Hurley from LOST, and Rowlf from The Muppets

Well, it’s been a while.  Plus, my main topic - U of L Basketball - hasn’t had much going on lately being that it’s the offseason and all.  And, I got pretty miffed at Google because they took my super-high ranking and dropped me.  Jerks.

Here are a few updates of some U of L Cardinals news though:

* Earl Clark - gone, but now he’s back.  Way to go Earl.  I’m really looking forward to next season!

* Derrick Caracter - still the most ironically named player in all of sports.  He got all cocky and decided he’d leave and opt for the draft…then…whoops!  He had an epiphany that he was fat and lazy.  He came crawling back to Rick Pitino, who basically said “No, I think we’re pretty well off without you.” Great set of stones coach!  Perhaps Derrick was trying to imitate one of the best players in his position, Charles Barkley.  My theory is that he got confused, and tried to imitate Sir Charles circa 2008, and not circa 1991.

I’m confident that Derrick will land somewhere he can have a great impact though.

“Thanks for the talk Mr. Caracter!  We want to be just like you when we grow up.  And, yes!  We would like to super-size.  It’s okay, we can wait until after your break. You’ve worked a long 8 minutes, and the other crew members aren’t passing the Big Macs to you nearly as much as they should.  

When you’re back from your break, could you tell us about how you were the best player in the Albanian Basketball League?”

That is all for now.  I’ll be back sooner than later this time, I promise.

- ACITWB

Well, since I live out of market, I literally got to see 30 seconds of this game last night.  30 seconds of Rick talking to the boys on the bench during a time out. 

Luckily I got to see the hotly contested Memphis/UT Arlington game.  A real nailbiter, lemme tell ya.

Thanks CBS.

The tournament is off to a good start - in true March Madness fashion, we had some spoilers in the first round, many of which I picked in my brackets (hands in the air “go me”), but UConn’s loss hurt.  I had them in the final 4 in one bracket, and the sweet 16 in the other. 

 In case you were wondering, this is what it’s like to lose a final 4 team in the first round in your brackets.

Ok, so I’ve had this blog for about a month and a half now.  When I first started blogging, a lot of my entries were getting picked up on Google, and I got a nice amount of traffic and comments. 

As of about 1-2 weeks ago though, my search engine presence basically disappeared.  What gives Google?  It’s like they made me persona non grata! Where I used to get 10-15 views a day, I maybe get 1-2 now.

This really ticks me off - I’m not selling anything on my blog, nor have I put up anything offensive or explicit. It’s mostly a bunch of posts about basketball and music. I liked it being searchable because it encouraged people to put up comments and to fire up discussions.

If there’s anyone who can find my blog here in search engine exile, your help would be appreciated!!!

Def Leppard - “Animal”
My wife was dying to hear this song over the weekend, so naturally I obliged. I first heard this song in 7th grade, and bought the tape (yes, it was before CDs), and couldn’t stop listening to all of Hysteria.

Sting - “Fields of Gold - the Best of Sting 1984-1994″
Awesome greatest hits. I was too young and too much of a metalhead to really like this music when it was first out. But when this CD came out in 94, I really dove in.

M83 - “Before the Dawn Heals Us”
Good album. I’m not big into eletronic/techno/whatever you want to call it, but I really like their music.

March madness begins Thursday!  This Friday, the Louisville Cardinals begin their journey in the NCAA tournament against Boise State. 

Not to sound cocky, but this isn’t a bowl game we’re playing here.  We should handily defeat the blue-turfed Ida-hoes by a considerable margin.  I’m afraid none of Boise’s players will be proposing to cheerleaders after this game.

I’m a bit pleasantly surprised at our 3 seeding.  Sure, it helps that even though we lost our last 2 games, that they were to Georgetown (a higher ranked team), and Pitt (who went on to win the conference tourney), but I really was expecting a 5 or even 6 seed.

This just goes to show that doing well in a strong conference will get you further when it counts. 

I really can’t believe we lost this game.  Louisville should not have dropped the last two games.  Especially not last night’s loss to Pitt. 

 I’ll give credit where it’s due - Pitt is a good team, and they played great ball at the end of the 2nd half and in OT.  We just threw up slop though.  Poor shot selection; running and gunning; and a “just starting to thaw out” Jerry Smith are just a few of the reasons why we lost.

Now, we’ve gone from a potential 2-3 seed in the NCAA tourney to a likely 4-6 seed.  More than that, I just hope we can break our funk, and use the next week or so we have off to rest, practice, watch the game film OVER AND OVER, and to relax as we get prepared for games we can’t lose. 

Today starts the first round of the Big East tournament.  The non-bye games are tonight - the most interesting of which appears to be Villanova vs. Syracuse.  I think Syracuse will take it, but not without a fight.

 Tomorrow night, the Cardinals will be playing against the winner of the Pittsburgh vs. Cincinnati game.  They shouldn’t have a problem with either team, but I think I’d prefer that they play Cinci if I had to choose.  I really want revenge for that New Year’s Day loss that stunk so bad. 

I enjoyed the little Scott Farkus/Luke Harangody separated at birth pics in my earlier post so much, that I decided to post more SAB’s as I find them.  Enjoy! 

Boy George & Ralph Wiggum

Well, it happened.  The 9 game winning streak snapped today.  While I always want U of L to win, and I’m always disappointed when they lose, I feel okay about this one.  Georgetown is undefeated at home; Louisville was barely ranked below Georgetown also.

 Earl Clark still turned in an awesome performance though, as did David Padgett.  T-Will showed up in style as always.

 Their second half numbers were great, and I believe that if they’d played a little better towards the end of the first half - hitting more 3’s, turning it over less, we would’ve won.

And what about the first 10 minutes of the first half?  Neither team could buy a shot. I was amazed to see the score so low after 10 minutes of fierce play.

 At the end of the day, if I knew that sometime between today and a certain Monday night in April, that we were going to lose one game, today would’ve been that game.  Now we go into where winning is a must:

next week’s Big East conference tourney on a fairly neutral floor at MSG in New York, and can hopefully play the type of ball we need to in order to lock up the automatic bid, and possibly a 3 or 4 seed.