The look on Perry’s face is priceless.

*contingent upon Big Ben keeping his cockpiece out of places it isn’t welcome.

Well that’s good to know. I’ll sleep better at night knowing that for some poor 7 or 8 seed armageddon is imminent when the mighty Longhorns come to town. Then after Texas dispatches of that unworthy mid-seeded patsy there’s a one seed primed to go down in the second round. It must suck to be a top seed knowing Texas is bringing the danger. It’s coming. It’s right around the corner.

Be afraid Kentucky. Pull the covers tightly Duke.

Texas is bringing a veritable Roman phalanx of defensive basketball to the party. Get ready to dance to the Horns’ symphony of offensive basketball. Afterall, this is the same team that started the year 17 and 0, right?

“I don’t think there’s a team in the country that will want to play Texas,” senior wing Damion James said after the Longhorns lost 86-67 to Baylor in the Big 12 quarterfinals Thursday night at the Sprint Center. “We’re so talented. At one point, we were the best team in the country. We lost our focus and enthusiasm and passion, and we have to get that back.”

Yes, Damion, other than Baylor, a squad on par with Alcindor’s UCLA teams, there probably isn’t another team that wants to play Texas. We were the best team in the nation once. For a minute.

“We’re out of the Big 12 now, and we can play some other teams, teams that have never seen us play.”

Damion, I love you man but there’s some teams out there you’ve never seen play and I’m not sure you want to. Catch any of that Big East tournament? The MAAC champion can ball, bro. There’s also three Aggie teams in this tournament and they are playing better ball than the Longhorns. Utah State, New Mexico State, and certainly Texas A&M are dangerous. In fact I’d bet their dangerous is more dangerous than your dangerous. Afterall, get three Aggies together in any setting and the danger factor increases exponentially.

“We are dangerous; we’ve proven to be dangerous,” Barnes said. “I know people think we’ve had a disappointing season because of the expectations, but that’s because of how far our program has come.”

Yep, we’ve come a long way Rick. The Penders coached teams were just mildly dangerous. You avoided them for precautionary reasons. Like public bathrooms and travel to the Gaza Strip.

This Texas squad on the other hand is ebola virus dangerous. Grown men cry at the mere mention of our random screen offensive design. Women and children are hidden at the sight of our smothering help and recover defense. Tivo’ing Texas Longhorn games is tantamount to handling a hydrophis belcheri sea snake or coming back as Hillary Clinton’s bicycle seat. Longhorn guards pack enough venom to kill a thousand men with one entry pass, their shot selection as frightening as a statist’s derriere.

“Other than the first two lines in the tournament, I truly believe that in this tournament it doesn’t matter,” Barnes said. “If you’re a 1-seed, if you win that first game, you’re going to probably play a team from a power conference. The pressure then shifts to the higher-seeded team.”

Yep, seeding makes no difference, much like a bout of chlamydia doesn’t matter as long as you get a shot of petercillin.

Texas will find out where it gets it shot today and perhaps it’ll cure what ails them because of the all powerful “pressure shifting” phenomenon.

One things for sure, the Texas Longhorns are dangerous. They’re dangerous to their fans in the same way brisk sprints and cheeeseburgers are dangerous to an overweight dude prone to myocardial infarction.

The Baylor game pretty well sapped me of any hope of this bunch beating a legitimately good team. They’re gonna go down like Leonidas vs. a hail of 3 pointers.

For much of the season Texas was ahead in the Ken Pomeroy efficiency ratings based on their defense. Now we’ve seen that defense crumble and the current rankings reflect a team that is even more devoid of identity with the 28th ranked offense and 27th ranked defense.

I think the defensive ranking is only supported by the earlier games and that this group is no longer even the 27th best in the nation. On the other hand, because of their proclivity for turnovers I don’t think the offense is the 28th best. Those turnovers have murdered Texas in the last several games since they put an already struggling defense in tough spots.

The offense that’s been run through James and Johnson is efficient and one that should be able to do damage in the tournament but the guard play is just going to betray Texas like Ephialtes.

The latest bracketology on espn gives Texas a draw of Florida St. and then Syracuse before reaching the sweet sixteen which I think is the bar for an acceptable season for this team. Florida St. could very well knock off this team and that would be it, however Kevin Berger did write that Texas was a bad matchup for Syracuse. After that Texas would get some 1-seed protection in the bracket, of course that would still not be enough to prevent the fatal flaws on this team from bringing down the ship.

I’ll be watching with interest of course, and rooting for James to go down in a blaze of glory. But this team has been unable to do anything together away from the Erwin Center in the last month and Barnes use of Hamilton in the Big 12 tournament was infuriatingly stupid. Will that change in the NCAA’s? Why should we expect it to?

Jonestopten had a good feature up on Barnes’ misuse of Avery this season. Bradley has been Texas’ best guard and best defender over the last stretch as well as a guy that should have been able to grow to the point where he could be trusted with the final shot in a tournament game and been a nightmare to stop. Instead he seems about gassed for the year and a possible mid-first round pick in the draft. I’m sure Trips will write about next year’s team soon but the backcourt/ballhandling/creators on next year’s team will be a terrifying subject if Hamilton and Bradley both leave.

It’s possible Barnes is your Ephialtes and the terrible guard play is just the low numbers of the group (300). I haven’t really thought through the metaphor very well. The hot gates haven’t been too impassable either recently…

Baseball:

HenryJames salivated over Taylor Jungmann’s recent performance and ridiculed Texas’ hitting and the nature of baseball slumps.

This is part of what particularly bothers me now about the MLB. You play 162 games and then the hottest team wins at the end. The grueling 162 game season hardly mattered so long as you were a top 8 team (or so) in the league and the bats are awake in October. Granted that playing well and not slumping is important for the postseason of any sport but the others aren’t nearly as streaky or so regular season heavy as baseball.

In basketball, if you do the right things on offense you will manufacture offense. Since defense is about effort and teamwork it’s a constant as well. In football slumping has very little to do with outcomes when the point is imposing your will on another team. If you are “slumping” what’s actually happening is a lack of execution from injury/fatigue or failure to adjust to other team’s strategy.

It’s so much easier for the timing and little mechanics in baseball to get off, or for a batter to simply hit the ball hard to the wrong place every time he breaks out of the rut with a good swing. All that said, what Jungmann has been doing is pretty fantastic and exciting to watch. As HenryJames types, the constants are there.

Football:

Srr50 called attention to a hilarious feature of Alabama’s 2010 schedule, namely that half their schedule gets a bye week before playing them next season. IN THE SEC!!! Who could overcome that? No team in that league will ever get a chance to play in the National Championship, it’s just too tough…

This should be a rough stretch for Bama, although I’m not sure that it should take 2 weeks to scheme a way to make McElroy look like a terrible quarterback. The extra focus and rest before taking on their power-running game will probably be the bigger difference maker as Trent Richardson bulls his way through rested and physical defenses over and over again down the stretch.

Really I think they aren’t too bad off though as their toughest game of that stretch (LSU) has an open date before hand for Alabama as well while the trickiest game (Auburn) comes at the end but also after a game against Georgia State who has never played a football game before. You might as well call that an open date as well.

OU had their pro day and it should come as no surprise to anyone that Dominique Franks and Keenan Clayton tested well with a 4.47 and 4.57 respectively. If Clayton had held onto the ball for either of his pick-six opportunities he would have single-handedly destroyed Texas championship hopes last season. As it is he’s a surefire bet to have value in the NFL as an outside linebacker for a cover-2 team or in some nickel or dime packages for anyone else.

I think more highly of those two than anyone else on that defense save McCoy, Beal and Lewis. Too bad their offense sucked so hard…oh well, live and learn.

This Miner backcourt of Randy Culpepper and Christian Polk is better than any combination of guards any University of Texas school has rolled out in the last two seasons. Randy Culpepper is the best guard to come out of El Paso since Tim Hardaway. His presence on the 2010 Texas Longhorn team would make Texas an instant top 10 club. I take him over Tweetie Carter based on hair style alone.

Culpepper’s backcourt mate Christian Polk is a nice complement to what Culpepper does. Imagine that, players with skillsets that mesh. Both can shoot the ball from deep, and they’re capable ballhandlers that can break down a defense.

In the frontcourt, the UTEP Miners have a couple talented players to finish what Polk and Culpepper start. Louisville transfer Derrick Caracter is a big body, but he also has a credible face up game from 15 feet out. The other post, Arnette Moultrie is a long forward that is a threat at the arc and a solid wing defender. They are plus rebounders that get the job done with different styles. Caracter is the bruiser inside that bangs his way to double digits rebounds. If you need a guy to carve out space and board he’s your guy. He’s Perfect weakside rebounder for the college game.

Moultrie is built like Anthony Jones of Baylor but he’s stronger at this point in his career. He’s also the perfect high/low complement for Caracter. The dude can ball.

If UTEP needs instant offense, the face up skills of the Miner frontcourt along with the ballhandling and terrific decision making of the backcourt allow Tony Barbee to go to the ballscreen game for easy offense. If they switched to the random screening offense, however, the Miners would be a solid favorite to take over the world and rule like Greek gods from the Franklin Mountains.

Speaking of Barbee and Greek gods, he’s one of the games up and coming superstar coaches who won’t be long for El Paso with this kind of career trajectory. But for now, don’t bet against Barbee’s Miners having a pretty long stay in the tournament. That’s good news if you were counting on rooting for a team in Orange representing the University of Texas system.

He’s a witch. Last night he struck out 17 Iowa batters in only 7 1/3 innings of work. And got a no decision. More on that later. He’s filled out his frame and is no longer all arms and legs like he was last year. His fastball has gotten, uh, faster, and last night his slider was unhittable.

No, you wouldn’t.

He gave up a single run in the first inning (made a couple of bad 1-2 pitches), and then struck out 17 of the next 25 batters he faced. How dominant has he been this year? Last night’s performance actually raised his ERA to 0.93. Best Longhorn pitcher since Greg Swindell.

Before the season started I told you we’d be a team carried by pitching and defense. I told you that again after the season started because some (all?) of you assholes have ADD and shit. Now I’m telling you this a third time because I like the sound of my own voice fingers typing on a keyboard. We’re a team of pitching and defense.

Good thing too because our hitting right now is outright faggotry. It’s embarrassing. It’s mental at this point. That’s what I hate about baseball. Too much thinking involved. I actually hate a lot more things about baseball, but let’s just stick to these this one for instructional purposes.

Baseball gives you too much time to think between at bats. It gives you too much time to think between swings. If you’re struggling, you have a lot of time to dwell on it. It’s not like football although kickers would be pretty close. If you fuck up in football, you typically have about 35 seconds to get ready for the next play. In basketball if you miss a shot, you have to get right back on defense. Unless you’re J’Covan Brown. Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha! That doesn’t leave a lot of time for introspection.

The Texas hitters are collectively pressing right now. Hitting is contagious. Like Mono. Actually hitting isn’t contagious, but Mono is. So some of you should probably get yourselves checked out. But some things are collective. Like Nazi punishments. If the Texas hitters were women, their cycles would all be in sync right now. If they lived in Mobile, they’d all be spotting Leprechauns.

Hitting .225 on the year.

Of course this can all probably just be explained by statistics, but there’s a reason no one reads Huckleberry’s posts.

But our pitching and defense is fantastic. As Augie Garrido said after last night’s game, “We are trying and failing (at the plate), but we are winning.”

And we won last night’s game against Iowa 2-1 in 10 innings on solo home runs in the bottom of the 8th and 10th innings. Since losing 2 out of 3 to New Mexico, we’ve gone 9-1. And why have we gone 9-1?

I’m not going to tell you a fourth time.

‘Bama’s schedule is as follows:
10/9 at South Carolina
10/16 Mississippi
10/23 at Tennessee
10.30 Open Date
11/06 at LSU
11/13 Mississippi State
11/20 Georgia State./Open Date
11/26 Auburn.

The league says they will look into “tweaking” the schedule over the next month.

I wrote earlier this season about Barnes’ (usually useful) infatuation with psychological achievement drive, arguing that this current group of freshmen couldn’t possibly live up to the standards of their coach, which was slowly killing them. I included Bradley among them and some posters noted that Bradley has no such problem with being driven: “he busts his ass every night” to quote one.

All true, but Bradley being a Barnes type of player leaves him as the horse in Animal Farm. “I will work harder,” says Bradley. Yes, right up to the point of exhaustion. And we don’t even have the benefit of watching practice. Stockholm Syndrome comes to Cooley Pavilion?

While we bemoan the lack of defensive effort on the part of a number of Longhorns (see Hank Dudek’s excellent work here), Bradley defends, usually doing more than one man’s job. While we are puzzled with the misuse of Jordan Hamilton or the bizarre rotational “strategy” inside Rick’s head, Bradley stays on the floor. And stays…and stays…and stays…only Damion James logs more minutes for Texas.

He’s spent. “The Freshman Wall” is not a myth. Bradley spectacularly smashed into it about three weeks ago and now it is crumbling on top of him. And Rick Barnes charted this course for him even before injuries robbed the Horns of their perimeter depth. Bradley expends all his energy on defense (and, might I add, thank God) exhibiting zero burst on the offensive end accompanied by an all-too-often short-armed jumper. He won’t regain his legs until next season begins.

The question I have is: Will his breakout season for the Horns be next year? Or will next year instead be his transitional season in the NBA?

Crazy thought? Watch the Spurs’ George Hill for a few games and tell me anything Hill is capable of that a healthy and rested Avery Bradley is not capable of, especially given the benefits of an NBA coaching staff.

Bradley needs to seriously consider this, because it’s pretty damned obvious that he’s not having any fun where he is.

Particularly the 17 year olds that are healthy, tall, and bad at sports.

I stumbled across this Rick Reilly article on Inside Texas and I think it calls for discussion on a number of issues centered around fair play, basic consideration of others, competition, and our society’s increasingly bizarre fixation with preventing youth from experiencing adversity and ensuring outcomes in a world that guarantees none.

First, I have to confess that I’m not a big fan of Rick Reilly and that may be coloring my view on this matter. He can be funny, but his decade-long shtick as self-appointed Defender Of The Downtrodden is annoying. This is the lowest form of writing and formulae. Reilly conjures a villain, presents a pitiful victim, rails about injustice, and then wraps it up in less than 1,000 words with several bad plays on words. Neat, tidy, apply bow.

He also loves to talk tough. Which is amusing if you’ve ever seen Rick Reilly. Mike Lupica and Mitch Albom are slightly less intimidating.

Reilly’s scolding lectures are the writing equivalent of a lay-up. Though apparently Reilly is opposed to that lay-up if the opponent is weak. Better to bounce it off of the front iron as a sign of respect.

At first blush, the article makes plenty of sense. Yates is beating people badly. That in and of itself must be an absolute wrong. The delicate psyches of seventeen year old males are being irreparably harmed…

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!

Here’s the rub: Houston Yates is the #1 rated team in the country largely because of their frenetic, fast-break system and the incredible conditioning and mental toughness it engenders. They’re not the most talented team in the country. Let’s be clear about that. They just play the hardest and with total selflessness. They have great depth, a fantastic commitment to an exhausting system, and the total belief of their players. They press all game, without fail, and fast break on every possession. That’s their system, that’s what Wise preaches, and that’s what every player on their roster – from scrub to superstar – is expected to execute. The traits I just described above are character-building. Or character-revealing, depending on your slant. But Reilly only ponders the mental constitution of the loser.

Is Wise deserving of Reilly’s bile?

Gerry Hamilton chimed in with something interesting on the IT thread. These are the season records and some scores of two of HY’s more famous opponent blow-outs:

Lee 3-22

FB Bush 119-46
Kempner 79-34
Westbury Christian 79-32
Sharpstown 110-43
Reagan 100-40
Sharpstown 96-46

Houston Davis 0-24

Sterling 110-40
Worthing 100-34
Dulles 112-46
Langham Creek 104-31
Second Baptist 84-23
Sharpstown 104-36
Reagan 120-39
Sharpstown 93-25
Reagan 107-51
Westbury 93-39

Are of all the coaches at the high schools above deserving of suspensions, as Reilly recommends for Wise? Houston Reagan beat Davis by 81. Langham Creek won by 73. And so on. Clearly, you have some basketball teams in Houston that are horrendously bad and that inequity is spitting out some wide margins. If they’re getting blown out by 50+ in every game by average high school teams, what result are you looking for when they play the nation’s best?

What the above represents is inequality. That little thing that plagues life in which some people are better at some things than others. None of us like it very much when inequality is imposed from a outside agent, however we’ve devolved into the politically correct idiot’s notion that any inequality, in and of itself, is wrong. Possibly evil. This is a bad idea and the root of much societal buffoonery.

My guess is that Houston Davis has some kids that would probably pants Yates in a spelling bee, amateur boxing, or an AP History exam. Yates is actually rather famous for losing baseball games in Houston to the tune of 42-1 and 31-0.

The question remains: does Yates have to run it up?

No, they don’t.

In fact, gratuitously running up the score at the high school level is bad sportsmanship and sends a negative message all around, though if it reduces your son or daughter to a blubbering heap that tells me a bit more about you than it does the principle involved. It’s not clear that Yates is running it up on everyone. Though the time-outs and intentional fouling accusations to get to 100, if true, are troubling.

In several blowouts, Yates played the last five men on their bench for most of the game. In several games, their starters had on sweats before halftime. Yates did, however, continue to run their system. A system which, by its nature, amplifies unequal talent distribution with ball pressure and easy scores. With 3rd teamers. Are they to blame for having players buried deep on their bench that would have started at a crosstown rival?

Conversely, is it useful to tell a 3rd teamer not to play hard when he gets his ten minutes in front of his parents and friends? Do only the starters get to run the system that the team relentlessly drills and practices every day?

This gets into territory that isn’t so neatly defined by Reilly’s indignant outrage. Just as there is a message to be sent about class, fair play, and consideration when one opponent clearly outmatches another, every player should also give it their best, play hard, and never quit. In my view, when the dominant team puts in their reserves at an appropriate time, they’ve fulfilled their obligation to fair play. But what if that still yields an ugly result?

If your scrubs are really laying it to someone, what’s the recommended basketball protocol? Tell them to run the full clock and then turn it over on purpose? Allow opponent lay-ups? Play with three men? If you get a breakaway, do you lay the ball down on the opposing free throw line and walk off? At a certain point, artificial kindness morphs into contempt and disrespect. I would much rather be blown out than be condescended to and pitied. Your opponent owes you his best effort. When you’ve cried uncle, the reserves owe you their best effort. When you cry uncle again, the 3rd teamers and ballboys owe you their best effort.

And if you still can’t compete, you need to look at yourself rather than whine about the cruel, unfair world. Why is it your inner-city public school is so deficient when another is so strong? Maybe you shouldn’t be playing basketball at all. Maybe you need a new coach. Maybe you shouldn’t have four starters benched because of No-Pass, No-Play.

Disagree?

How about this?

Yates could throw the game to build Davis esteem. Just have all of their players stand there.

Yates would still go to the playoffs and achieve their ambition of a state title.

Houston Davis should have a huge celebration after the forfeit. Confetti could pour from the rafters, chants of We’re #1 should reverberate through the gym, the players should take a whooping, celebratory sweatless shower as they plan the evening after-party. Now they’re 1-23. They can walk with their heads held high.

What happened tonight was eerily similar. In fact, it’s mindnumbingly frustrating that our staff made nary an adjustment to try to make the game respectable. Point blank, we were pimp slapped for the fourth time in a row by a program that is a few short years removed from college basketball’s version of the death penalty.

Think about that.

As far as this particular embarrassing performance goes, a couple things caught my eye.

First, we have absolutely zero floor balance especially against a zone. Floor balance means you have the correct distribution of players to attack the offensive glass while still having enough transition defenders to stop the break. Floor balance is very important against a zone because the location of the guards on defense are such that once a ball is shot the opposing guards are already in good position to get up the floor on the break. As for floor balance, getting back, stopping the ball, protecting the basket before you fan out to find your man…yeah, we don’t do that so well.

In fact, we usually use at least one guard to attack the interior of the zone or the baseline of the zone in our offense, leaving the other guard to get back on defense and protect the basket. If you couldn’t tell already, I don’t think our other guard has been made aware of this responsibility. In fact, I think there’s a solid chance that our other guard is being taught to hope the ball bounces to a “muthafucka in burnt orange!”, or simply hope against hope that the rock goes through the hoop.

Even still, I’m not sure the make gives this bunch enough time to get back on defense anyway. Perhaps we can get Suns coach Mike D’antoni on the horn to clarify if there’s some nuance with the “Random Screen Offense” as it applies to transition defense that we may be missing. I’m honestly all ears at this point.

The other thing that was interesting about this game was the insertion of J’Covan Brown into the lineup. I have to applaud the staff for trying to exercise this talent muscle that we’ll certainly need down the road, not only this season but next season as well.

I thought Brown played pretty well and did some things at the point that we haven’t seen out of the position for most of the year.

That typed, I thought the use, or lack thereof with respect to Jordan Hamilton was abjectly asinine. Unless this guy is validating his shoe size by exposing himself at midcourt, you have to play him as many minutes as possible to get him ready for primetime. Point blank. Bad with the good. Good with the bad. You do Jordan Hamilton, his confidence, team chemistry, and the program itself an absolutely huge disservice by having the talented wing on the bench to prove a point about a random quick shot. Especially when that quick shot happens amongst a litany of other player errors all over the floor. Come on, Rick.

This kind of hardline coaching has no value at all in light of what’s been going on this season. Zip, zero, nada. The benching makes little sense in the context of Hamilton’s marked improvement over the last month or so.

Put away the stick and grab the carrot.

It smacks of Hickory, North Carolina, small town coaching jingoism and nothing more. It’s stupid coaching dogma on par with always press a pressing team and not fouling up 3 with under 10 seconds to go.

There’s no reason for Barnes’ actions on this front other than to win some juvenile pissing contest that probably originated when Barnes was a player back in high school.

Other than that, the game was monumentally entertaining in a, “Hey look, HenryJames slipped Vasherized some rohypnol in a room full of Mexican midget wrestlers” kind of way. Every fiber of your being tells you not to watch, but you just have to, making note of which teabags are Lipton and which are generic.

Now imagine you’re sitting there, knowing that it’s your job to write up these Hispanic grappling shenanigans along with every horrifying detail about to ensue. That’s how I feel before I push the little red button on my DVR prior to a Texas game.

I’m looking for the tiny, masked Espectrito coming off the top rope in all of his diminutive glory. Lately, I haven’t been able to get out of his way.