John Moss, a sports director at KTUL, tweeted, “A player on the UConn bench just looked at his teammate and said, ‘This place is crazy!’” This single tweet brought many a tear to this bleacher creature’s eyes.
A player from a national championship-winning program, which undoubtedly has hopping crowds attend its home games, called our lowly Reynolds Center “crazy!” That’s like Albert Einstein commending a physics major’s homework, or Freddie Mercury congratulating me on my falsetto. Nonetheless, over 6,000 fans filled the Reynolds Center for the men’s basketball matchup against Connecticut, the defending national champions.
While the game earlier in the year against OU had a higher total attendance, last week’s contest certainly had more TU students. In recent years, TU basketball has struggled to attract fans the way Bill Self did around the time of the Reynolds Center’s inception.
However, a new conference, a return to the NCAA Tournament and a prestigious coach have all slowly begun to help refill Reynolds. Even so, the matchup against the Huskies was especially raucous.
So what about this game grabbed so many students out of their apartments on a Tuesday night? It was the perfect hurricane, er, storm of corny t-shirts (which read “UCONN’T but HurriCANe”), the biennial festival known as syllabus week and a chance to knock off a basketball program that ESPN knows of.
*Editor’s note: I have no idea why the Bleacher Creature seems to think that these shirts are corny. For starters he didn’t even mention that they glow in the dark which pretty much seals the deal for me. Also they are obviously grammatically sound.
In addition to the win, congrats to the men’s basketball squad and the athletic department on not committing any NCAA violations! Celebration is certainly in order because non-compliance is all but an inevitable certainty on any half-decent basketball or football team.
Just ask SMU’s Larry Brown. Last week, the NCAA levied allegations of academic improprieties against SMU’s basketball program. The allegations revolve around sophomore Keith Frazier’s eligibility.
The candle is burning on both ends for Frazier, who carries a miniscule GPA and whose grades were inflated prior to attending SMU. Apparently, the SMU athletic department has grown a little cocky since its football team received the “death penalty” in the late ‘80s.
After winning a national championship with Kansas in 1988, Larry Brown received three years’ worth of punishments from the NCAA for recruiting violations. So don’t worry, SMU fans; Brown’s done this before.
NCAA referee Karl Hess has been relieved from reffing any more AAC, ACC, and SEC men’s basketball games after making a racist remark toward a former Wake Forest board member.
During a matchup between Wake Forest and Louisville, Hess said to Mitt Sah, “When I’m older, I want to sit in your seat and watch your Egyptian ass ref a game.” Hess committed the oh-so-typical racist error of misattributing someone’s race.
In fact, Sah is of Indian descent and hails from the far-away land of Winston-Salem, North Carolina (the home of Wake Forest). Furthermore, our misinformed antagonist fails to distinguish Egyptians from Indians.
For reference, Cairo is 2,750 miles from New Dehli. In terms of distance, mixing a Pole with an Egyptian would be a less egregious comparison. And, personally, I have never heard anyone accuse the late Pope John Paul II of being Egyptian.
