VAGUE SPACE

NCAA Officiating

It's been horrible for years, it seems like it's getting worse, but this postseason has been monumentally egregrious.  First there was the mug-fest in the Big East championship where Louisville came from way behind by putting on a press that involved full-out tackling of Syracuse players in the backcourt without a call, allowing the Cardinals to get a bunch of easy buckets in a row and all kinds of momentum while the game spiralled out of officials' control until they called a phantom foul on Syracuse (!) on a 3-point shot, then followed it up with a technical on Syracuse (!) after Michael Carter-Williams swatted away a Louisville defender after 2 minutes of nonstop mugging without a call.  Anyway, yes I'm still pissed about that game even though Syracuse made the Final Four.  Then we all watched Wichita State get robbed by a call that directly led to Louisville's win and in the nightcap, the officials decided to decide the game yet again, yet again going against Syracuse.  After playing miserably all night, Syracuse came back due to Michigan's poor free throwing shooting and struggles against our pressure, and we had the ball, down 2 with 20 seconds to play.  Brandon Triche made the unwise move of driving from the free throw line to try to score, got called with a charge on a controversial call, fouled out, and after Michigan missed a free throw, little played backup shooting guard Trevor Cooney turned the ball over and the game was over, and Michigan would lose to Louisville in the title game... the two teams that the referees helped most to beat Syracuse this season.  Cooney was handling the ball because Syracuse's two starting guards (Triche and MCW) had fouled out.  MCW's last 2 foul calls were extremely questionable, and obviously this was the first time all season both of our starting guards fouled out of a game, as Boeheim had only one other scholarship guard on the roster (Cooney) and he rarely played.  Long story short, despite how poorly we played and honestly did not deserve to win, the charge call on Triche cost us any chance to tie the game.  So what about that call...

It should have been a blocking foul.

Point blank. Period. The NCAA Men’s Basketball Rules Committee issued new guidelines last June for the officiating of blocks and charges:

“Before the offensive player (with the ball) becomes airborne, the defender must have two feet on the floor, be facing the opponent and be stationary to draw a charge. Otherwise, it should be a blocking foul.”

Morgan’s feet were not set and he was not stationary when Triche went airborne. Now, I’m not going to say this alone cost Syracuse the game; they had plenty of chances to win and maybe Brandon should have pulled up, as he said. But, by the letter of the law, it was clearly a bad call. Personally, I can’t stand how the charge has gone from a way to keep an offensive player from simply bulling his way through a well-positioned defender to a way to draw a cheap foul by barely getting set outside the circle as an opponent is making a move to the basket. Officiating in this manner punishes offensive players for taking it strong to the hoop, even when they aren’t necessarily out of control, and Brandon was not out of control as you can see below. (you might need to click on the picture to see the GIF move)

link to full article here

 

Cuse in Review

It obviously didn't end as I'd hoped but they went way further than anyone expected this season.  So thanks to Brandon and James for four great years, and thanks to Michael for one great season, or at least one great post-season until his final collegiate game (as I'm sure he's gone).  As for CJ, hopefully he comes back for his senior season and I still believe he will.  And there isn't a whole lot of experience left around him, so we'll need big jumps for Jerami Grant and Trevor Cooney and Rakeem Christmas and DaJuan Coleman to have any kind of a shot at anything next season.  But there is a great recruiting class coming in (again) and not a whole hell of a lot was expected out of this year's team after losing Dion Waiters and Scoop Jardine and Kris Joseph (and Fab Melo).  So we'll see.  It was a long wait between Final Fours and hopefully it's not another decade.  And hoping one Mr. James Arthur Boeheim is back for yet another season on the hill.

Cuse

This is not a Final Four post because (a) I'm still too excited to post anything and (b) I haven't posted anything about the tournament and do not want to jinx them at this point.  This is strictly a post about the awesomeness of so many Syracuse alums that I followed for so many years being at the Verizon Center (along with Obama!) for the game on Saturday.  

OK so you can't miss DC in the middle row there on the left with the Orange hoodie.  But he's at most of our games.  Also on that row are Hakim Warrick (Syracuse hat) and all-time leading scorer Lawrence Moten (to Warrick's left).  Sitting above DC is Leo Rautins (who is before my time as a fan but fathered Andy Rautins of more recent fame).  Above Rautins is Billy Owens and further down his row is Pearl Washington (in the glasses, also before my time).  And in the row below DC is Sherman Douglas (white shirt, looking down).  John Wallace is also supposedly in this pic but I can't pick him out unless it's the guy in the hat talking to Pearl but he looks way too old to be Wallace, right?  Anyway, so much history and so much awesomeness and so many years of joy as a fan represented by that pic.  And of course, out of the picture but just below this group is the Syracuse bench which includes famous alumni Gerry McNamara, Mike Hopkins, Adrian Autry, and of course Jimmy Boeheim, the guy responsible for all of it. Thanks to all you guys.  And of course to Brandon, James, MCW, CJ, Baye, Rak, Jerami, Trevor, and the rest of this year's team :)  Oh, and Brandon Triche has now passed DC as the all-time winningest player in Syracuse history.  Congrats!  Let's do this two more times.

CJ and My Team

As Rudnick laments all the time, I'm not as into sports as I used to be, as other interests and responsibilities have crowded out time to do much more than catch the Phillies score the following morning, for instance, but the one team I still make time for to watch every game... or most every game (I've unfortunately missed a few this season) is the Syracuse Orange.  Yet this has been a challenging season, as I wrote earlier this week, with a promising team outright collapsing in February, losing all ability to do anything resembling scoring on offense.  But there's been one player who has remained consistent, remained great, even in this end of season debacle, and that's junior forward CJ Fair, who leads the team in scoring and rebounding and minutes.  He made 2nd team All Big East (should have made first), along with the more heralded (and much more inconsistent) Michael Carter-Williams, and ahead of senior teammate and supposed team leader Brandon Triche, who made 3rd team as he suffered through his worst stretch as a player ever, in February of his senior season.  Now, something has happened when they got to New York that changed all that.  Perhaps they were so embarrassed by their 39 point output last Saturday that prompted me to write my eulogy for the team.  Perhaps their shots just started falling and that built up everyone's confidence, both on offense and defense.  Perhaps James Southerland is just such a good shooter that his slump couldn't continue forever.  I can't explain it.  These are 20-year-olds and they are prone to be inconsistent.  So I cannot explain how a team that played so bad for a month could suddenly wallop Seton Hall, beat #19 Pitt, and beat #5 Georgetown -- the same team that beat them by 20 a week ago -- on consecutive nights.  

Fuck Georgetown

Pretty Much Forever.   :))))))))

 

And CJ played his worst game of the year and we still won... thanks to CJ's fucking sweet ass dunk in OT... omg was this a beautiful thing

Rotten Orange

It's been a while since Syracuse basketball has been bad.  And by bad, I mean, 22 win seasons, scraping into the tournament or even just missing the tourney.  Which is not actually bad but not the greatness we've come to associate with Syracuse basketball under Jim Boeheim.  In recent years, we've gotten #1 seeds in the tourney (twice) and the only question for this year, for much of the year, was whether we could actually make the Final Four or squabbling over whether a 1 or 2 seed was our destination.  But then, with a shocking suddenness that no one can claim to have predicted, this year's team has devolved into bad, like real bad.  Like scoring 39 points against Georgetown bad.  39 points in the entire game.  Lowest ever for a Jim Boeheim team.  And just a month ago we were thinking 2 seed.  What the fuck happened?

Syracuse Beats #1 Louisville

And at 17-1, 5-0 in the Big East, we should by all rights be #1 this week but that will probably be Duke, which is fine.  Rankings don't matter a whole lot this time of year.  Still is nice to knock off current arch-rival Louisville at their home court, when they are ranked #1 in the nation, and when we are (still) missing our 2nd leading scorer, James Southerland, to suspension.  I honestly didn't think we had a shot to win this game going in.  And as Louisville's pressing defense made sophomore Michael-Carter Williams turn the ball over a career high 8 times, I REALLY didn't think we had a shot to win this game.  After an early 11-3 lead for Syracuse, Louisville turned up its trademark D and guards Russ Smith and Peyton Siva harrassed the shit out of MCW, starting a series of runs by the Cardinals that had them up by 8 or more several times in the game.  But somehow, some way, Syracuse willed itself to claw back to tie the game time and again.  In the first half, it was Brandon Triche singlehandedly putting the team on his back with 7 for 7 shooting and 4 for 4 from long range, totaling 18 points and going on extended runs of his own.  But it was his assist to MCW for a half-ending 3-pointer that tied the game at 38 at the half.  That was pretty much the grand total of positive plays the "star" sophomore guard (who has really struggled in Big East play) made in the 1st half.  Louisville jumped out in the 2nd half on a 10-2 run but again, Syracuse slowly perservered and fought back.  They held onto the ball better in the 2nd half, and Louisville didn't shoot as well, but Russ Smith (scoring a game-high 25) was absolutely amazing, and at several points I thought the game was lost.  Coach Boeheim shrunk the bench to 5 players in the 2nd half - MCW, Triche, CJ Fair, freshman Jerami Grant, and reserve center Baye Moussa Keita.  Triche and MCW both played 38 minutes.  Fair played all 40.  And Grant played 35, starting the 2nd half and never leaving, easily his career high.  And he had a real solid game in place of Southerland, scoring 10 points with 5 rebounds, but he wasn't Southerland.  Keita also played well, but after hardly playing at all in Big East play, it was more a reflection of Boeheim's view of Rakeem Christmas and DaJuan Coleman that Keita played almost the entire 2nd half.  Offensive rebounding became a huge problem, as Louisville's man-child Gorgui Dieng got 5 offensive rebounds in the 2nd half (and Chane Behanen had 6 in the game), outmuscling the pencil-thin Keita and skinny Fair and Grant, leading to easy buckets and free throw attempts down the stretch.  But somehow, Syracuse kept fighting back.

The Cuse without James

We seem to go through this every season, don't we?  Super team ranked in the top 5 suddenly has to deal with losing a key member that had the team ranked so highly.  And I'm not going to mince words here, if James Southerland's ineligibility issues are anything like what dogged Fab Melo last year, we're fucking screwed.  Fab, if you remember, missed three games in January (just like now), supposedly got cleared of the academic issues before the second semester started, then continued to not go to class (allegedly) and got declared ineligible on the eve of the NCAA tournament, damning the #2 ranked team in the country to an Elite Eight loss to Ohio State (when Jared Sullinger feasted on our inside defense without Fab).  Now there's word that James Southerland, this year's 2nd leading scorer and best outside threat, is ineligible, likely due to academic issues since the 2nd semester started yesterday at Syracuse.  I don't know if he can make up the time like Fab did since school is back in session, but if he misses 3 games and then comes back, that's the best case scenario I think, even if it means we're without him against Louisville this Saturday.  Hell, if he needs to miss a bunch of games but can still be back for the stretch run and the NCAA tournament, it's not the worst thing in the world.  But if he misses the NCAAs and we are without a key contributor for the 3rd out of the last 4 years (Arinze Onuaku got injured on the eve of the tournament when the team was a 1-seed in 2010), then, well, fuck.  We seem to be fucked.  Royally fucking fucked.

Cuse Update

So the Syracuse Orange are ranked 7th in the country and stand at a solid 14-1 two games into the Big East conference season.  What looked like a potential national championship team when they were blowing out non-conference foes by 30+ points devolved into a series of question marks after a bad loss to Temple and then two middling performances against the final two non-conference patsies.  But then they recovered to cruise to impressive wins against Rutgers and at South Florida, so the question is back to -- can this team win it all?  The answer below.

The Death of the Big East

I became a fan of Syracuse basketball in 1988, at pretty much the exact moment I became a fan of college basketball, at pretty much the exact moment that ESPN's Big Monday started to captivate the nation and the Big East became the greatest basketball conference in the nation, a crown it would hold pretty much without doubt through today (ACC and Big Ten fans might argue but...).  With the announcement that the seven remaining basketball-only Big East schools would be breaking free and forming their own separate Catholic school conference, the Big East has finally, mercifully been killed.  And sadly, very sadly, it all ends with a whimper.  I'm not exactly sure why I became a Syracuse fan.  I went to Rutgers for college, which is decidedly not all that close physically to Syracuse, NY, and wasn't in 1989 in the same conference.  I grew up near Philadelphia, where basketball powerhouses like Villanova and Temple play and I was definitely a Villanova fan -- like the rest of South Jersey -- during their magical run to the NCAA title in 1985.  But for some reason I became captivated with the Orange and learned to hate with a passion the evil John Thompson and all of his Georgetown thugs and the even more evil Jim Calhoun and all his UConn fucks and then when Pitt got good and we weren't so good and we could never beat them I hated them.  Even Villanova, which went through a long stretch of suckiness only to be resurrected under Jay Wright in the last decade and I learned to hate them too.  And don't get me started on Louisville.  F Rick Pitino.  But now it's over.  All the rivalries are dead or dying and there's no one left to hate.  Well yeah, I'll fucking hate the shit out of UNC and Duke but will it ever be the same as Georgetown or UConn?  I don't know.  And the question is how did this happen.