I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the cash game in Houston over the holidays.

It was one of those evenings that had we filmed it and put cameras on all of the hole cards, we would probably never run out of material to discuss on this blog.

For starters, I completely misjudged how it would play out. As a reminder, we played small blinds ($1-$3) NL, but we had a $1,000 buy-in. You might have guessed that the buy-in would have very little impact on the texture of the game. In fact, you might have guessed (which I did) that it would (ironically) reduce the amount of action, as the fear of getting felted would provide a deterrent for playing middling hands in a big pot. But to think that would have happened, you would have to suspend all knowledge of what lunatic gamblers my friends are.

To be honest, I didn’t expect much from the Oracle from Omaha (aka The River Chief). When we last played, he was a fairly timid player. The worm has turned, and he is packing an oozie! On the second hand of the night, after being into the pot for $650, he fired another $350 at the pot and got Juan to fold. The table took notice and nobody fucked with the Oracle after that. In fact, it seemed like the first 10 or so hands that he won went uncontested.

I also assumed that Ted “The Poker Nihilist” Hoth would play like a maniac. For about 5 hours, he actually played pretty tight. I’d never seen that before, and it really changed the EV of the game.

To explain one reason I didn’t fare well (and there were many), I think it’s helpful to understand the situation in which I typically do very well. In the (now) common format of $1-$3 with a capped buy-in, either in home games or in casinos, I tend to play very long sessions. That generally means that after a while, I have a monster stack. Even if I have lost and re-bought a lot, at some point I can win a hand and have a big stack (even if it is less than my cumulative buy ins!). So say I have $700 in front of me and most players have around $100-$200, but there are 1 or 2 other guys with stacks about the size of mine. These guys sat down and put in $200 and never really expected to have $700 at risk. If I get in a hand with them, I can usuallly scare the shit out of them. There aren’t many poker situations in which I am uncomfortable. I wish that higher stakes made me nervous (that would be a good deterrent) but I honestly don’t think I play any differently with $700 in front of me than $70. So, here I typically am in a siutation I want to be in… and my opponent is in a situation he didn’t exactly sign up for.

Now contrast that with a $1,000 minimum buy-in game. To have even sat down at the table automatically means that you aren’t afraid of having $1k at risk. I can’t thow out a $250 bet and even get you pause from the story you are telling while you call (or even raise). Nobody is the slightest bit scared of the stakes. Advantage lost.

I suppose that I never fully appreciated just how much of an advantage I typically have in the typical (capped buy in) game until I could contrast it to an uncapped game. Looking back, most of my big scores, particularly in Vegas, came from having a big stack from which I kept firing off bazookas at trembling opponents.

Not only can I typically knock a guy off a hand when the stakes get high, I can also count on a lack of bluffs from my opponents. A guy that doesn’t play very often who finds himself up $500 in a $1-$2 game is not about to give up those chips easily. If he bets, you should assume he has something. In the Houston game, if my opponent bet, it only meant he was still alive.

So, in summary, I intentionally chose a structure that was meant to approximate a situation in which I feel I am favored. I felt that the nuance of starting with a big stack as opposed to waiting for people to, through winning and/or buying back in, build up their stack (thus losing precious poker time!) was in consequential. In fact, it was of great consequence.

Moving on…

I have also usually had a policy of always buying as many chips as possible: either “up to the biggest stack” or up to the cap, depending on the rules. I never understood the guy who plays with a dwindling stack without buying more chips. Invariably, he hits a big hand and doubles up. As happy as he might be, I’d be pissed. After all, the double up would be worth a lot more if you had more chips! I haven’t backed off on my policy, but I have tempered it a bit. Either you consider yourself favored at a table or you don’t. If you do, then you should maximize your EV by maximizing your chips. If you don’t feel you are favored, you should leave. I suppose it doesn’t hurt much to let your stack dwindle some without re-loading. Sometimes you go through a cold streak. I am not talking about any sort of hocus-pocus. Cold streaks may start out due to random bad luck, but once you start losing and others start winning, they will pound on you. Your bluffs are thinly veiled. Your whole image is shot. So it becomes an iterative thing whereby losing begets more losing. It could make sense to temper my enthusiasm to reload to the max in these situations. Wait for a few things to go your way, wait for your image to change, and then (when that EV just picked up) you should re-load. In $200 capped games, this isn’t terribly important, but after playing an uncapped game, I can see the wisdom in waiting to reload just a bit.

Morris bluffed me pretty good on one hand. I don’t remember everything, but it went something like this. I had AJ on the button and I raised pre-flop. The flop came AKT. He checked, I bet big and he called. Don’t recall the turn, but he checked and I think I did, too. Don’t recall the river, but he bet $350. I thought about it forever. What I just couldn’t get past was that I couldn’t conceive of a hand that would call me on the flop that didn’t have me beat on the river. I was going under the (usually safe) assumption that bluffs are typically designed on the river, not master-planned on an earlier street. I folded, and he showed total rags. That meant that he called a big bet on the flop with absolutely nothing. There can only be one reason to do this, and that is exactly what he did. Well played. According to Juan, had I studied his body language, I would have “known” he was bluffing. Maybe. But stuck in the thought that the only bluff I might be facing was a missed draw (i.e., I couldn’t conceive the bluff that was planned several streets in advance), I don’t think that body language alone would have been persuasive.

Junell thought our big hand was the same holdings as the famous hand from 2004. He was right. I guess the long run is officially 69.75 months long.

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Although I don’t agree with Homeslice’s opinions, I find it interesting that ESPN drew the same connection from Saban to Yates HS that we I did.

Texas losing the game and finishing #2 sits very well with me. I’ve heard a lot of comments from Texas fans about how it doesn’t really matter, but it does.

On a superficial level, finishing #2 tells me that the voters saw the exact same game that longhorn fans saw and discounted the result (and the score, you little rat bastard) because of Colt’s injury.

On a more substantive level, where you finish the previous year has a lot to do with where you start the next, and correspondingly where you stay during the year if you take care of business. TCU fans can probably tell you a lot about that.

I almost wrote a ridiculously long comment to Fro’s post and then decided that was stupid since I could just write a long post in response.

Tuberville is going to turn Tech into Aggie Lite. They’ll pass a little bit and play great defense, but they won’t be constantly talked about on TV and they’ll probably muddle along in the middle of the pack for a while. I do think he is a good hire – he’s one of the best available coaches out there – and, ironically, Tech can thank Leach for bringing them to enough prominence that Tuberville would want the job and no one in the media is asking, “why would he go there?”

FWIW – Leach got railroaded because the administration was looking for an excuse and Adam James was handy. Anyone who says that he got fired for “punishing a kid for getting hurt” is a moron and is wrong on two counts:

1.) Leach was punishing the kid because the kid was a smug turd and as coach Leach had grown tired of his attitude and didn’t want him to be around practice if he didn’t have to be. Coaches do that all the time and, frankly, its their prerogative as the authority figure. Adam James wasn’t harmed by it, so the only real argument is the “humiliation” angle, which is BS because humiliation is a major part of group dynamics and leadership. The point of leading a team is that the members of the team need to be taught that the team is more important than the individual. How better to encourage the individual to be subservient to the team? Punish him for being too much of a individual. If you don’t want to be humiliated, be a team player and follow the rules and give your best effort or don’t play at all. I am fairly certain that Craig James, even as the stud running back back in the day, was occasionally punished or humiliated by his coaches in much the same way, and I’m fairly certain that if you got Craig James drunk (ie not being sanctimoniously phony on TV) he would still profess his love for his coaches at Stratford and SMU as “molders of men” or somesuch nonesense.

The moral of the story is that Leach called Craig James a “little league dad” – anyone reading this blog knows what that means – and Craig James abused his position at ESPN to get back at Leach and get him fired, which leads to the next point.

2.) Leach was fired because the administration was tired of HIS attitude. Just as Leach had the right to banish Adam James from the practice field, the administration was within its rights to fire the coach for insubordination to the leadership of the university, including the very public contract negotiations last year, but also including lots of other stuff behind the scenes, apparently. It was a clash of egos, but since Leach was the best coach they’ve ever had and very popular with the fans, the administration needed an excuse beyond not being able to get along with him.

Leach will go be a coordinator somewhere and put up big numbers and then will land as head coach at some middle of the road Pac 10 or ACC school and do for them what he did for Tech. Maybe not consistently chasing the MNC, but better than they used to be and popular with the media.

I also agree that the NCAA shitstorm is about to rain down on USC and California Pete jumped ship like the rat that he is.

As far as last Thursday:

No one can dispositively say that Texas would have won with Colt and anyone who does say it is wearing orange glasses. That said, the Bama fans who make the opposite claim – and there are quite a few – that whether or not the winningest college quarterback of all time played was irrelevant because the result would have been the same, are also in fantasyland.

It was pretty clear that Texas’s game plan, consistent with Muschamp’s stated defensive philosophy, was to let those running backs get all the yards they wanted and dare McElroy to keep up, which, based on the fact that he was sacked almost every time he dropped back to pass, seems a pretty valid idea to try.

Casting aside the fluke pick 6 and little Nicky running up the score at the end (when the result was already decided) to ease the redass of the freshman QB almost coming all the way back, the Bama offense managed 17 points all night in what was basically their perfect game. McElroy didn’t have to win it, but he couldn’t have if Colt had been healthy and Texas’s entire team hadn’t staggered around depressed for the last 25 minutes of the first half.

Then, once Gilbert got going and the team got some pep back on both sides of the ball, they started to come back and all of those people who say that Bama was just trying to be conservative in the 3rd quarter are fooling themselves. They went 3 and out three times in a row in the 3rd quarter, plus another 5 and out drive, and there was no way that McElroy could have “opened up” the offense even if they had wanted to. No way.

So yeah, Texas was ripped off. No asterisk or anything like that, injuries are part of the game and you can’t win them all, etc etc, but Colt getting hurt was definitely the best thing that could have happened to Bama and there’s no denying that by any objective standard.

As we have seen from the SEC and its fans, however, objectivity is sorely lacking. But to the victors go the spoils and Bama fans (not so much the sycophant SEC guys…) have earned the right to be loud and boisterous and point to a crystal football. There’s not much more to it than that.

The big silver lining for me is that now Garrett Gilbert has a more intense big game experience than any other starting QB in the country next year save Greg McElroy, who sucks, and those trips to Dallas and Lincoln and Lubbock won’t be nearly as scary for him as they would be otherwise. He is going to a be very good and I feel better about the Longhorns next year already. Awful for Colt, but better for next year’s Longhorns.

Speaking of next year… I’ll just write a new post.

Predictions

If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.

Let’s start with my predictions.

1) UT beats OU Hellz yeah
2) By a big margin Not so much.
3) And wins the B12 South very much so.
4) And the B12 Barely, but yes.
5) And goes to the NC game Yes! And 21 of our starters
played after the 5th play!
6) OSU ranked around #13 No, much worse. Without Bryan,
they werent very good.
7) A&M beats Baylor Whoop!  Keep in mind, across the board, people had Baylor finishing ahead of A&M in the conference.  I was the only one that truly believed in the spirit of Aggieland
#8 FU is not in the NC game No, they weren’t
9) Ole Miss ranked worse than 8 Very much so, at #20
10) USC-OSU winner to NC game No
11) And its USC Hell, no
12) J Best to NYC Along with prediction #11, I
overestimated that Pathetic-10 Conference
13) But McCoy wins Not this year.
14) ND worse than #23 Uh, yeah.
15) USC wins it all No they don’t. I wish I had phrased
this “UT loses the NC game” so that I could have been right.  Do I get a half point?
16) And of course………Junell is still gay at season’s end.
Word.
OK, that’s 9 right and 7 wrong.

Pools

Now I’m gettin’ Matchbox 20 money

On to my pools….
#1 straight up pool – lost entry of $50.  Would have won a weekly $100, but I evidently clicked on a wrong button once.  Ughh.

#2 against the spread pool – entry of $40, won a weekly prize of $50. 
#3 bowl games only ranked pool – didn’t get picks in on time. Last year you could change your picks up until off of each game. I assumed that was the case this year. There was a rule change without notification, and I pissed away $30
#4 pool – did with a friend. He changed a pick (Bama to Texas). Had he not changed it, we would have won $276/2. Instead we lost $20/2. Bastard.
#5 The big pool that Johnymac and his bro played in. I won $2000 on a $100 entry. The UT game going over 45.5 sealed it for me. The end game of this pool probably deserves a separate post.

I also picked up $250 from having a piece of a friend (a generous friend) who won big in another pool.

That’s gross revenue of $2,300 on entry fees of $230.   Silly mistakes (including the friend who switched a pick!!) cost me $268.

The National Championship Game

Well, turn around. Yours look pretty good, too.

Well, crap, what can I say? I’ll quote a friend who said, “I must say that I feel like we were all robbed last night. Not of a win, but of what I think would have been a classic National Championship football game.”

Injuries happen. I get it. It’s not like Colt got hit by a bus in the parking lot before the game or poisoned by the hotel staff.  He got hurt as a result of a hit that happened in the course of the game.  It happens.  There is no asterisk on Alabama’s championship. That is stupid. But I otherwise agree with this guy’s basic sentiment that 09 Alabama will always be haunted by the doubts of “What if?” And maybe, just maybe, UT wasn’t the one that was robbed. Maybe Bama would have beaten us with Colt McCoy, and if so, they they are the ones that got robbed. They’ll probably feel like my 1994 and 1995 Houston Rockets who did all they could to win but will always be asked “What if Michael Jordan played against you? Would you have still won?”

Saban should be embarrassed to have been only 3 points ahead of a team playing a true freshman at QB so late in the game. I think he called an absolutely terrible game and won despite himself. I have nothing to say about the TD with 45 seconds left because complaining about running up the score is best left to wussies who can’t stop teams from scoring. This wasn’t feckless Lee against superpower Yates trying to set records. It’s the #2 University of Texas in a National Championship game against #1 Alabama, and complaining about that is just stupid.

All in all, I am pretty proud of our team. The execution was far from perfect, but what do you expect from kids on a big stage like that. Our blunders were less, um, blunderous than Alabama’s. In the end, Greg Davis brough along GG slowly and the D did an excellent job of forcing Bama to punt 8 (7 real punts + 1 fake) times and keeping them to 2 of 12 on 3rd down conversions. This collectively put us in a position to win, despite our circumstances. Then we didn’t capitalize.

Oh well, we’re a basketball school anyway…

Random thoughts and observations on the game:

-  Blake Gideon intercepted that pass on the fake punt.  Good for him.  Of course, the right play would have been to drop it, since it was 4th down.  But this is the same Blake Gideon that told himself after he dropped a potential game-winner against Tech last year that he’d never drop another INT.  And he didn’t.

-  I have a theory that Saban isn’t stupid.  He might have told the team before the game that they were going to go for it on the first punt opportunity.  That would be pretty smart to call it so far in advance because in football as in poker, the body language of the team and coach can sometime be read when they are trying to do something tricky.  I guess he didn’t have a “safeword” to call it off when it turned out to be 4th and >20 yards to go.

-  Mark Ingram is a good kid.  His Heisman speech was great.  He performed well in the NC game, and his team won.  He is a beast of a RB.  We all know the story about his dad, so why did Kirk and Brent have to drone on and on about it?  C’mon, it’s about the kid, not the dad.  Just drop it and talk about how incredible the kid is.

-  I always thought that “Hot Child in the City” was sung by a chick.  So, I always thought it was weird that it ended, “Come on down to my place woman, and we’ll make LOVE!”  I just learned today that it is a dude singing that song, which answers one question but begs another.

-  Gilbert had more yards in the 2nd half against Alabama than Tebow did in the entire CCG.

-  Texas actually outgained Alabama.  One word: turnovers.

-  I read on a Tech website and on a Florida website that Colt “was probably faking it.”  That makes a lot of sense.  You give up NFL money to play 13 games only to bow out of the most important game of your career (and at that, a game in which you could significantly help your NFL stock.)  There is no reasoning with fans.  After all, the word “fan” comes from “fanatic”, but really…   They should read this, or at least the first part of it.

-  Sometimes reality is a heck of a lot funnier than anything I could make up, and I couldn’t make this up:  Alabama is going to display its trophy at the Tuscaloosa Walmart.

- I know many people are convinced that the shuffle (sic) pass call a the end of the half was stupid, but I strongly disagree.  I know those that struggle to understand EV are the first to chime in with opinions on the subject, but it is only us gamblers that really understand how to make decisions and, more important, how to criticize them.  For starters, in poker and in college football, you don’t judge a decision based on the results.  Yes, the pass was “intercepted” (technically, although it was more akin to a fumble recovery) and returned for a TD.  But using that as evidence that it was a stupid decision would mean that every time a playgoes awry, that it was wrong to call the play.  If a punt is blocked, was it stupid to punt?  A shovel pass is about as safe of a play as can be called.  I have never seen one returned for a TD prior to last night, and I might not ever see it again.  It was completely flukey.  And why should UT have taken a knee?  They are basically an amatuer poker player with a short stack against a seasoned pro right now (as far as their odds go), so take a chance.  Make a play.  It worked out for Moneymaker.  I think it was the right call; it just didn’t work out.

-  Many people in Alabama will say that Mark Ingram is the second best running back on their team.  We got a glimpse into what they mean.

- It’s still just very sad right now.

Coaching Carousel and Oddities

Sometimes a pirate beats a soldier

First there was the Weis speculation which ended with his firing and the hiring of Brian Kelly.  I agree with the firing and that hiring.  Cincy players acted offended at the fact that BK left.  Really?  You think anybody in their right mind would stay at Cincinnati when offered a job a Notre Dame.  Those kids are pretty freaking naive.  Then Bowden “retired”, and I agree with FSU’s decision to make him retire.  It was nice to see him pull off a victory in his last game.  There are a lot of coached in football that I do not like, but Bobby Bowden is not one of them.

Then there was the firings of Mangino, Leach and Leavitt.  This just in:  Coaches are mean to their players.  I guess this is a surprise to many people.  I had coaches say and do worse things than any of these three guys are accused of (but not as odd as what Leach was accused of).  For Mangino and Leavitt, I understand the firing.  The PR was bad enough, but you also have to consider the legal problems with not taking action.  But the Leach thing, that is different.  The whole thing is such a circus, but I’ll try to make some sense of it.  First of all, obviously Mike Leach did something stupid.  But on the scale of Stupid Things, this is barely a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10.  If this had been a coach in good standing with his bosses, they’d investigate first and only fire after the investigation.  If this were Stoops, Brown, Tressell, it would have been kept under wraps as long as possible, and the administration would immediately go into damage control mode.  Seeing how quickly they made it public and suspended him made it pretty clear that they were anxious to can him but needed just the right opportunity.  Oh, and then there is the little fact that he got fired just in time to save the school at least $800,000.  ESPN’s coverage was anything but unbiased.  They aired the interview with Leach which made him look pretty good.  The, during the Tech game, they tout “breaking news that contradicts Leach’s claims from the interview.”  So they show some quotes of his which were embarrassing, but didn’t at all contradict what he said. They were just a bunch of crass profanity that made him look bad.   But it didn’t really change any basic facts.  I think that Mike Leach is at least twice as smart as the smartest person at Tech, and I fully expect him to come out well when this goes to court.  (update: I don’t think Tuberville was the right hire.  I could be wrong.  I was right when I thought tossing RC for Fran was a bad idea.  I was very wrong when I though UT should hire Barnett over Brown.  So, I don’t always know what I am talking about when it comes to coaching hires, but Tech had a good niche going, and they should stick with it.  I would have gone with Ruffin, not because I think he is better.  It’s just that Tech had a good thing going and they shouldn’t rock the boat.)

Mangino, Leach and Leavitt each took their teams to #2 at some point in a regular season.  They are each regarded as the most successful coach ever at their university (Leavitt is the only coach ever at his…).  Any chance that there is a positive correlation between coaches beaing hardasses and success on the field?  No, that is just ridiculous…

Now Pete Carroll is, in all likelihood, headed to the NFL.  Pete has said on more than one occasion that he is a college guy.  He, and everybody else on the planet, knows that his greatest strength is recruiting and that the NFL is not a smart move (again).  So why is he going?  Same reason coaches have been leaving inexplicably for decades: he knows that the NCAA is about to drop the hammer on USC, and he is not about to be around when it happens.  Bye bye, doucher.

The whole Urban Meyer thing is almost too weird to analyze.  I get it that he as health problems, and I think it was brave to make the (initial) decision he made.  But the change of heart <24 hours later?  Really?  Dude, you are the best coach in football, but you need to work on your PR.  I hope he gets his health in order, and I hope he is back in football soon.

SEC! SEC! SEC!

I’m not part of a redneck agenda

KTL once said something to the effect of “It’s not that I don’t think the SEC is the best conference; Ido.  It’s the extent of how much better they are is greatly exagerrated.”  With this I agree.  Hats off to the conference that is 6-0 in the BCS Championship Game.  When OU lost to LSU and USC, it was clearly outmatched.  Against FU, it could have gone either way; in the end, I think Stoops was outcoached.  But I should point out that 4 of the SEC’s Champions came from teams with 5 losses (LSU once had two).  Three of those championship games were home games (Sugar for LSU twice and Orange for FU once).  And of course, Alabama, well, enough about that.  So, I think they are the best conference “top to bottom” and”at the top” but I think statistics like the the SEC is 6-0 lead one to believe that they are a lot more dominant than they are.  A more accurate “trend” is to point out that OU and Ohio State are 0-4 against the SEC, which is probably more of a statement of those teams’ futility in big games than anything else.

Over the past several years, certainly since the inception of the BCS, the Big 12 has been the clear runner-up in the competition for best conference.  For 2010, I would have to give that to the Big 10.  Iowa and Ohio State won BCS games and Penn State beat LSU.  This blogger doesn’t have a lot of love for the Big 10, but they were better this year than most people will give the credit for.

The Decade that Was

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.

Had UT won, they could have argued they were the team of the decade.  But they didn’t, and they aren’t.  USC, UF and LSU could each make arguments, but USC was more consistent for the entire decade, so I have to give it to the boys from Troy.

The 90’s were about a lot of things, but the biggest game year in and year out was Florida-Tennessee.  And the plot was simple:  Peyton Manning lost to Florida every year.  Then some kid named Tee Martin came along and got over the hump.  That year, they won the NC.  Tennessee didn’t win another NC, but they pretty much owned Florida after that.  Well, welcome to the past decade where a kid named Chris Simms couldn’t beat OU.  Finally, a kid named Vince Young did and he went on that year to win an NC.  UT didn’t win another one, but it has owned OU ever since.  The winner of the UT-OU game played for the NC five times this decade, and the LOSER played in the NC game once (OU, 08).  That is pretty amazing.  The 90’s biggest rivalry whose winner played for the NC three times (going 2-1 in the process).  So, I think it is safe to say that the rivalry of the 90’s was FU-Tennessee, but for this decade it was UT-OU, which was actually bigger than the rivalry of the previous decade.

This decade was not good to the BCS, and it is getting worse.  Too many undefeated teams have been left out of the BCS Championship Game, and 3(!) were this year.  At the time the BCS was created, it wasn’t envisioned that the Boises, the TCUs or the Utahs could legitimately compete for an NC.  When Tulane went undefeated in the late 90’s, there was no controversy.  Nobody thought they could hang with Nevraska or Florida or Florida State.  But what has changed in this decade is that the teams that have gone undefeated are actually pretty darn good.  That’s the difference.  I think some day there will be a playoff (God help me if it is more than 4 teams), and this decade will be a big reason why.

The Heisman Trophy became a joke this decade.  It used to mean something, but now it is just “best player on the best team, no-wait…, the best player on the team that we think is the best, but we aren’t sure because the bowls haven’t played out.”  Mark Ingram aside, the trophy has been awarded to a player who didn’t look so hot in the NC game way too many times.  I am pretty sure that the cause is the changes in media.  On one hand, we have 1000 times more sources of information.  On the other hand, there isn’t a lot of original content, so everybody keeps repeating what everybody else said, giving a false impression of unanimity.  This false impression leads voters to take on a herd mentality.  And while I am no conspiracy theorist, I think it sucks that the people who give us games are the same people that give us our “news.”  No conflict of interest there.  No way.  It is a complete coincidence that the guys that cover the biggest games get on the “news” shows and tell us that the best player in America is in that game.  They’d never tell you that the best player in America is the QB on a team on some obscure end-of-the-dial cable channel.   Just a theory, but methinks this is the reason the Heisman Trophy consistently goes to the wrong person.

The decade will also be remembered for the resurrection of left-for-dead USC, the rise of Boise et al., the fall of Michigan, the punchline that Notre Dame has become, the slow decline of FSU, the explosion of College GameDay, coaches “politicking” to get in the BCS, coaches being humiliated on YouTube (Miles, Gundy) and NCAA sanctions that were ubiquitous but apparently of little consequence to the programs involved.

Happy 2010

That’s all I have.  Sorry for the terse post, but it was all I could muster.  It’s been a long decade, and I’m tired.

Happy 2010.  May all your top sets hold up, all your beer be cold and all your wildest dreams come true.