Will Mr. Lombardi be next?

First they came for the left-wing ranters… then they came for the teachers with Soviet flags in their closets… :)

[/inside Newington High joke]

An Italian parliamentary commission says the Soviets tried to assassinate the Pope.

With all the talk about mid-major schools taking advantage of a “weak bubble” on Selection Sunday — 5 or 6 from the MVC? 2 or 3 from the Colonial? — last night was a coming-out party for major-conference bubble teams eager to reassert themselves with well-timed big wins.

* Florida State, an ACC team whose tournament hopes were considered nearly dead, stunned #1 Duke — for the second time, some would argue — to get squarely back on the bubble. A win over Miami and/or an ACC tourney victory and they’re probably in.

* Texas A&M, one of Joe Lunardi’s “next four out” as of yesterday (FSU was in that group, too), upset #6 Texas to solidify its position as the likeliest fourth tourney team from the Big XII (sorry, Colorado).

* Struggling traditional power Kentucky, an 11-seed according to Lunardi but a bubble team nonetheless, won at #11 Tennessee, a crucial résumé-enhancing win for the ‘Cats.

It’s probably a safe bet that very few people in Tallahassee, College Station or Knoxville were thinking about the implications of the games they were watching for teams like Bradley, Southern Illinois, Air Force and Hofstra. But, truth be told, it’s entirely possible that what happened last night is that 2 or 3 mid-major teams’ bubbles burst — we’ll never really know which ones; it’s a Schroedinger’s Cat sort of thing — because a trio of major-conference teams were able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and announce, “Hey, we’re still here!”

And, hey, more power to the ‘Noles, Aggies and Wildcats. Just because I happen to have a soft spot for the cute and cuddly mid-majors doesn’t mean that power-conference teams don’t deserve some love too, when they earn it. And anytime you beat Duke or Texas, you’re okay in my book. (Tennessee, on the other hand, I kinda like… Good old Rocky Top! Rocky Top, Tennessee! Er, except in women’s basketball, of course. U-C-O-N-N! UCONN! UCONN! UCONN! :)

Saturday is Senior Night, and an elimination game to boot, for the Notre Dame men’s basketball team. Beat DePaul and they go to the Big East Tournament; lose and they’re done. Mike Brey sucks, but the players have played their butts off this season, and they — especially the seniors — deserve a big, loud, enthusiastic crowd. But since Becky and I will be out of town this weekend, we won’t be using our tickets. So if you’re an ND student and you want a ticket, let me know! Just leave a comment or e-mail me (bloy [at] nd.edu). They’re yours for the taking… but we’re leaving town this (Thursday) afternoon, so you gotta let me know soon!

UPDATE: The tickets have been claimed. :)

Adam Morrison: 28.7857 ppg
J.J. Redick: 28.0357 ppg

(Full stats here.)

At the moment, they’ve both played the exact same number of games (28), and Morrison has 806 points to Redick’s 785. Barring any conference-tournament upsets, Morrison has two games left (WCC semis and final), and Redick has four (vs. North Carolina, then ACC quarters, semis and final). If Morrison were to score 30 points in each of his last two games, Redick would need about 35 per game to beat him. J.J. has been struggling lately, though: he had just 22 points against Georgia Tech and just 12 against Temple, and although he managed 30 in a losing effort at Florida State last night, he did so on 10-of-28 shooting — the most shots he’s taken in a game all year, but one of his worst nights percentage-wise. Overall, he’s shooting 30.5% in the last three games.

here.

Puppies are cute.

Here is The Observer’s summary of Dmytro’s fight on Tuesday:

After a strong start, second year law student Josef-Dmytro “Fun Size” Aponte fell to sophomore James “The Beast from the Beach” Carlson.

“Fun Size” kept Carlson along the ropes early in the second round but a series of strong rights soon took away the law student’s advantage. Carlson outlasted Aponte in the third round as he struggled to protect his face, allowing “The Beast from the Beach” to land enough punches to secure a split decision.

Better luck next year, Meat. The Alaskan Assassin will rise again…

Now that the temporary traffic boosts caused by three InstaPundit links earlier in the month have died down, my 7-day traffic average has resumed its slow but steady, long-term post-Katrina decline, and as of this morning, has dipped below 1,300 visitors per day for (I believe) the first time since the hurricane. That’s pretty darn close to my pre-Katrina average.

Should I be upset about this? Perhaps not. I always suspected that I would eventually lose most, if not all, of the tens of thousands of visitors who frequented this blog in Katrina’s immediate aftermath. Still, I can’t help but think that if it weren’t for ongoing technical issues with the blog, I could have made a few changes that would have made the site it easier to read (and easier for me to update on a variety of fronts), and perhaps might have kept a few more people coming back. It’s frustrating to be unable to take full advantage of the unique opportunity afforded by having a temporary audience of thousands.

I also fret that, even as I’ve gained some new readers, I’ve lost some of my pre-Katrina audience, in part because the site is less focused on news and gossip from Notre Dame (and specifically, Notre Dame Law School) than it was last year. To some extent that’s inevitable, I suppose. I can’t be everything to everyone, and moreover, the law-school experience is much easier to blog about during 1L year, when everyone is taking the same classes, than it is 2L year. I’ve also gotten a bit gun-shy about posting “quotes of the day” and such, because I don’t want to get anyone in trouble or cause unwanted publicity for my professors and fellow students. The Katrina traffic boost brought this point into sharp focus, and I’ve been more cautious ever since. I tend to post quotes and such only if I’m quite certain they’re completely and utterly harmless, which rules out a surprising amount of material. :)

More broadly, I’ve felt at times recently like I’ve lost some of my blogging mojo; occasionally I look at my homepage and think, “eh, it’s kinda boring today, isn’t it?” Not all the time, mind you, but sometimes. It would really help if I had the Extended Entry feature back, so I could prevent the homepage from being dominated by long, text-heavy, potentially boring posts (like, say, this one). Cue again my frustration with the poor timing and remarkable longevity of the site’s technical issues.

Oh, well. It will be interesting to see, next summer and fall, whether my traffic gets a spontaneous bump whenever a hurricane is threatening land. (Well, hopefully I won’t have the opportunity to see that… but if I do, it will be interesting.) In the mean time, I’ll keep blogging about what I’ve always blogged about, namely, whatever the hell I feel like. :) Those of you who continue to stick around have my ego’s sincere thanks. ;)

Not like this is remotely a surprise, but we now have indisputable video evidence that Bush lied when he said of Hurricane Katrina, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” Not only did plenty of people anticipate it, but he was one of those people. (Hat tip: various people, including Kim Stone, Ed Joyce and Becky.)

Now, you can argue all you want that the feds did all they could, pre-landfall. But clearly, Bush felt sufficiently insecure about the response that he felt the need to make that asinine statement about the levees in the first place. And he deserves to be called out on the carpet for it, regardless of anything else.

Perhaps the even more important point, though, is this clear refutation of the argument that the NHC was somehow giving government officials the “all clear” when their computer models began to show that the storm might go east of the city (which it did, but the levees failed anyway because of shoddy construction by the Army Corps of Engineers). Max Mayfield quite rightly hedged his bets:

The National Hurricane Center’s Mayfield told the final briefing before Katrina struck that storm models predicted minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane but he expressed concerns that counterclockwise winds and storm surges afterward could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun.

“I don’t think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern,” Mayfield told the briefing.

The government, at all levels, needed to be prepared for the worst, and wasn’t. Period. (This is especially disturbing since, in reality, the worst didn’t happen. They weren’t even adequately prepared for the second- or third-worst-case scenario, let alone the worst!)

I just created an Excel spreadsheet to calculate the 32 possible scenarios stemming from the five remaining regular-season games involving the six contenders for the final three spots in the Big East tournament, and Johnny Mac is right: if Notre Dame beats DePaul on Saturday, we’re in, no matter what else happens. In all of the possible tiebreakers, we would do well enough to finish at least 12th in the conference. So, beat DePaul, and we’re going to New York. On the other hand, if Notre Dame loses to DePaul, we’re out, no matter what else happens. So the Irish’s fate is in their own hands.

GOOOO IRISH, BEEEEAT DEMONS!

P.S. So basically, we face five consecutive elimination games. Win ‘em all, and we’re in the NCAA Tournament. Win eleven straight games, and we’re national champs! :)

Duke loses… Notre Dame wins… Texas loses… what a day! :)

The Irish just wrapped up a very big win on the road. Now they have to beat DePaul at home next weekend, and hope everything else falls into place in the Big East just the way they want it to, so they can finish in the Top 12 in conference (oh, the lofty goals of the Mike Brey era).

Oddly enough, the Irish (5-10 in conference) — who are 2-0 against Providence on the season — now need to hope that the Friars (also 5-10) win their next game (against Marquette) so that Providence will be one of the teams tied with Notre Dame at 6-10 if the Irish beat DePaul. Why? Because in the “mini-conference” tiebreaker, having a 2-0 record against one of the tied teams really helps.

CORRECTION: Notre Dame doesn’t need any help to get into the Big East tournament. Win and they’re in.

There will be no undefeated ACC season for the Blue Devils. Florida State 79, #1 Duke 74, final. The Seminoles, who nearly beat Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium in a game that the referees decided earlier in the season, got the win tonight on their home floor on Senior Night. Woohoo! Duke sucks! :)

The end of the game was ridiculously crazy. In the final seconds, with Florida State up by 5 points, J.J. Redick missed a shot, FSU’s Al Thornton got the rebound and was fouled by Duke’s Greg Paulus to stop the clock with 1.7 seconds left. Notwithstanding that there was still time left on the clock, the Florida State students rushed the court!! And then came my favorite part, though it didn’t get mentioned on ESPN amid the craziness: the scoreboard operator, who had correctly stopped the clock at 1.7 seconds, randomly restarted it and ran it to 0:00!! LOL!! Gotta love the home cookin’.

The officials weren’t buying it, though; they ordered the clock reset to 1.7 seconds and called a technical foul on FSU for the court-rushing shenanigans. (The Seminole coach later conceded that this was the correct call.) Redick hit both free throws, cutting the lead to 3, but Thornton still had his free throws to shoot for FSU. Coach K actually ordered his bench players (including Redick and the fouled-out Shelden Williams) off the court at this point, before FSU’s free throws, for safety reasons due to the crowd situation. In a surreal scene, the Blue Devil players were shaking hands with everyone on the Seminole bench as they went, notwithstanding that the game wasn’t over yet, and Duke could still theoretically have won. But Thornton staved off any thoughts of a Duke miracle by hitting both free throws, and the Seminoles won by 5 — and the crowd rushed the court again.

Throughout the whole fiasco, ESPN’s announcers were pretty harsh in their criticism of Florida State’s crowd control, for obvious reasons. Personally, I thought the whole thing definitely made the game even more entertaining… but I suppose I wouldn’t have wanted to be in those fans’ path, either. :)

Alas, I suspect this loss will actually help Duke refocus. I think it’s sometimes hard to get college kids motivated just by saying, “That was a closer game than it should have been.” But now that they’ve lost to the Seminole, it won’t be remotely difficult for Coach K to gets his kids to work harder in practice in preparation for the ACC and NCAA tournaments. Part of me wishes Gonzaga had also lost one of its close games, for similar reasons. (I said part of me. :)

Notre Dame is leading Providence by 4 at halftime. The Irish must win, or they can pretty much kiss their Big East tournament hopes goodbye. (A loss might knock them off the NIT bubble, too.)

In a related story, Notre Dame alum John Chute has a letter to the editor in today’s Observer which explains brilliantly exactly why Mike Brey needs to be fired. Here’s the money paragraph, which points out many of the precise problems that Becky and I have noticed, and also effectively rebuts — in wonderfully sarcastic fashion — the fallacious counterargument, so often heard from defenders of Brey and other bad coaches, that people who aren’t players or coaches have no right to criticize the coach because they don’t know what they’re talking about:

Since I am not a professional basketball coach or player, I do not suggest that my two varsity letters in high school basketball qualify me to pass judgments on the coaching acumen of Notre Dame’s exceedingly well-compensated and well-connected head coach. For example, I am willing to admit that what appears to me to be a highly unconventional strategy of complete abandonment of a low post game, coupled with an alternative strategy of “have two guards dribble it around with no other motion or off-the-ball screening and then chuck up a three-ball from 35-feet with one second left on the shot clock and two hands in your face,” is a potentially more cutting-edge, sophisticated, winning strategy than the tried-and-true approach of feeding the low post for two to four-foot buckets or a foul shot every other time down the floor. I will also admit that it may be incredibly innovative to take the rarely pursued approach of recruiting only two college-caliber big men during six years as coach and combine that with a complete lack of attention to teaching those players how to play the low post so as to ensure no semblance of an inside game as an option for your offense for three straight seasons. Lastly, it may be the veritable future of the sport to state as your goal “if they shoot 48 percent, we’re gonna try to shoot 55 percent because that is who we are,” and combine that with the rarely-employed defensive philosophy that consists of “stand flat-footed, keep your hands at your side, play as passively as possible, never jump out on high screens even when we are ahead by three points with two seconds left in the game and never, ever, box out as if you intend to actually obtain the rebound.” These may be the mandates of a true visionary, and it is not for me to suggest that other programs, for example, Indiana and Duke, which have combined for seven national championships via total commitment to defense and fundamentals, know any better than the current Notre Dame coaches as to how to achieve success on the court.

Heh.

“The last time I checked, the men’s basketball coaching position at Notre Dame was indeed a ‘job,’ not a volunteer camp counselor position,” Chute adds. “In fact, I suspect it ranks as one of the most highly-compensated positions at the University. As such, there should be fundamental standards and milestones which are required to be met.” He concludes that “Notre Dame needs a basketball coach and athletic director who, recognizing Notre Dame’s own legacy in men’s basketball, will commit to bring the Irish back to the top of the rankings, not to a seat on the annual bubble.”

(Hat tip: Kristin.)