Keep on Rolling ‘Cuse
If you had told me before the NCAA Tournament started that one of the Final Four teams would have to pass through Dayton and be an unranked double digit-seeded team with a color in the name of their mascot and a legion of doubters proclaiming that they shouldn’t have made the tourney in the first place, I would have asked you if Stead made a deal with the devil to make sure TU won the whole damn thing.
Of course, it’s not the Tulsa Golden Hurricane in the Final Four but the Syracuse Orange who have been the Cinderella story of the 2016 college basketball season (Syracuse was not a participant in one of the First Four games in Dayton but had to beat the University of Dayton in the first round).
By the time you are reading this article, Syracuse may already have been eliminated at the hands of the supremely talented University of North Carolina team, in which case I hope all of you had been rooting for them. Or they could be squaring off in the championship game against either Villanova or Oklahoma, in which case…you better still be rooting for them.
Yeah, OU might have been your childhood favorite team, so what?? Syracuse represents everything that TU stood for in this tournament, defiance to the man, the will to win, the possibility of unprecedented upsets! A win for them is a win for us!! Or maybe I’m still just salty that we lost and am living vicariously through them, who knows.
Why are we so mad at Russell?
The controversy surrounding De’Angelo Russell and Nick Young of the Los Angeles Lakers has been covered to death, so you’ve probably heard this story already. But just in case you haven’t, the quick synopsis is that Russell, a nineteen-year-old rookie, recorded Young, a talentless hack (relatively speaking of course, he’s in the NBA after all) talking about all the women he has cheated with while in a relationship with his fiancee Iggy Azalea.
Young had not known he was being recorded and when the video surfaced, he and his teammates made a big show about freezing out Russell, who has also been put on blast by just about everyone in the sports world for violating the “sanctity of the locker room and teammate confidentiality,” or some nonsense to that effect.
Meanwhile, Young has for the most part been left completely off the hook for his actions. Look, I’m not trying to defend Russell; he shouldn’t have been recording anybody without their permission, it’s a violation of their privacy.
But the hate that’s been directed towards him in the past week seems equal or even greater to me than what is given to all sorts of other scumbags who play professional sports, be they domestic-abusers, dog-fighters or even killers, despite his offense being a pretty small deal in the grand scheme of things. It was a prank gone awry!
And if it affects Young’s wedding plans? Too freaking bad, the man shouldn’t have been a serial cheater in the first place. It’s funny, I don’t remember anybody freaking out when Donald Sterling was recorded against his will.
