It’s no secret that Iowa contacted Bruce Pearl to offer him their head coaching job. What is a little funny about the whole thing, though, is that the day after Pearl declined the offer, Iowa formed a search committee to find a new head coach. Is that the best the AD could do? Was Pearl his only idea? Allow me to re-enact:

Iowa AD: “I need to find someone to coach basketball. Hey…Bruce Pearl! Didn’t he used to coach here? Caused some kind of stir with those bastards at Illinois-Urbana? I hear he’s a good coach, let’s get him!”

{Picks up phone, calls Bruce} “Do you want to be our head coach?”

Bruce Pearl: “No” {hangs up phone}

Iowa AD: “Shit. Well, that’s all I’ve got. Time to make a committee, I’ll let them worry about it.”

It seems to me that it’s really not hard being an athletic director. You have a good bit of fame, but about a thousandth of the pressure of the head coach. The pay is nothing to scoff at, and you get great seats at every game. The best part is, there’s no real accountability. To keep people happy, you make the teams successful. To do that, you hire the best staff. To find the best staff, you either hire a search firm or make a committee. If the staff doesn’t create a winning team, fire them, blame the committee/search firm for doing a piss poor job, then start again.

It’s not just Iowa. Mitch Barnhart, Kentucky’s AD, publicly stated that he’d do the search on his own without a search committee, then promptly hired the same search firm that Minnesota used to hire Tubby Smith. Apparently, you don’t even have to do the work to find your own search firm.

So if any of you are on a search committee looking for a new AD, I’m your guy. I promise, nothing will ever be my fault.

Erik Ainge had surgery to repair something or rather in his knee (personally, I don’t think there’s actually that much going on down there, it’s just a bunch of hooey for doctors to make money, but hey, we all gots to make a living somehow), and apparently a “best case scenario” type, um, scenario has surfaced.

Because I know nothing about the physiology of the knee, I shall use instead, words that I am more familiar with. They were going to try to repair a tear to the Marshmallow Peep portion of the knee, but were afraid that they would have to remove completely the Marshmallow Peeps as well as the Twizzlers, leaving what doctors call “licorice-less knee syndrome.” It is a terrible affliction as we all know that Twizzlers are what hold our bodies together, and without the delicious red strips holding the knee together, it was feared that during a game Erik’s lower leg would simply fall off.

As it turns out, the damage to the Peeps wasn’t as bad as originally thought (it was only missing an eye), so they simply removed the afflicted area (read: head) and did something else that I couldn’t tell you if my lifetime supply of fresh underwear depended on it.

What is important is that, when asked, people that seem to know things seem to think it’s a good thing overall. Hey, as long as he wins games, it’s okay, because we all know, winning makes you invincible. Just ask Ben Roethlisberger. Btw, watch the video that’s part of that link, and you’ll get to see just how tremendously hideous um, interesting looking our backup quarterback is. Just have the eye-bleach ready.

Saturday Night Live, the show that has been in the crapper since the late 90s when the likes of Phil Hartman, David Spade, Adam Sandler, Tim Meadows among others graced the show, has decided to try and take a different approach. Not Sucking. Well, actually, it might still suck, but at least Peyton Manning will be the host this weekend.

This is exciting news for those fanboys of Peyton, of which I am a registered member. I, like many others, enjoyed the commercials he has been in, and hopefully there will be some sort of parody involved (the Sprint one where he’s talking about how awesome he is would be great if someone walked in and called him out). The promotional picture for the show (along with skewed perspective and shadow for dramatic effect added by yours truly) has Mr. Manning looking very dashing, and classic. I should stop with the man-crushing until after I’ve seen the episode.

Mancrush in full effect.
The other awesome part of the show will be Carrie Underwood. Although I’m not a huge fan of country music, it can be said that I am a huge fan of hot chicks. That being said, Carrie Underwood is pretty hot (I’ll try to refrain from an ‘under’ and ‘wood’ joke). I’d let her carrie my underwood. Damnit!

So here we go Peyton. Time to see if all those years of training as a sketch comic paid off. What’s that? You trained to be a quarterback? Ruh roh, this show’s gonna be a disaster! All the more reason to watch! Check it out on NBC, Tonight, at 11:30.

I don’t want the last post to sound like I was down on the boys.  They played an awesome year of basketball, made the season very exciting, and made a tremendous and gutsy tourney run with a scrappy team.  We’ll have a year in review for both football and basketball coming up over the next… ugh… 6 months, and hopefully some good stuff for the offseason.

GO VOLS!

The BasketVols gave forth a valiant effort (whilst simultaneously giving up a 20 point lead) in their quest for their first ever Elite 8.  There was one place where we could have put the game away, and that was: Free Throws.  The Vols missed something like 50 out of 20 free throws (actually taking points off the board), especially in critical situations late in the game.

The first half looked like it was going to be a blowout and well, the first half was.  The second half was a blowout the other way, with UT giving up the aforementioned 20 point advantage.

Before anything else, I’d like to say Thank You to Dane Bradshaw for an awesome career at UT.  Hopefully you can go play in Europe or something, or if nothing else, I’m sure there’s a spot on Pearl’s coaching staff for you.

What’s next?  Well, spring practice has begun, and well, there’s 6 motherfarking months until football season starts.  Oh yeah, well, the Lady Vols are in the Sweet 16, so perhaps if they could win a title this year, it would be a nice finish to another dominating year for Candace Parker the team.

Good job to the BasektVols for an awesome year, it was fun watching you guys mature, gel, and play.  Thanks Hulk.  Now go practice free throws until next season!

Tubby Smith has decided to leave Kentucky for Minnesota, not because of all of the speculation and restlessness from the Kentucky fans as most would assume, but because Tubby Smith actually likes cold weather. If there’s one thing he likes more than cold weather, it’s weird accents. Put the two together, you get Minnesota.

Upon hearing the news, it was reported that Kentucky fans celebrated in the streets for about 10 minutes until they realized that now, they’re without a coach that has taken them to 10 consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances, and that Rick Pitino already has a job.

Sources close to the story say that Kentucky is in negotiations with a local businessman S.Atan for the services of one, Adolf Rupp. University officials had no official comment, but reports state that a bright light, immense heat and guttural laughter was overheard emanating from the office of the UK Athletics director Mitch Barnhart.

What more is there to say about this story? This kind of reminds me of when Jerry Green was “let go” for taking the team to the NCAA Tourney as well as 20 win seasons 4 years in a row in favor of losing more games and not making it to any kind of postseason tournament. But there was a catchy name: “Buzz Ball” which made it all worth it?

Kentucky has to brace themselves for at least a few bad years of basketball coming up, which, if you’re a Kentucky fan, is made only slightly less unbearable due to the fact that Rich Brooks is actually a pretty decent coach. But really, the fans have no one to blame but themselves for running a winner out of town. If the new coach doesn’t immediately win, there’s not much that can be said criticizing the guy for sucking. I heard Buzz wanted a bigger paycheck, he’s probably available. Not to mention, he actually recruits Mr. Kentucky’s in basketball.

Tubby doesn’t need this.  Tubby’s leavin’
But as far as for Tubby goes, he had to leave. The situation wasn’t going to get any better in Lexington lest he won 4 championships in 2 years. Overall, he’s been pretty classy about the whole situation, by not openly criticizing the criticizers, but the situation was going from bad to worse. I’d imagine a team like the Golden Gophers would be more than happy to have Tubby, and he’s bound to do quite well there, and we wish him nothing but the best.

I’m just sad that the SEC is losing a good coach, a good competitor, and most of all, a dude named “Tubby.” But at the same time, that opens up possibilities for the Vols to win a couple more games against the Wildcats, which is a good thing, because the football team is looking like they’re getting better every year. UK fans should run Brooks out of town too.

ESPN recently conducted a poll on their site, and as we all know, ESPN Polls are absolutely scientific. The purpose of the poll? To see what the consensus was on which one of the #1 seeds wouldn’t make it to the Final Four. Seeing as how all four #1 seeds have never made it to the Final Four in the history of the tournament, the question seems valid.

That having been said, it’s interesting the colors they chose to represent the different teams. I suppose due to the fact that the color would represent the different teams losing, they purposely chose colors that were not of the school colors, but of the schools that could possibly knock them off. Perhaps my theory is completely skewed seeing as how I am only talking about Tennessee here, but anyway. I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore, so just look at the map.

Well, I thought it was funny anyway.

If you look closely, there’s a small representation off to the right of Florida that shows that the entire OCEAN is orange. I mean, all the seas of the world think Ohio State will lose before reaching the Final Four. But ESPN’s choice of using the color orange seems to indicate that other than the state of Ohio, the entire country, and all the living inhabitants of the oceans of the world are shooting for Tennessee to win.

Go Vols!