Say hello to your new Auditor of Public Accounts Louisville.

Victory party at CC Headquarters around 10 p.m. Go ahead and bring your "Rutherford/Carmody '06" shirts, signs and party decorations because I've been pushing "green" pretty hard over the last 48 hours.

Before this season Louisville hadn't entered a regular season game as an underdog since traveling to Miami in October of 2004. When they take the field in Morgantown on Thursday, the Cards figure to be somewhere around a 16-point dog.

There's definitely not as much media hype or smack talk floating around in the days leading up to the game as there was last year, but because I'm feeling so confident about our team's chances right now, I'm willing to fire the first grating blow: It would please me most exceedingly if our beloved Cardinals were able to achieve a most improbable victory on the gridiron this coming Thursday evening.

You're up Rodriguez.

Earl Clark has recently updated his blog (told you it was cool), the latest entry being his responses to questions posed by elementary schoolers from his hometown of Rahway, NJ.

So cool.

ESPN's ten college basketball "experts" (apparently Digger Phelps was downgraded to "enthusiastic observer" in the offseason) have spoken, and half of them believe Louisville will advance all the way to the Final Four. Pat Forde, Fran Fraschilla, Andy Katz, Joe Lunardi and Dick Vitale all have the Cards playing in San Antonio, but none of them believe they will ultimately cut down the nets.

When reached for comment, the cast and crew of Frasier said they were "blown away" by the amount of diversity in the experts' picks.

Storming the Floor - a very good college hoops blog - has been counting down its preseason top 30 for the past month or so, and unveiled last week that it has Louisville pegged as the seventh best team in the country.

Brian Bennett tells us that Josh Miller and Vic Anderson have been playing the roles of Pat White and Steve Slaton in practice this week, and Steve Kragthorpe reveals his personal opinion that White and Slaton are good and that this is going to be a hard game to win.

Louisville is a two seed in all seven of the major preseason mock brackets. The Cards had been a top seed in Joe Lunardi's Bracketology (which, if you hadn't heard, is a total scam), but Lunardi was apparently so impressed with Brandon Rush's ACL injury that he bumped Kansas up from a two in his official preseason bracket.

And finally, thanks again go out to Jerb (and Charles Springer for bringing it to my attention) for posting the 2007 U of L basketball luncheon video on YouTube.

Anyone else surprised by the amount of Stu Miller air time?