First Fan

Call him the First Fan.

President Barack Obama today welcomed the University of North Carolina Tar Heels basketball team to the White House to congratulate them on their recent national championship—which the president correctly predicted they would win.

Obama Welcomes UNC's National Champs to White House (WSJ Blogs - 11 May 2009)

Congratulations, Tarheels

Congratulations to the University of North Carolina Tarheels, 2009 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Champions.

Game highlights will no doubt be on YouTube shortly.

Meanwhile, two advertising-related observations from the game:

(1) Although they broke a first-half scoring record (55 points), Carolina did not score more than 100 points in the game, meaning that it won't be two-sausage-biscuits-for-a-dollar day at Bojangles tomorrow (explanation here, sort of. It's definitely a Southern thing.)

(2) Here are college basketball coaching legends Roy Williams, Rick Pitino, Bobby Knight and Mike Krzyzewski in their underwear, pimping Guitar Hero Metallica:

He spins, he tweets, he scores

Twittering the tournaments (via TweetGrid)

Up in Indiana where the tall corn grows

They know a little something about college basketball in Indiana:

Quinn Buckner laughed as soon as he heard the premise of the question.

"It's way too early to be talking about this," said Buckner, one of the stars of college basketball's last unbeaten national champion, Indiana's 1975-76 team that went 32-0.

The topic was North Carolina and whether the Tar Heels can replace the Hoosiers as the most recent unblemished champion.

North Carolina was the first unanimous preseason No. 1 team in The Associated Press poll, fueling the chatter that has existed since several key Heels spurned the NBA draft and returned to Chapel Hill.

They return all five starters, including national Player of the Year Tyler Hansbrough, and key reserves from a team that went 36-3 and reached the Final Four. Additionally, they add one of the nation's highest-rated recruiting classes, including 7-foot McDonald's All-American Tyler Zeller from Washington, Ind.

All pieces in place for No. 1 North Carolina to chase perfection (Indianapolis Star, 9 November 2008)

If it hasn't made the news in Indianapolis yet, it will soon: Tyler Hansbrough is out for an undetermined time with a "stress reaction condition" (the precursor to a stress fracture, one imagines?) in his shin.

Hansbrough's absence didn't deter the Tar Heels in their first outing against... uh... UNC-Pembroke.

Question of the day

If Obama earns his party's nomination at the convention, and is elected to the White House in November, will pickup basketball games replace touch football on the lawn as an iconic Presidential activity?

Dribble-Drive Motion

Who the hell is Vance Walberg? How is his [basketball] offense spreading around the nation? And if his brainchild is the hottest thing in U.S. basketball, why is he out of a job?

Grant Wahl examines the Dribble-Drive Motion offense in the most recent issue of Sports Illustrated. ("Fast and Furious," 12 Feb 2008).

(via Kottke)

Dean Smith was an innovative basketball coach and, a legend himself, "descended" from legends: Smith was coached by Phog Allen at Kansas, who in turn was coached by James Naismith, the inventor of the game. Dean wrote what continues, today, to be the bestselling technical book on basketball theory in the world, but the offenses and defenses he ran during his career were developed and tested by others first.

Hell, Dean didn't even invent the Four Corners offense, in which the team with a lead near the end of the game tries to run out the clock... he just popularized it, so much so that the NCAA had to change the rules of the game and introduce the shot clock. The inventor of Four Corners was a coach you may not have heard of. (And a big chunk of Dean's Book On Basketball--the description of the shuffle offense--was written by an obscure coach named Bob Spears.)

That's what Grant Wahl's story is about this week... it's a fascinating look at how unknown coaches can revolutionize the games they make their anonymous livings at.

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College basketball is the only sport I know anything about, or really care to.

It's mostly an accident of birth; I grew up as an inadvertent but reverent student of the game in the Triangle region of North Carolina--the place that Dick Vitale inevitably (and inaccurately) refers to as "Tobacco Road," where the legendary programs at UNC, NC State, Duke, and Wake Forest had us surrounded.

Like most North Carolinians, if pressed, I could do a fair job of offering color commentary on a basketball broadcast. My elderly aunt could give you a learned discourse on how to set a screen and execute a perfect pick-and-roll.

(It's a good thing I married a girl from Kansas. They also take their basketball seriously there.)

Of lemurs, lorises and layups

A lovely and apposite travel story about the part of Piedmont North Carolina that I'm presently in, and our obsession with college basketball, in (of all places) the New York Times: A Triangle Equal to the Sum of Its Hoops:

The gentle hills of the Triangle region of North Carolina are spangled with the prim brick McMansions of migrant techies lured by opportunity and temperate weather — almost any day is good for squeezing in 18 holes. Out on the wandering back roads, tall pines still cast thin shadows, turning a sunny-day drive into a sparkling strobe-light show. Just roll down the window to air out your soul. The Triangle, bounded by the cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, is an easy place to live and an even easier place to visit. Refill your sweet-tea glass and sit a while.

But at this time of year, an earlier immigrant from the North slices its pleasant homogeneity into three. The pulsating indoor game of college basketball takes over, dividing loyalties and generating friction. In the Triangle, even if you are not a fervent fan, you must share the deep regional certainty that basketball is really, really important.

Important? Ha. I've been living in NYC for ten years now, and I will, this year as always, arrange to take a vacation day on the opening Friday of the ACC Tournament.

In there amongst all the Tobacco Road and roundball references, writer Dave Caldwell even manages to work in an unexpected shoutout to one of my all-time favorite Triangle institutions, the Duke University Lemur Center, which works to study and preserve the earliest (evolutionarily speaking) surviving primates on the planet, the lemurs, lorises and other prosimian cousins of Madagascar.

Aye-aye, captain (picture of Aye-aye, Daubentonia madagascariensis,
courtesy Duke Lemur Center)

These cute little buggers are the ancient ancestors of monkeys, apes, and human beings (for those of you not into evolutionary "theory," relax... Satan put them on Madagascar to confuse us all and test our faith.)

Update: Do check out the Modulator's Friday Ark today - and later tonight, Carrie is going to please Mister Gato's large Internet fanbase with a bit of catblogging.

Klass with a capital K

Bobby Knight is now the winningest coach in Division I NCAA Men's Basketball, surpassing Dean Smith's record 879 wins with Texas Tech's victory over New Mexico today.

Calling Coach Knight controversial is like observing that the abortion issue is potentially divisive. He was in fine form at the post-game press conference:

"I don't expect you people to have agreed with what I've done -- and, if I did [care], I would have asked your opinion. And I have never asked the opinions of very many. I've simply tried to do what I think is best in the way that I think you have to do it. I think I've put myself out on a limb at times, knowingly, simply because I thought what I was going to do or say was the best way to get this kid to be the best player or the best student."

Knight has been a college coach for 41 of his 66 years, having broken in at Army and made his mark by winning three national titles in 29 years at Indiana. Fired by Indiana after administrators could no longer tolerate his behavior, he resurfaced at this college basketball outpost in 2001 and has guided the Red Raiders to unprecedented heights.

He's a complex package, someone who can hit a policeman, throw a chair across the court or be accused of wrapping his hands around a player's neck, yet never gets in trouble for breaking NCAA rules, always has high a graduation rate and gave his salary back a few years ago because he didn't think he'd earned it. (source)

Michael Jordan played for Dean Smith at Carolina and for Bobby Knight when Bobby coached the US Olympic team. Asked to compare and contrast their coaching styles, Jordan famously observed, "Coach Smith is the master of the Four Corners offense and Coach Knight is master of the four-letter word."