Keegan Bell to leave Vanderbilt; AJ Ogilvy's Awful Smell to Blame?

Alex Gordon takes this shot without hesitation. God, I'm going to miss him.

Freshman point guard Keegan Bell, a rotation player for the Commodores this year, will leave Vanderbilt at the end of the semester to finish out his college career elsewhere. Vanderbilt failed to disclose where Bell would go, or why he was leaving, but experts speculate it was related to the fact that he had to live with a 6-10 Australian who looks like he smells awful.

All the great centers smell horrible. Olajuwon, Ilgauskas, Laimbeer...

Bell had been a three-star recruit out of high school and would likely have taken on an increased role in 2008-09 with the departure of guards Shan Foster and Alex (Fucking) Gordon. Suddenly, a team that did nothing but shoot 3-pointers has no three point shooters. This puts much more pressure on Stallings as he attempts to lock up Oregon guard Brad Tinsley to replace Bell as token white guard on the court.

This also makes Vandy's rotation dangerously thin, as Ogilvy, starting PG Jermaine Beal, and backup PF Darshawn McClennan are the only returning players to have seen more than 11 minutes per game this year. While the team is adding at least 2 more 4-star recruits (Lance Goulbourne and Steve Tchiengang), and a top-150 redshirt center (Festus Ezeli), it looks as though 2009 will be a rebuilding year for the Commodores. My projected record? 18-0 at home, 0-13 on the road/neutral.

Let the Festus era begin.

In happier news, guard/savior Shan Foster was named a 2nd team All-American by the AP, and will face off against AJ Graves, Drew Neitzel, Chris Lofton, and others in the NCAA 3-point competition on Thursday. It will mark the last Thursday that I actually watch something other than Lost or The Office until summer starts.

If you got all four Final Four teams correct you need to grow a pair.

Floyd Mayweather to Fight Basketball Failure

Getting chokeslammed into the hearts of redneck America.

Floyd Mayweather, seemingly determined to shift his legacy from "greatest pound for pound fighter of all-time" to "Rickey Henderson-Style Circus Sideshow", will wrestle Paul "The Big Show" Wight at Wrestlemania XXIV this month. The move is a controversial one, as Mayweather stands to either follow in the footsteps of Muhammad Ali (referee at Wrestlemania I) or Mike Tyson (referee at Wrestlemania XIV). However, unlike the other two, Mayweather will be actually wrestling, which seems like a ridiculous idea for a successful athlete who currently holds multiple boxing titles (Ali and Tyson weren't active boxers at the time of their matches).

Mayweather will take on former Wichita State center Wight, who at 7ish feet, 441 lbs, outweighs his opponent by nearly 300 pounds. Adding to the danger factor is the fact that while Wight is seemingly in better shape than he has been in the past 5 years, he hasn't wrestled in a WWE match since 2006.

Let's think about this. The Tennessee Titans banned Pacman Jones, a player that they have no intention of retaining as anything but trade bait, from wrestling in TNA during his year-long NFL suspension. All he was allowed to do was show up on camera, occasionally acting as though he'd just been attacked mysteriously off-screen.

Mayweather, who is not suspended from boxing, has plenty of money, and is arguably boxing's best hope at a revival against the rise of MMA, is fighting seemingly because he can't find more constructive ways to quell his boredom.

Mayweather-Hatton. The most romantic weigh-in since
that time George Foreman fought Leroy "Cuddles" Jones.

What's worse is that Mayweather couldn't win over the WWE fans, a group so fickle that they'll support a corpse-raper like the Big Boss Man so long as there's someone slightly more evil around for him to punch. Mayweather, despite following the time-tested WWE script and throwing money to the crowd, was unable to garner any support and as a result was turned into the bad guy for his face-off with Wight, who supposedly will now be turned into the sweetest 7-foot giant you've ever met. Sort of like Gheorge Muresan.

So unless the WWE has some ingenious plan where Mayweather is disqualified for saving big breasted hookers and kegs of Natty Light from a sinking ship and giving them to the fans, he's not going to make any headway with the rest of America. And for a man who is known for making it rain over strippers/hookers/white chicks, clearly the money is not an issue. So Mayweather has no good reason to be a part of Wrestlemania other than as a wrestling fan, and possibly to join the ranks of Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali - a group that he seemed destined to join regardless.

Will the Big Show ruin Mayweather's undefeated record? Will Mayweather ever admit that this pay-per-view is a mistake? I doubt it on both counts.

Thanks Bill Cosby.

Pictured: Certain virginity, bitter nights of bunk-bed dry humping

Bill Cosby, in an act of benevolence which will surely erupt in a flamewar on some chat room, donated a live Terrier to become Carnegie Mellon University's first living mascot. And now, the university is giving students the chance to name the poor dog. Why Cosby would give a live animal to a university he has no affiliation to is still unknown, but it's rumored that the dog contains smallpox and the Philadelphia native is attempting to systematically destroy Pittsburgh.

None of this would be so bad, but the four naming options available to the public (alumni evidently are not invited) are:

• Andy/Andi
• Skibo
• Scotty/Scottie
• Heart

along with with a grassroots movement to name the dog Chia, after a student whose parents presumably hate him soooooo much. I'm not sure that I could have thought of four worse names for a dog. They might as well be pestilence, war, famine, and death.

In our efforts to help out the one time Sugar Bowl participants (1939 - TCU 15, Carnegie Tech 7; TCU was awarded an additional 8 points after Sammy Baugh boxed and defeated an Australian kangaroo for his alma mater) we've come up with our own names for candidacy, which we feel will be a better fit for the university.

• St. Anger
• Asian kid
• Asperger's
• Virgin
• Kid Loneliness
• Creeping Death
• Uni-wheel, the dog that unicycles to class EVERY DAY
• Compulsive Masterbator
• Pokemon
• Butterface
• Antisocial failure
• Belligerence
  

Feel free to vote or write in your own in the comments section. We'll have a final verdict in the coming days. Also, feel free to comment on the fact that a school filled with Korean kids is adopting a live dog as its mascot. You don't see Wisconsin carrying a glazed ham to all their games. Just sayin'.

Country fry that and we'll talk, Wisconsin.

WHADDYA GOT THERE, NUMBERS?: NO HUMAN WILL EVER PICK THIS TOURNAMENT CORRECTLY

This in addenda to the Washington Post's article covering the futility of picking this year's Sweet Sixteen.

Offering a million dollars for a complete bracket is a safe marketing bet by ESPN that stirs up considerable interest with very little risk. There are 2⁶³ = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 possible ways to fill out a bracket given the play-in game is not counted, and only one way to win that money. If we assume that a bracket weighted with knowledge of the game improves those odds by about 6 orders of magnitude (base 2), let's say the four 16-1 gimmes and two other games, and that the 3.65 million participants of ESPN's Tourney challenge each entered a unique bracket (didn't happen, but irrelevant), the odds of ESPN paying up each year are about 0.0000000002814%, which will not happen in our lifetime, or in the expected lifetime of the human species. In fact, the odds of ESPN paying up at least once between now and 900 million years from now (when the surface of the Earth becomes inhospitable due to gradually rising solar luminosity) is only about 0.3%.

If during those 900 million years, ESPN invested their million dollars in an average mutual fund (with a nominal interest rate of 5%), they'd double their money every 14 years and have a total of 2^64285714 million dollars at heat death Armageddon. However, if the treasury was continually printing $100 bills (about 2^64285727 of them by the end) to allow ESPN to cash out their savings to actual currency (which is ridiculous, but bear with me), at a point of about 5 solar masses (1 gram per bill) their combined weight would collapse Earth to a singularity. This would happen in only about 1,416 years. This is without considering that college basketball would become a much more difficult game to play as the surface gravity of Earth steadily rose under all those dollar bills. So I think it's safe to say that we should either rob ESPN or stop this whole bracket thing sooner rather than later.

The Earth would look roughly like this in 3424 A.D.
thanks to ESPN. You, as the observer, would also die
if you got this close.

Vanderbilt Loses to Siena; Coach Stallings Saved Ignominy of Being Indiana Coach

When Jamie Graham outscores your starting backcourt...You know how this ends.

Vanderbilt, doing their best to enforce the label that they can't win away from Memorial Gym, got toasted in Tampa by MAAC powerhouse Siena, 83-62. The Commodores were led by starting guards Alex (Fucking) Gordon and Jermaine Beal, who came in to the game averaging 19 points and 8 assists combined. Against Siena, they went 2-12 from the field and chipped in 6 points and 5 assists. This put their combined production behind that of reserve guard Jamie Graham (1.5 ppg, 4 mins per game), who somehow was able to score 6 points in 10 minutes against the Saints' "smothering" defense.

To be fair, it wasn't just Beal and Gordon's failure that led to the defeat. Siena guards Kenny Hasbrouck and Tay Fisher used an apparent pact with Satan to go 15 of 20 from the field and score 49 points. Three other players finished in double figures for the Saints, who were then promptly blown out by Villanova, showcasing the Big East's superiority over the MAAC.

This is even worse news for Coach Kevin Stallings, who reportedly had been on a short list of candidates for Kelvin Sampson's old job at Indiana. After a blowout and a less than stellar away record (see previous posts, any article about Vandy basketball over the past month) he seems to be out of the running. Though Stallings would probably have welcomed a return to Indiana (he's a Purdue grad and former player), would you really want to coach any sport in the Big Ten? I mean sure it's great to get to a championship game every year, but then comes the eventual blowout loss to an SEC, Big East, or Pac-10 team and media scrutiny that accompanies it. And yes, much of the point of this paragraph is to piss off everyone else that writes for this blog.

And suddenly this is all I have left.

Georgetown loses, Ernie laments

G'town didn't even make it to the Sweet 16. I almost don't want to watch the tournament anymore. Well, that's not true, but I was sad to see them lose and no less to a team led by someone who looks like a cross between a 14 year old and E.T. With three quarters of the field watching from home I would like to consider a couple things from the first weekend:

Vandy Impressive In Just How Badly They Stank
Butler got jobbed being given a #7 seed and played Tennessee--a once #1 team in the land--to a great overtime finish in the second round supporting they were legit. As much as they were underrated, and showed it, Vanderbilt was an overrated #4 and showed it. As my colleague Schmitt would say, Vandy shit the bed...oh man did they shit the bed. Blitzed by Siena in a game that was never close. Definitely the most lopsided upset so far.

Duke--as overrated a 2 seed since Iowa State in 2001; UCLA rewarded with a cake walk
Duke showed they aren't just weak when they can't shoot, they are actually a sub-par team. Scraping by Belmont then getting taken to the house by WVU. Paulus is really wishing he took the ND quarterback gig right about now. The #2 (Duke) and #3 (Xavier) from UCLA's region are weak as those seeds to begin. After Drake and UConn screwed the pooch and bowed out early they have to beat only W. Kentucky to face either Xavier or WVU to move to the Final Four. By far they have the easiest road among the 4 #1 seeds remaining.

A pair of 12-13 second round matchups...great!!
Through close games, except Vandy v. Siena, a pair of 12s (Villanova and WKU) and 13s (San Diego and Siena) advanced to play each other. 'Nova is a good school having a bit of a down year, but played well and moved past Siena easily--making you wonder even more just WTF with Vandy. I have no idea who W. Kentucky is but they knocked out Gumbercules' national champion pick (Drake) so I'll root for them against UCLA as they scraped by San Diego.

Washington St. wakes up at halftime against Winthrop
10 of the 12 top 3 seeds made it to the second weekend. If you said only one #4 seed would be in the Sweet 16 I would have bet money it would not have been Wash. St. Since they were tied with Winthrop at half they have outscored their opponent 93-52 over 3 halves. That 52 points allowed over three halves is super impressive. They may have a shot against UNC who has decided that instead of playing defense in their first two games they would just play at a pace that neither opponent could match. Good defense beats good offense...and vice versa.

The landscape of contenders didn't change too much except G'town and apparently Drake are gone. I think UCLA and UNC still are poised to dominate. Kansas has played well, but they're really good at finding ways to fuck things up. It's ironic how Memphis has fewer losses than any team in the land and yet few people talk about them as possible champs. That trend continues here, too.

Who else got drunk and made their bracket picks?

A Vanderbilt - Xavier National Championship game? That's just crazy enough to work...

Also in the works, Cornell over Stanford (who I picked to win it all in my sober bracket), Texas A&M in the Elite Eight (...) and Pitt somehow not shitting the bed before the Sweet 16.

Fail.

This happened in one of my lacrosse games once. The defender that scored celebrated by smoking a cigarette in the middle of gameplay directly afterwards. In the world of club lacrosse, that's evidently completely legal.

Butler Rewarded for 29-3 Season, Top 10 Ranking with 7-seed

Congratulations! You get Tennessee in the Second Round!

Butler, despite playing in a weak Horizon League, put up a strong year in 2007-2008. They touted a recognizable star (A.J. Graves), a strong sense of team recognition after a strong 2007 season, and wins over bubble teams like Virginia Tech, Ohio State, and Southern Illinois. The only thing that they lacked was a signature win, as the only Tourney-bound team they played (Drake) beat them by 7 points. This however, was one of only 3 blemishes, putting them behind only UNC and Memphis in the loss column and giving them a Top Ten ranking in the final poll before the NCAA tournament.

Logically, the NCAA bracket makers decided to stick the team with a 7-seed in one of the hardest brackets in tournament history. For the #10 (#11 AP) ranked team in the country to make it to the Final Four, they'd have to potentially beat Tennessee, Louisville, and UNC in consecutive games. On the other hand, Vanderbilt, ranked #19, drew a 4 seed, and potential matchups with Siena and Clemson on the way to the Sweet Sixteen, despite the fact that their best win away from Memorial Gym was at Depaul (or Georgia, depending on how you look at them).

Really, any excuse I get to post Alex Gordon, I'll use.

While I'm not going to complain, as I'm sure I'll be crying hysterically after Ross Neltner goes 0-12 in regulation during a Siena upset, this seems like a huge oversight. Did Butler get screwed? If this was college football, we would have been praising them like we did Rich Rodriguez for setting up such an easy OOC schedule on the path to postseason play. However, since they didn't bother to put one team that looked like an NCAA lock on the schedule this season (Ohio State would be without Oden and Conley, no one thought Drake would be this good, and Florida State/Texas Tech/Michigan were all clearly going to be bad BCS teams), it looks like they have no one to blame but themselves. Now they've got something to prove, and all the cupcake teams in the beginning of their season have turned into monster games in the NCAA tournament.

Underrated? Probably. Screwed? Yes. But they're as responsible for this as the selection committee is, and they'll have to dig their way out to be anything more than a mid-major novelty this year.

Surgery hurts like I imagine that scene from American History X and that guy with his mouth on the sidewalk hurts.

Gumbercules, much love for the thoughts. I took the liberty of editing this post. For such an amazing feat of injury I just want to thank God, through him all things are possible. My actual x-ray looks like this:

I am now officially bionic with a plate and EIGHT screws holding my collarbone together. The incision for the surgery was a mere 6 inches.


The injury, of course, happened like this:


Get well soon! I have nobody to drink with.

I DON'T MEAN TO BRAG..

..but here will be the fallout after my bracket intellectually cleanses the college basketball knowledge you claim to hold:



And I'm totally going to bone that slampig as soon as she gets done talking about how sweet my bracket was. I assume churches, weekly tithing and ascendancy will come soon thereafter.

Only 3 days to go until college basketball Christmas. Or for Billy Packer, the 11 or so days where his value as a human being on this planet is supposedly justified.

Shan Foster Becomes NBA Jam Character, Awarded SEC Player of the Year

After a 42-point, 9 for 9 3-pt shooting performance (along with 3 nasty dunks!) in the 2nd half and overtime, Vanderbilt's Shan Foster was named SEC Player of the Year by the conference's coaches. Foster, who evidently traded mindsets with notorious 3-chucker Alex Gordon (see I'm Alex Fucking Gordon, Dec. 2007), simply caught fire in the 2nd half, turning the Commodores' 2nd-half offense into a game of dribble aimlessly for 30 seconds, pass to Shan, and watch him shoot.

I'm pretty sure this was a 3-pt. attempt.

Foster, who had become the team's all-time leader scorer in the previous game, was humble in victory. "This is the first game I hit nine 3s. To hit nine in a row, that blows my mind," The win kept the 'Dores undefeated at home, but continued their streak of having absolutely no good road wins, which will serve to undermine their NCAA tournament seeding (unless you count victories at Depaul or South Carolina).

Ben Hansbrough, who guarded Foster all night, could not be reached for comment. Presumably he was crying himself to sleep after resigning himself to the idea that he's become the new Eli Manning.

Foster beat out stiff competition to become Vandy's second straight Player of the Year, including MSU's Jamont Gordon (who lit up the Commodores before leaving the game in OT due to cramps), Tennessee's Chris Lofton and Tyler Smith, and Florida's Nick Calathes.

BEAVER STADIUM NOW BEST AT EVERYTHING

Per The Michigan Daily, Beaver Stadium is officially the largest capacity stadium in the nation at 107, 282 people. Rejoice! And a special thank you to the unruly handicapped who made this moment possible.

Your stadium does not look like this.

Michigan Stadium will henceforth be known as "The Quite Large House" on this blog. One remaining homosexual issue was risen again:

Engineering graduate student John Nanry said he thought the Big House "might lose a bit of its personality if it's not the biggest," but added that Penn State's Beaver Stadium already felt bigger because it traps sound better than Michigan Stadium.

Mr. Nanry, like many Michigan students on this issue, is terribly misinformed. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how a bunch of kids can be so intelligent and still think that jangling keys somehow intimidates the opponent, rather than simply appearing to be the largest assembly of salvation army volunteers in history. If you would raise your goddamn voice at the game things might be different, fellas. I can't tell you how many times I've played mute beer pong at 1 am because I left my voice in the stands. Don't think it doesn't make a difference.

With Favre's Retirement Vinny T. Has Eyes On The Prize

"Let's see...I wear black so throw to white!
Haha, another one for The Testaverdenator!"

For those doing the retiring, retirement means ending an era, allowing that what has been will no longer be. For those who have competed with an individual who is about to retire, that individuals retirement means something else. Opportunity. Favre retires holding most major records for a quarterback, including the most interceptions thrown, all-time. Looming in the shadow of that record is a curly-haired, former Heisman winner from the sometimes school most times site of illegal activity, Vinny Testaverde.

That's right, Vinny T. currently trails Favre by 21 career interceptions. While it might actually be difficult to throw 21 interceptions and still hold a job in this league, typically you'd be benched before accomplishing such ineptitude, Vinny T. has shown an admirable resiliency to such blatant measures of inadequacy. Vinny T. has eclipsed 21 interceptions in four seasons throughout his career and still manages to find a team that is willing to pay him money to run their offense. Look for Vinny T. to latch on where he can to show, once and for all, who's the boss of throwing to the wrong team. Some athletes stick around well past the prime of their careers to pad the productivity stats. Vinny T. never experienced a prime of his career and all he's got to go for is an ironic accomplishment where longevity and productivity clash. I say, play the hand your dealt, and go for it Vinny! The Testaverdenator rules!

YES YES YES YES YES

A tip of the hat to Run Up The Score who linked coverage on ex-Steelers Coach Bill Cowher visiting Penn State last week for undisclosed reasons. The seemingly eminent Penn State head coaching vacancy is the tastiest way to view this piece of information; another rumored possibility is that his daughter is looking at PSU for college.

Either way, FUCK AND YES TO ATHLETIC DIRECTOR TIM CURLEY FOR HAVING A SLEEPOVER WITH THE CHIN. JoePa was probably fussing and pouting (and eating brains) over at his house while Tim and Bill drank Yuengling and played Mike Tyson's Punch Out! until the wee hours.


Cross that one off of the life To-Do list, Tim (still left: bring back the PSU-Pitt rivalry). While I support Paterno's subtle "Let Me Die On The Field" campaign, bringing Cowher Power to Happy Valley would completely lock down PSU's western PA recruiting. I've always felt that a unification of the state would lead to a PSU national title every 6-8 years. Plus, annexing Pittsburgh would be a huge step towards destabilizing Michigan's, and to a lesser extent Ohio State's recruiting.

In related news, a Google Search this evening of the phrase "Bill Simmons sucks" returned 834 hits. "I hate Bill Simmons" came in at about half that, at 443. While I find those totals strangely low, today I am proud to add a point to both. Here is a blog dedicated to hating him.