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Back at it
This is not a good time to miss anything in college basketball, and with that in mind, we missed what could have been a good week of blogging.
But I’m back, I’m in good spirits, and if all goes well, the blog should be essentially going full throttle in the days leading up to the MAAC tournament.
I was not in Baltimore, so I didn’t see Rider’s come-from-behind win over Loyola or the scuffle that ensued after the buzzer. The Trentonian’s Josh Norris was in greater Washington visiting some friends, so he was scheduled to do the game regardless of where I was.
I’m happy to say, though, that I’m back in New Jersey and ready for a good college hoops weekend, including Fairfield-Rider on Sunday.
As I mentioned last week and have mentioned a few times throughout the year, my mom – a Division III forward-turned-reporter-turned-blogger – has been fighting her third bout with Leukemia for the past couple of months.
Things hadn’t been going so well for the past two weeks and they REALLY weren’t going well a few days ago. That’s why I spent three days in Massachusetts, away from the blog and from work in general.
But I’m happy to report that she’s made substantial progress in the past few days (the lyrics don’t exactly fit except for the key line in the chorus, but we’ve adopted “Feeling Stronger Every Day” by Chicago is her theme song), and the blog’s hiatus, for now, is over.
Apologies for missing the PMI. Had I posted it Thursday, it wouldn’t have really even been late, since every team in the MAAC had Sunday through Wednesday off. But I didn’t get around to doing it, the weekend has essentially already begun, and I think it’d be best to just skip it and do a final regular season edition on Tuesday.
As for tonight, I’d love to find a bar with ESPNU and watch Siena-Niagara. Can’t do that cuz I’ve got desk duty, but for those who are able to watch, it should be one last regular-season treat before everyone gets into tournament mode.
Both teams were REALLY impressive in their BracketBuster wins, though I thought Niagara’s defense stood out more than any other aspect of any of the games. Both have reason to be confident. Both, regardless of what happens tonight, will be favored to go to the MAAC tournament title game.
But for the Purple Eagles to really feel like they can hang with the Saints in Albany, they’ll need a good showing tonight. I don’t think they need a win to prove that to themselves, and I think they’re a virtual NIT lock no matter what happens, so they don’t need a W on that front either.
But the Eagles turned in a lackluster performance when the teams met in Albany, and if they’re on Siena’s level, they’ll show up tonight in a big way.
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Good job by the Siena fans who responded to the question I posed in my last post about the venom some folks have for Rider. I don’t have to look it up to know that the 23 comments is the most we’ve had on a single post. Hopefully we can generate some good discussion in the next couple of weeks and break that record.
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Had a chance, while I was home in Massachusetts, to watch a little college hoops on TV – something I don’t get to do nearly as much as I’d like to because of the night desk schedule.
My dad is a long-time UConn fan who had been impressed with the Huskies in my aspects but worried sick about their lack of perimeter shooting. A.J. Price’s performance Wednesday against Marquette made him feel a bit better. … Speaking of UConn and Marquette, and everyone else in the Big East: recession or no recession, scalpers are going to make a pretty penny outside the Garden for the Big East tournament. It’s next to impossible to argue this won’t be the deepest field ever at a conference tournament.
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Staying in the Big East: I spent a few hours a day driving in New England over the past few days and listening to WEEI, Boston’s sports talk station. Folks in New England aren’t usually too big into hoops outside of Connecticut, but there was plenty of talk about PC’s upset win over Pitt. Even with all the other Big East success stories, you could make a good case for Keno Davis for conference coach of the year.
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Tim Pernetti will inherit plenty of good things and plenty of bad things as the new athletic director at Rutgers. One of the bad things will be the dreadful men’s basketball team, which dropped to 1-14 in the Big East with Wednesday’s loss at Notre Dame.
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Joe O’Gorman looks ahead to Princeton’s weekend and chats with the Tigers’ Dan Mavraides in today’s paper.
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I’m still trying to figure out how Ulysis S. Grant, ranked the 33rd best president by this survey in 2000, jumped 10 spots to 23rd in the rankings released two weeks ago on Presidents’ Day.
Anyone got anything for me on that one?
posted by Ben Doody at
4:05 AM
6 Comments:
Good to hear your mom has made progress the past few days. I'm sure it is hard sometimes to focus on work, but keep up the good work.
Siena/Niagara this late in the season...nice!
I don't know what's worse...US Grant jumping up that high, or Rutherford Hayes dropping so low (26 to 33). Can they really jump around the list that much considering both have been dead for quite some time?
And is James Buchanan the worst president? I mean worse than William "I died in 30 days" Harrison, the man who insisted on a lengthy inaugural address in freezing cold weather that probably made him vulnerable to pneumonia?
Why are Andrew "Indian Removal" Jackson (13) and Jimmy "Stagflation" Carter (25) so high on the list?
The above comment comes from Fred Sakai, who must be the biggest MAAC fan and most dedicated Blog reader in California.
Good stuff from Fred regarding C-SPAN's presidential rankings.
Here's my best shot at responding to those points:
Good job on the Rutherford Hayes point. Not sure what went into that, but I wonder if in a strange way, George W. Bush's largely unsuccessful presidency impacted Hayes' standing. Since the historians didn't think highly of Bush, maybe that turned their attention to Hayes, who's the only Prez other than George W. to have been elected despite losing the popular vote. I wonder if they looked back on the contested election of 1876 and thought the country would have been better off had Sam Tilden pulled it off.
William Henry Harrison is a very tough case to figure out. He was ranked very lowly in just about every category, but it's tough to say if that's justified since he wasn't really in office long enough to really screw up a lot of things. I almost think the historians should have just left him out of the rankings all together.
Regarding Jackson, he had a pretty complicated presidency, but I don't know how you can be surprised he's ranked so highly when he's on the $20 bill. They don't put just anyone on money. I mean, there's a reason that Dwight Eisenhower is on the dime and Millard Fillmore isn't.
Carter is another tough one. The consensus among most historians is that he became a victim of the circumstances surrounding his presidency but didn't go out of his way to screw anything up, which most folks thing George W. Bush did.
Something else to consider is the potential for liberal bias.
I think a lot of the talk about liberal bias in academia is overblown, but I bet if you assembled a panel solely of conservative scholars, they'd put Reagan a few spots higher (maybe above Kennedy), LBJ further toward the middle of the pack, Bush 43 at least a few spots higher, and Carter among the bottom five.
Any presidential scholars out there who want to chime in? I'll see if I can get Doris Kearns Goodwin to do a Q & A for a later post.
MAAC office has requested tape of the fracas that broke out after the Loyola game last night. FWIW.
I hear the MAAC is looking at video of Fran McCaffery throwing water at an official.
I like Doris Kearns Goodwin...
Maybe we can push for a Millard Fillmore 18-cent coin. (Years ago, some guy did research on pocket change and came up with the 18-cent coin to reduce the average number of coins in change. I remembered it being an obscure number, but had to google it to find that it was 18-cent that was concocted by J. Shallit of Canada's U of Waterloo)
I wanted to make a smart-aleky remark of how they should come up with a Grover Cleveland non-consecutively sequential $500 bill, only to remember that Cleveland was actually on some large bill of the early 1900s.
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