Tag: basketball

What Minnesota sees in the mirror, and what the rest of us see

john
What We See
What We See
What Minnesota Sees
What Minnesota Sees

So Minnesota fired Tubby. @MedcalfByESPN is pretty clear that the real problem lies within the Minnesota athletic program and community — failure to build facilities, failure to support program, etc:

That’s the truth. Gophers need to invest a lot of money to right the ship. I’m gone. Feel free to disagree.

You can get lost in Minneapolis. When the Gophers are good, everyone cares. When they’re not, they go away. That’s just how it is.

The Gophers need so many additional resources to compete with the best teams in the Big Ten and the country. Limited investment.

Pretty classic mediocre team problem. The institution thinks it is a premier program, and thinks it deserves premier people and premier results. The truth is different.

Friday afternoon musing about TV — VCOs, Airplay, Cameras

john 1 Comment

Gearing up for lots of basketball watching over the next month, OSU is on tonight, Go Bucks, humiliate the Boilermakers. I know he is long retired but that combover that Gene Keady sported for years still annoys me and Purdue must pay for it. Anyway, random TV thoughts:

* Why are there no virtual cable operators? Why have MSFT and Hulu pulled back from this strategy? Rumours are it was over rights fees but given what I pay for a full load of cable channels each month so that I can get all the sports content, it is hard for me to believe there is not a viable offering in here. This seems like the only viable “cut the cord” strategy (vs the wishful think about ala carte pricing), I don’t understand why no one has bit the bullet and tried to make a VCO work.

* When will all our TVs have cameras built into them? OK maybe this year — “Samsung plans”:http://www.cepro.com/article/samsung_smart_tvs_dominate_2012_plans/ Kinect functionality? The chip cost is de minimus and the TV guys need features. How will that change how we use our TVs? If I have a camera in my iPad and Airplay and a camera in my TV, which will I use for video calling? I am confusing myself.

* Should we junk projectors in our conference rooms and just use AirPlay/AppleTV and an LCD display? Or at least use AppleTV as input to projector? Would this end the silly game of trying to get laptops to work in conference rooms with projectors? The new Airplay features of the iPad seem undersold. The press coverage seems to be all about resolution and network speed and multicore but this Airplay thing seems pretty interesting.

* Oh and back on the VCO thing — hooking up your PC to your TV can be a PITA, but it seems like AirPlay is going to help on that, so maybe this makes a VCO more viable?

NCAA bracket tools — the majors

john

“ESPN’s tool”:http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/en/frontpage is super easy to use. Can make picks first time right from the ESPN main page.

“SI”:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/basketball/ncaa/mens-tournament/?eref=sinav — where is your brain? Shoving me to Facebook and forcing me to let some other random Facebook app smash through my privacy wall? Wow this seems dumb dumb dumb. How can a sports media site let fantasy sports activity slip off their site??

“CBS Sports”:http://mayhem.cbssports.com/splash/mayhem/spln/opc/free?tag=railLeftContent;fantasyGamesCol also good, easy to enter, also a nice bracket manager for your own pool. They have a facebook thingy too but it is an optional side thing, much more rational.

“Foxsports”:http://mayhem.cbssports.com/splash/mayhem/spln/opc/free?tag=railLeftContent;fantasyGamesCol. Visually clumsy — orange, too much Hootersness, and the bracket layout is hard to parse. Not my fav. Oh and registration seemed more onerous.

“Yahoosports”:http://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/ seems good, nice bracket manager too.

OSU can never beat Minnesota by too much

john

Nice to see the Buckeyes wrap up the Big10 title in dominating fashion, onto the dance! And especially nice to wipe out Minnesota, too bad they weren’t knocked out of the tourney altogether. Why the hatred for the hapless Gophers? It all goes back to this incident, which pretty much flattened the OSU program for the next 10 years and ended Witte’s career. The Minnesota thugs got wrist slaps, Winfield went on to a successful baseball career which always galled me.

Here’s hoping the Gophers flame out in their first game.