How To Start a Season (Cont'd)

I know it's not historically common for me to blather about basketball games, but I can't help myself right now. Those college hoops just keep on coming, more recently courtesy of my beloved Hoosiers. Last night they beat the Lafayette Leopards by a score that wasn't really indicative of how close the game was. Watching the Hoosiers play a real game in superb and stunning HD made for the head-to-toe happiness. The Girl and I watched it, and she must have been pretty happy about it, too, given that she stopped softly calling, "Ask me about my weinerrr..." for the duration of the game. Plus, she mentioned about 214 times that she was excited about getting to watch our boys play again. I was glad that the Hoosiers managed to win, and I wish it would have been less touch and go for the majority of the game. Still there were lots of things to think...

The Good

• Earl Calloway is really fast. The Jack-be-nimble point guard repeatedly knifed into the lane to easily score against the Leopards. At one point, he scored 5 buckets in a row (or maybe 5 of 6). As the cherry on top, he pulled up and drilled several pull-up jumpers, which Lawton and I have been preaching for years are the single biggest lost art in hoops.
• The Hoosiers don't have to have a big game from DJ White to win. At least not against Lafayette. DJ's fouls per minute stat was absurdly high last night, and he only scored four points, and those were after the game was decided.
• Rod Wilmont can still score, reminding us that he was a 30+ ppg scorer in high school. He lit it up from beyond the arc, dropping 6 of 11 3's. He's also still the best energy guy they have.
• Kelvin Sampson started off with a win. Don't ask me why I care about this. Maybe it's because if he didn't, people would be talking about how no other IU coach has ever lost his debut game or something equally trivial and irrelevant. Regardless, it's good to start off on the right foot.
• This squad can fill it up. Sampson's teams aren't known for high-octane offense. They're known for slug-it-out 62-56 types of games that feature a lot of long possessions full of D. I'm fine with that sort of play, but it's fun to put up the points once in a while.

The Bad

• The Hoosiers had to win without DJ. It's a good thing that we listed that they can do it without him in the Good part because they didn't have a choice. He needs to keep his ass on the floor for more than 5 minutes a game.
• Aside from DJ, the Hoosiers don't have anyone who can defend the post. Or rebound very well on the inside. Or score down there. Ben Allen has some skills, and you can't let him have a stand-still 3, but he's the smallest 6-11 guy I've ever seen play at this point. Really, we're just assuming that DJ can do it, since he was a near non-factor last night. But he could defend and rebound and score two seasons ago, so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt. It's only one game, but I'll be interested to see how this situation develops for the rest of the season.

The Annoying

• The refs are calling absurd numbers of fouls this year. I've watched two full games so far. The one I saw on Sunday in Hooville, and the one on TV last night. One game featured 51 foul calls, and one had 52. That's ridiculous, especially when about 20% of them are ticky-tack crap that didn't give anyone an advantage. Plus those Shane Battier-style flops. Yuck. (Had they been going the Hoosiers' way, I would applaud the Dane Fife-style craftiness. But let's not talk about my hypocrisy.) I sure hope they settle down with those foul calls. It bugs.
• Duke Vitale did the game. I've mentioned before that Dookie V. is a pain in the ass, and he sure didn't change before last night. There was a 12-minute stretch (that's game time, not real time) in the first half where they didn't talk about the game AT ALL. Happily and surprisingly, Vitale wasn't talking about Duke, but damn. He talked about Sampson's recruiting violations at Oklahoma. He talked about the scandal around uber-recruit Eric Gordon. He talked about Bob Knight (but not about Knight push-/slap-/clubbing one of his players in last night's game because that hadn't happened yet, thankfully -- incidentally, I think it's non-news, and I'm not going to talk about it). But he wouldn't TALK ABOUT THE GAME. If he weren't deaf in one ear (as he constantly claims), he would have heard me yelling at my Big-Ass HDTV to do just that. There were all sorts of newcomers checking in and out of the game that they didn't even waste one word on. It was awful. Luckily, I'm a good guesser, and I was able to figure out who they were. Thankfully, someone else will be doing tonight's game.

All in all, the Good outweighs the Bad and the Annoying (because they are Dumb -- oh sorry, got carried away with a bastardized Spaceballs line). And Hoops are here to stay for a while! Good times indeed.