, it won't be a standard 16-team tournament format, pitting 1 vs. 16, 2 vs. 15, and so forth. Instead, it will be sort of like the West Coast Conference tournament on crack, with a series of byes and double-byes to reward teams that do well in the regular season:
Teams seeded ninth through 16th will meet on the first day. The four winners will advance to play seeds 5 through 8. The top four seeded teams will still receive a bye to the quarterfinals where they will meet the winners of the second day's games.
Remember the 2006 Syracuse team, led by Gerry "10 F***ing Games" McNamara, that was seeded #9 in the Big East Tournament and resided on the wrong side of the NCAA bubble, then won four games in four days to win the conference championship and earn a #5 seed in the Big Dance? Well, under the new format, the Orange would have had to win five games in five days to win the BET. On the flip side, though, maybe they wouldn't have needed to beat #1 UConn in the Big East quarterfinals (which, in '06, was considered the "must-win" game that clinched them an NCAA bid), since they would have already had to win two conference tournament games (over the #16 and #8 seeds) just to get themselves into that game. That might have been enough by itself to get them off the bubble. ... There are some scenarios where this new format will actually be good for bubble teams ranked in the #9-11 range, and others where it will be bad. Regardless, I daresay this will make the Big East Tournament more exciting than ever.
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