Happy Depaul day
by Mike Rutherford on Feb 15, 2009 7:00 AM EST
in Basketball
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PrintGenerally a fan unwilling to overlook any opponent in any sport I follow closely, I celebrate this day with extreme reverence, for today the Louisville Cardinals shall battle the Depaul Blue Deomons in the game of basketball.
I had danced around the idea that it was impossible for Louisville to lose to Depaul for some time before finally embracing it fully in 1999. It was in that year that freshman walk-on Quentin Bailey completely outplayed eventual Conference USA Player of the Year Quentin Richardson in a 71-68 Cardinal victory.
Any and all doubt had been removed.
Still, further proof came two years ago when Juan Palacios - who entered the game having scored a total of ten points in U of L's last four contests - hit eight of ten shots and dropped 21 on the Blue Demons in a 59-50 victory for the then struggling Cards. Not only was JDP hitting open jumpers, he was effortlessly putting the ball behind his back on the fast break, doing double pump dunks, making no-look bounce passes and various other things that he would be able to do against no other opponent.
Now the "record books" show that U of L actually lost overtime games to Depaul in both 2003 and 2004, but the games weren't nationally televised and I was out of town, so I don't believe for a second that either of them actually happened.
Ordinarily, the last seven halves the Cardinals have played would leave me wary of any opponent waltzing into Freedom Hall, but on this morning I feel no fear. Jerry Wainwright's club could be leading the Big East and pegged as 28-point favorites across the board, and I'd still take U of L...big. As it is, the Blue Demons are making a serious run at streaking through the conference season winless.
We'll scrutinize the effort, speculate on whether this performance exhibited progression or regression, but make no mistake about it, Louisville will win this basketball game.
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A Modest Proposal
The Big East adopts the English Football style of rankings.
There will be the Premier Big East, and a big east with lesser lights.
Four teams (DePaul, St John’s, South Florida, Rutgers) are immediately dropped from the Big East and placed in a kind of “Triple A” big east with perhaps eight other teams.
The Big East plays its regular schedule, playing each other twice per year.
The little big east plays its own schedule with perhaps two games per year scheduled against the Big East.
At the end of every year based on wins, two teams are dropped from the Big East and demoted to the little big east.
Two teams from the little big east ascend to the Big East.
Yeah, right, like this is ever gonna happen! Like the Big East would ever go for contraction.
All we want to do is expand, expand, expand. Let’s bump the number of teams up to say….28. That way we could field, say, fourteen teams into the Big Dance (ouch "Big Dance, " cliche number 237) every March.
And eighteen of them would be gone by the end of the second round.
The Chronicle intelligentsia are already aware that Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” satirized the British and their off handed view of Ireland’s hunger problems by proposing that said Irish eat their plump infants at the appropriate time, say, when they became toddlers.
Next week: How Swift’s “Gullliver’s Travels” was really a proxy for Duke/NC dominance of the ACC.
This is Allistair Cooke, Masterpiece Theatre, goodnight.
DePaul is in for a world 'o hurt
Poor little blue guys. They gonna lose, and it ain’t gonna be purty. Nuff said.
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