Monday January 17

I thought about taking the Christmas Tree down today.  I'm going to consider that a step in the right direction.

The Australian Open started Sunday at 7pm eastern time and I must say it was a pleasant surprise.  DirecTV has the hookup for the first week of all of the Grand Slams with their mix channel and the ability to watch any of those 6 matches on it's own channel.  All in HD. 

I'm not going to lie when I say that the most interesting sporting event I saw yesterday was Monfils battling back from being down 2 sets to none and 5 to 2 in the 3rd to eventually win in 5 sets.  It would have been a major bummer had he lost that early.  He's pretty much the only non American I follow.

Speaking of Americans, I need Serena to get back in the mix by the next Slam.  I don't just miss her singles, but she ruins the sister doubles as well.  You know it's actually pretty embarrassing that her and Venus are the only good American women.  They can't play forever.

I've watched a lot of college basketball in my life and I've never seen a game start the way that the Syracuse - Pittsburgh game did tonight.

Playing at home, the Panthers jumped out to a 19-0 lead.  Syracuse then promptly responded with a 17-0 run of their own to cut the Pitt lead to 19-17.  I've never seen that.  I've never seen two teams take turns trading those types of blows to start a game.  Never.

Besides the fact that both Pitt and Syracuse couldn't lose tonight, there was something else bothering me during the telecast.  No it wasn't that I kept flipping the channel to see what was going on in the Australian Open.  It was Dick Vitale.  Dick doesn't the Big East game on Monday but since today was Gigantic Monday with games being played all day, I had he misfortune of listening to him run his mouth about evertying but the actual game going on right in front of him.

Example of Dick being Dick - late in the game with Syracuse trying to mount a comeback, he just keeps going on and on about how San Diego State has a chance to go undefeated before the NCAA Tournament starts. 

I've been saying for awhile now that you can't win a Big East game scoring less than 60 points.  Georgetown has failed to score 60 in all of their conference losses so far.  Well earlier in the day both Connecticut and Villanova seemed really determined to prove me wrong.  Connecticut went on to uphold my theory by just barely clearing the bare minimum hurdle in their 61-59 victory.

You know I love Jay Bilas and Bill Raftery doing games.  I absolutely love them but I was pretty disappointed in them at the end of the UCONN game.  Villanova got the ball with 2.5 seconds after Walker scored and had to go the length of the court.  Jay and Bill went on about how surprised they were that Villanova didn't call a timeout.  Well it wasn't all that surprising given the fact that they didn't have any.  How was there not somebody in their ear telling them that?

And with that I'm calling a timeout.  I have one left.

Peace brah