Avdat

Crow, Mmm Good

Basketball season ended for me this afternoon, mercifully enough, as the Wolfpack was defeated in the ACC Tournament.  And yes, it was a double-digit margin, as all but one of the Pack's nine consecutive defeats have been.  The one close game was, inexplicably, the second Dook game.  I don't know if we somehow exposed the young Blue Devils, or if it's a case of even blind squirels finding a nut here and there.  What I do know is that I was on crack or something when I wrote this, and Jonathan, who is much more polite than me, gets a lot of credit for comments that amounted to no more than a roll of the eyes.

K deserves coach of the year honors for getting so much out of such a young team.  Certainly more so than Seth Greenberg who earned a first round bye by only playing the top three seeds once. 

Either K or the guy who beat us today, Frank Haith.  A guy whose name surfaced before we hired Sidney Lowe.  The Hurricanes in the big dance?  Who'd a thunk it?

Let me count the ways

The N&O's Chip Alexander offers 15 reasons why the Wolfpack is in the cellar.

State Fans Nation has commentary.  Lowe is both indicted and exonerated.

Off-label use; unintended consequences; cross-pollination; call it what you will

Buck thinks that Sidney Lowe needs to walk over to Centennial Campus and check out what the good fellows in the Physics Deptartment are up to:

Researchers in New York reported this month that they have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made -- about 30 times as dark as the government's current standard for blackest black.

The material, made of hollow fibers, is a Roach Motel for photons -- light checks in, but it never checks out. By voraciously sucking up all surrounding illumination, it can give those who gaze on it a dizzying sensation of nothingness.

But scientists are not satisfied. Using other new materials, some are trying to manufacture rudimentary Harry Potter-like cloaks that make objects inside of them literally invisible under the right conditions -- the pinnacle of stealthy technology.

U.S. military and intelligence agencies have funded the cloaking research "for obvious reasons," said David Schurig, a physicist and electrical engineer at North Carolina State University who recently designed and helped test a cloaking device. In that experiment, a shielded object a little smaller than a hockey puck was made invisible to a detector that uses microwaves to "see."

The first working cloaks will be limited that way, he said -- able to steer just a limited part of the light spectrum around objects -- and it could be years before scientists make cloaks that work for all wavelengths, including the visible spectrum used by the human eye.

But even cloaks that work on just a few key wavelengths could offer huge benefits, making objects invisible to laser beams used for weapons targeting, for example, or rendering an enemy's night goggles useless because objects would be invisible to the infrared rays those devices use.

Buck suggests putting the technology to a more peaceful use:  "Give Gavin Grant a +1 cloak of invisibility in the low post."

Problem is, technologies tend to boomerang on you.  I think Lowe and the scientists have already been collaborating, because Brandon Costner has been invisible for much of this season.

UPDATE:  Pack packs it in versus Noles; Lowe throws team under bus.

Woe is the Wolfpack

Brother Bill asks, "Where would this pack team be with Herb coaching? Would his teams fold like a wet house of cards in a wind tunnel?"

This is a good question.  Herb did rack up a lot more wins in his last two seasons that Lowe has in his first two.  But of course our relationship with Herb was plagued by irreconcilable differences.  Herb liked beating Florida State and Virginia Tech more than he hated losing to Carolina and Dook.  Thus the relationship had to end.  And while Lowe is 1-4 against the Tar Heels and 1-2 (I think) against Dook, his heart and his hate is in the right place, and we appreciate that.

This teams quits when the going gets rough.  But I do remember games in the Sendek era when his teams quit on him.  They'd abandon the disciplined Princeton system and just start jackin' up 3s.  But Herb wouldn't call time out or sit anybody down.

As we have observed, State can't put two good halves together.  There's two theories about this, both of which have something to do with Lowe's coaching. 

The first, my favorite, is that the team just isn't motivated to play a solid 40 minutes of defense.  In the Maryland game guys were just standin' around while that cat with the afro who really needs to play with a red, white and blue basketball was scoring at will.

Because Lowe is an NBA coach, he knows that defense wins games.  But because he's an NBA coach, he expects everybody to know this.  He calls plays, calls defense, and they execute, right? 

But they don't.  Lowe thinks that playing good defense is it's own reward.  If you contest passes, you get to play.  If not, you get to sit down.  Which is why Hickson was on the bench Thursday night.  Herb wouldn't have benched Hickson.  This is to Lowe's credit, not Herb's. 

Like it or not, Lowe's gonna have start being their Daddy.  They need lots of positive reinforcement when they get after the ball.  Or else...

The other theory is that the other team makes better halftime adjustments than State does.  If true, that would be bad for our appreciation of Lowe's coaching abilities.

But I think it's more the former than the latter.

We won't have another Herb situation.  If next season is as bad as this, or only marginally better, Lowe will return to the NBA.  It won't drag out.  He has options Herb didn't.  And the NBA is great, man!  A job that lets you travel to New York, LA, Miami, and Chicago, as opposed to, say, Tallahassee, Clemson or Bill's town, Winston-Salem. 

And you don't have to be anybody's Daddy...

Good game, my little smurfs!

Plus, Dook lost too.  Y'all are in high cotton!

Earlier I wondered why State can't put two good halves together.  Physical conditioning?  Mental toughness?  Talent?

Lowe, Ellington and Hickson agree:  it's the mental toughness.

Hickson had a lot of time to think about it, sitting on the bench for a long stretch in the second half after missing an assignment.  And Lowe's called out this team for lack of defensive toughness before. 

I like this about Lowe.  He'd rather lose by 14 with guys who get out on the court to play than lose by 8 or 10 with guys whose hearts aren't in it.

But it raises a question:  Which is the harder motivating assignment, the NBA or College Hoops?  Lowe doesn't seem to be much into stirring halftime speeches, more into sending you to the end of the bench where hopefully you can find the inner resources to motivate yourself.

So, on the other hand, maybe this is a skill Lowe will have to learn in order to coach college kids.

Meanwhile, Tyler Hansbrough is a force of nature!

They've done gone meta

Pathetic.

They aren't even whining about which team's more badly hurt.  They're whining about which coach whines the most about it. 

Meta-whining?

And so I ask all you little Smurfs and Dookies out there, Is it worth it?  I can see the attraction in being a Homer for such successful programs, but at what point does the little shred of self-respect left in you stand up and say, I will not salute and say Yes Sir! when such small, self-absorbed crybabies pull their pacifiers out of their mouths and let ER rip in front of the microphones?

And I will say to Roy in particular, There is a game tonight.  I hope you're preparing your team to play it and win it instead of sponging tissue off of them because K hurt your feelings. 

I'm not making any predictions, mind you.  I saw what happened in Chapel Hill last month, and I've seen what's transpired since then.  I'm just saying, There is a game tonight.  And it's not against Dock.

84-70

State beats the teams it can beat and doesn't beat the teams it can't.  This seems like an utterly banal observation, but mediocrity is often exemplified by flashes of brilliance followed by inexplicable losses.  Not so the Wolfpack.  No one expected State to win on the road at Chapel Hill, College Park, and Durham, and they didn't.  And no one really expected them to lose at home to Wake, which has lost, like, a gazillion in a row on the road, and they didn't disappoint.

But they do get my hopes up in the first half, only to crush them in the second.  The Duke game was a great example, and so was last night's game.  It's the defense.  State can defend the basket tenaciously--for 20 minutes.  Then they forget to contest passes and sort of stand there and let you score.  I don't know if they lack mental toughness or physical conditioning or talent, but they can't stop a superior opponent in back-to-back halves.

Two great tastes that taste great together

What's the harder wall to hit?  Mile 20 in any given marathon, or...

downing the eighth doughnut of the dozen you must consume at the halfway point of the Krispy Kreme Challenge?

Even hashing looks like a bona fide athletic event compared to this.

It's another reason to be proud of my alma mater, even in basketball season.

There's still time to register!

I got something for you

You're here this morning because you think I got nuthin.  Baby, let  me tell you, I always got somethin'.  Starting with how I mailed a big fat check to the Marion Jones Legal Defense Fund in your honor last week!

Yes the Wolfpack is 0-1.  But tomorrow is a new day.  Just like today is a new season for the Giants, who started 0-2.  Gotta luv that Eli!  Told you there wasn't anything wrong with him.

And I got more!  How about my man Philip Rivers!  Wolfpack nation burns its hoodies this week to back the Chargers. 

I ain't afraid of no devil in a blue dress

It's good to be a State fan again.  We were starting to assume the morose defeatism of pre-2004 Red Sox fans, but the three wins in a row and a brilliant first quarter against Carolina were no summer tease followed by the inevitable September collapse.  We held!  We won!

And it's looking even better.  Barring an injury, the 2008 basketball season looks like a return to the good ol' days when the Wolfpack and the Tar Heels vied for ACC supremacy.  Sorry Jonathan, but I am leaving Dook out of the equation.  Brother John and I were talking on the phone last night, and we agreed that Krzyzewski is the new Denny Crum.  He of straight black hair had a nice run, but he can't recruit. 

I mean, why would you want to go to Dook?  Let's say you're a 250 lb. white boy, a beast in the middle, an ogre terrorizing skinny kids in every barn in Iowa.  And you want to go to Dook so that you can become the next... Shavlik Randolph? 

Even if you have a stellar college career, all you have to look forward to is an NBA career of forgettable mediocrity.  Shane Battier?  As much as I hate Carolina, I do have to respect the proven fact that they are a factory for All-Star Team starters. 

Unlike Crum, Coach K probably will not have a long fade out.  K has too much of his mentor in him to go quietly into that good night.  One of these days he's going to pull a Woody Hayes on a Carolina point guard who's just silenced the Cameron crazies with another alley oop.  You watch.