Saint John’s came back from a 12-point deficit to sneak by one of the worst programs (Hi Fordham!) in the history of college basketball at Carnesecca Arena Tuesday night 74-61 and if that isn’t enough to set off some alarm bells then I don’t know what is. Because there are only a few explanations and none of them are pleasant. Either Coach Third Choice is having a hard time motivating his players, which seems unlikely as he’s already in six short months created an entirely new culture wherein his team will run walk on hot coals to run through a brick wall for him, so it can’t be that; or they’re looking past their opponents  – one wag suggested that UNH was “a classic trap game,” presumably before their important homecoming showdown against crosstown rival Vermont; or they’re playing down to the cupcakes. But Occam’s razor suggests that they stink and that’s where my money is. I mean, okay, stink may be a little harsh. Mercer stinks. Whereas SJU’d be a contender for the national championship if they played in Division II and a contender for the conference championship if they played in the MAAC. Unfortunately they play in the Big East, which this year has lost one game so far as a conference and where perennial laughingstock DePaul just kicked the bejesus out of Iowa on the road. Despite a steady stream of ‘this is going to be a dangerous team that surprises some people’ chatter from the homers I suspect  that ‘this is going to be on of those pesky teams that no one wants to play but nobody minds beating.’ Still, that’s down the road and for the time being they remain undefeated. At least until Saturday …

The box score reflects SJ’s ineptness: they shot 40 percent from the floor, for the second game in a row 60 percent from the free throw line – Wow! When was the last time that happened Eddie Mush! – and turned the ball over 15 times. The only thing that saved them was that UNH was worse: they shot 38 percent from the floor and 50 percent from the FT line and turned the ball over 15 times and not a lot of that had to do with SJ’s defense, except the free throw shooting obviously. If there was a bright spot – and there wasn’t – it’d be the 17 offensive rebounds, which is I think without looking more than they had all of last season … For all the talk of 40 minutes of hell and Anderson’s (I refuse to call him Iron Mike and so should you) diabolical use of his bench only seven players played double figures and five of them played ~ 30 minutes. Whether this was a strategic decision based on match-ups and personnel or CTC abandoning his vaunted system at the first sign of adversity is a question for wiser minds than my own.

PLAYERS: Absent LJ Figueroa – he had a career-high 25 points (including 5-9 from three), eight rebounds, five steals – CTC’s cadre of ball washers would this morning have some splainin’ to do … Champagnie had another near double double – 11 points and nine rebounds – and Josh Roberts had in 33 minutes (!) 12 points and seven rebounds along with four blocks, which puts him about second in the country total and tied for fourth percentage-wise. Regarding that Marquette’s Theo John is currently averaging eight blocks a game, which prediction: that number comes down … Unfortunately that’s the end of the good news. Mustapha Heron must have thought this was an NCAA tournament game: he scored five points on 2-12 from the floor … Nick Rutherford had six rebounds and five assists which is nice but is averaging close to three turnovers a game and shooting 20 percent from three for the year and 66 percent from the FT line, which if that continues, that’s going to be a problem … Earlington had eight points and four rebounds in 12 minutes and was involved in something of an ironic sequence where he was called for flopping at one end of the floor – which if flopping was a point of emphasis a couple of years ago several former dook players would have been hanged – and a charge on the very next possession … Great White Hope David Cadaver contributed little in nine minutes and Damien Sears less in fewer than that

NOTES: I sojourned in New Hampshire briefly in my youth, drawn by the lure of cheap booze from the government-run liquor stores and no state income tax and the delicious irony of living in a state where convicts make license plates that say “Live Free Or Die,” but didn’t last very long there despite those boons: the arts are nonexistent – the state’s greatest cultural achievement is a rock that looks allegedly like an old man –

the winter weather is atrocious, and the citizenry comprises the sort of rock-ribbed can’t get there from here republicans that make even rock-ribbed can’t get there from here republicans such as myself rethink their rock-ribbed can’t get there from here republicanism. Not to mention that it’s next to Massachusetts, the worst state in the union other than California, California being peopled in the main by mellow extroverted assholes in Bermuda shorts. I can’t place the year I was there exactly but it was long enough ago that I had a square job waiting tables at a downtown Concord restaurant run by the sort of Greeks who hate their customers only slightly less than they hate the staff. There was nothing much notable about it except that one day I waited on alleged comedian Pat Paulsen, late then of Rowan and Martin and the Smothers Brothers, who was running for president, which he did every four years. His wife had a vanilla milkshake while Pat took a shit; she was nice enough but he didn’t leave a tip, which isn’t surprising as he was running as a democrat … New Hamphire’s sports mascot is the wildcat, by which I assume they mean mountain lion, because it’d be weird if they named their team after Johnny Bench, Ernie Ladd or Andres Galarraga, big cats all. I never saw a lion while I was there but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any: I never saw a minority either and I assume there are some as the state’s population is allegedly one and a half percent black. Which perhaps explains the futility of UNH’s basketball program, which is described in its Wikipedia article as having “a long-standing reputation for futility … since 1903 no Wildcats team has made it to the NCAA or NIT tournaments and no Wildcat player has made it to the NBA.” Current Coach Bill Herrion  – who can perhaps be forgiven as he learned everything he knows about basketball studying at the feet of Mike Jarvae at George Washington – is 172-251 in 14 years at UNH and has had two winning season in that time and yet his job seems pretty secure; his predecessor Phil Rowe was 45-125 in six years; and those are two relative success stories compared to the conga line of incompetents that preceded them, a conga line so incompetent that they defy description, even for a writer of my prodigious talent and access to a thesaurus: Jeff Jackson was 21 and 61; Jim Boylan – who went on to coach the Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers – was 15-69; and Gary Friel was 188-335 in his twenty year career. The last coach to have a measure of success was someone called Butch Cowell (119-54), who also coached football and baseball, except when the university was unable to field sports teams due to a little thing I like to call “World War One.” … The university’s notable alumni – and I hesitate to plow this ground as I notice that Norman Rose over at Rumble has cleverly come up with this idea all by himself – include major league baseball players Carlton Fisk and Del Bisonette – the first player to hit a bases loaded triple and home run in the same game and as a rookie only one of five players in MLB history to be walked with the bases loaded (the others include Barry Bonds and a presumably sober Josh Hamilton); the novelist John Irving, a first rate writer who’s scared to write a first rate novel; Michael Kelly, who edited the work of literary fraud Stephen Glass before going on to die needlessly in the first Gulf War, leaving behind a widow and orphan, because journalism; the saxophonist Jeff Coffin; and a  bunch of hockey players and Canadian football players, which who cares … Fox Sports 2 had four halftime analysts which I thought a bit of overkill for a Tuesday night preseason game until I learned that they were naming – wait for it – the Mount Rushmore of SJ’s basketball. That this turned out to be merely an opportunity for these dopes to shout out the names of random past players – Willie Glass! Bill Wennington! Sergio Luyk! – shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did. What didn’t come as a surprise was that histrionic personality disorder poster boy Steve Lavin opined that one of his players – D’Angelo Harrison – should be considered, as he might have been the school’s all-time leading scorer “if I hadn’t suspended him,” which statement allowed Lavin simultaneously to thrust himself into the center of the conversation while diminishing the accomplishments of one of the players directly responsible for his meager success. What a repulsive, repulsive person. No wonder Mary Ann cucked him.