Monthly Archives: November 2017

Central Florida, saint john's

Knights On Bald Mountain

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Nowadays I rarely get mad enough during basketball games to scream at the television but I made an exception during St John’s 46-43 victory over Central Florida in the consolation bracket of the Advocare tournament Sunday afternoon. I screamed at Bashir Ahmed when he threw an ill-considered full court pass to Kassoum Yawke, who has a hard enough time catching the ball when you hand it to him. I screamed at Marvin Clark when he took the  ball end to end on a break instead of giving it up to one of the guards, and then  screamed at him again when he did it again. And I screamed at Justin Simon when he almost gave the game away by nearly turning the ball over at half court with a minute left. But mostly I screamed at the referees. Consider: UCF did not score a point in the first 10 minutes; they did not make a field goal until seven minutes were left in the first half, a half in which they managed four field goals total; they made a mere 14 field goals the entire game, had 15 shots blocked, turned the ball over 21 times and had their best player foul out three quarters of the way through the second half. And yet they came within a clam’s hair of winning by virtue of the the 14 of 23 free throws they made – good thing they sucked at FT shooting huh? –  in a seemingly unending parade to the line. And meanwhile St John’s didn’t shoot a free throw until there were 13 minutes left in the second half and ended up with a total of eight, half of those in the last five minutes. Things got so bad that at one point a referee collapsed, exhausted from the strain of whistling fouls against SJU. (Just kidding, he got head butted by one of UCF’s players, which resulted in a St John’s foul.) Being uncharacteristically sober it took me a bit to figure out what was going on, but then the light bulb went off: former dookie Johnny Dawkins was on the sidelines, that was why UCF was getting the benefit of every call. That was why for example Tarko Fall could grab a rebound under the basket, stumble halfway across the court and end up laying on his back near the sideline where he was awarded a time out: it wasn’t because he’s learned the secret of teleportation or because he’s the most supernaturally coordinated golem in the history of golems, it’s because his head coach attended the best Ivy league school in the ACC. It all became clear: St John’s was getting rogered, just like they got rogered in 1990, when dook shot 32 free throws to SJU’s 15 in a 4-point first round NCAA tournament loss, and just like they did in 1991, when dewk shot 28 free throws to SJ’s six. It wasn’t merely bad basketball, or blind and biased referees: it was part of a vast shadowy conspiracy of karmic forces that has existed for more than 50 years. In which case there’s nothing to do be done about it, so you might as well scream into the darkness. (Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, Villanova just played an entire game without committing a single foul. Last year when they didn’t commit a foul in a half against St John’s I called that loaves and fishes territory. No fouls in an entire game means Jay Wright has moved on to raising Lazarus from the dead). Which whining about the refs is not to say that SJ played well. They did not. They were putrid: they shot 25 percent from the floor and 7 for 27 from three and committed 22 turnovers. But I don’t care. In a four point game where 80 points were scored total UCF shot 400 percent as many FTs as SJ and scored a third of their points from the line: they made as many FTs as they did baskets. Some guy called C Brown on UCF took six shots that resulted in 13 free throws, and meanwhile Lovett, Ahmed and Ponds took 40 shots between them and got fouled twice. Not buying it, not at all. The refs were horseshit … About the previous three games there’s not a lot to say. SJ made a nice comeback against Oregon State, but Oregon State stinks so there’s not a lot of there there. The Missouri game was a bit of a disappointment, because they had them and let them go. Although the difference in the score at game’s end was eight the real difference was fourteen: 14 more FT’s for Missouri – they made eight more than SJ took – and they had 14 more rebounds than St John’s and they made 14 threes. That’s more fourteens than Roy Moore’s had. Still, six and one after seven games is about as good a start as any non-delusional fans – and there are a lot of you –  could expect, because even if they’d beaten MU they’d have had their heads handed to them by West Virginia. The big tournament take away for me is the defense, i.e., that they’re actually playing some. And that’s a big deal. Because if you play defense you can win games you shouldn’t, just like the one they won today … There’s five games left before the real ones begin: assume a loss to Arizona State and that they beat snot out of the the cream puffs (Sacred Heart and Iona); even if they lose a game they probably could win against Grand Canyon or St Joe’s, that’s nine wins, which is just about where you’d expect them to be in December: halfway to a favorable seed in the NIT.

NOTES: Advocare was sponsored by the sinking ship ESPN, meaning that I was spared the presence of the repulsive Steve Lavin and dimwitted Tarik Turner; the bad news is that I was subjected to unending streams of ill-informed nonsense by the conga line of failed coaches that ESPN foists off as alleged experts: Dan Dakich, Seth Greenburg, Dino Gaudio, Mark Adams and Bob Valvano have between them 1500 coaching losses, three NCAA tournament appearances, and the combined  charm of a convention of Albanian marriage brokers. The worst offender though this week was former SJU coach Fran Fraschilla, who noted during the game that we were watching bad basketball and “probably bad coaching” – which is a remarkable statement coming from someone whose own once promising career exploded more spectacularly than anyone not named Bobby Gonzalez. What Fran failed to note was the atrocious announcing: an indication of the kind of day Fran had was that when a Marcus Lovett jumper lodged itself between the rim and the backboard Fran went on a 30 second dissertation about how that shot was “an indication of the kind of night Shamorie Ponds is having.” In one short sentence he got the player wrong, and the time of day, and drew the wrong conclusion from what he’d just watched twice, but other than that made some fine points. On the bright side he didn’t pull his cock and balls out and start shaking them in anyone’s face, so there’s that … And finally the elephant in the room. Many of you have written over the past week, the gist of which was hey fun, what gives? Where’s my recap. The short answer is that I couldn’t be bothered and the longer one that it’s all part of the master plan: like Saint John’s in the first half of many of its games I’m starting slowly and conserving my energy for the second, when games are won. In point of fact Molloy was a glorified exhibition against a nursing college – Lou used to joke about playing the little sisters of the poor but it took Chris Mullin to actually pull it off. What was I supposed to write about? How to make jello? How to jerk off doctors in the linen closet? (Hint: use jello). I couldn’t have been less interested. Still, one astute poster in the interminable game thread at one well trafficked fan board – you’d think they were playing for the national championship the way these dopes analyze the excruciating minutia of every possession – termed the win “a disgrace,” evidently because SJ only won by 29, after having sat their two best players for the last 10 minutes of the second half. No doubt the same poster would have complained if Lovett and Ponds were in at the end, lest they get injured. Because some people are only happy when they’re unhappy.  Re the Advocare tournament, I wrote three recaps in three days during last year’s preseason tournament, after which I said to myself, self, if I’d known they were going to play three games in three days I’d have written one recap comprising all three games, which is exactly what I did this year, having this year cleverly looked at the schedule beforehand, as opposed to last year, when I was drunk. Not that I’m not drunk now obviously, but at least I looked at the schedule. And I actually did some research into the schools we played, just in case. The Oregon Beavers were a treasure trove, beaver being along with area 51, axe wound, baby cannon, badly packed kebab, beef curtains, broad faced chicken, clowns pocket, furburger, front-butt, meat curtains, minge, muff, Sarah’s saddlebag, sausage wallet, shame cave, smiling dolphin, stench trench, stink box, tinkleflower, tuna purse, twinkle cavern, Valarie’s stinkhole, yippee bog, and yogurt factory a synonym for the female private parts. It turns out that in days of old it was thought that venereal disease was spread by contact with the pubic hairs of prostitutes, who in turn shaved their nether regions and wore instead vaginal toupees, called merkins, made from beaver pelts. Today of course most women shave themselves bald as a matter of course, snow flake millennial males evidently being sexually aroused by the Barbie dolls with which they grew up playing. Me, I’ll take a hirsute 80’s porn bush any day of the week. De gustibus non disputandum est. And Missouri, the Tigers, was the alma mater of Tom Berenger, Sheryl Crow, Jon Hamm, Robert Loggia, Brad Pitt, George C. Scott, Tennesee Williams, Art Shamsky, and Ed Sanders, founder of the Fugs, whose The Family (The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion) is the sine qua non of Manson porn, poor Charlie having shuffled off the mortal coil in a synchronistical bit of good fortune this past week. RIP Charlie.

Nebraska, saint john's

Here’s Johnnies

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Well that was fun, and by that I mean the 79-56 beat down St John’s put on Nebraska at Alumni Hall Thursday night. It wasn’t so much the margin of victory – they beat CCSU by more on Monday – but the way they went about it: dunks and blocks and behind the back passes and a couple through the legs and even one off the backboard. It was so much fun that the game featured prominently on Sportscenter – just after James Harden’s 40 whatever point night and just before a video tribute the NL MVP Giancarlo Stanton – introduced by “if you like dunks you’re going to love this” and with an exit line warning viewers to “keep an eye on Chris Mullin’s crew.” The team’s play was I thought just the right level of arrogant: they got up big and kept their foot on the other guy’s throat and swaggered a bit but weren’t cocky about it and if anything the fact that they didn’t look like they were trying to humiliate anyone made the humiliation more humiliating. It was like one of those cartoon fights where one guy holds the other guy off with a hand in his face while the other guy futilely windmills his arms.

Which degree of confidence is not necessarily a bad thing, assuming they don’t forget they’ve won 25 games over the past couple of year.

For all the points they scored and the way they scored them they didn’t shoot particularly well – 40 percent from the field and 30 percent from three. What they did do well was rebound – they had 50 and were plus 11 – and pressure the ball in a way I don’t remember them doing in quite a while and when the pressure worked they got out and ran. Which is what I think the Mullin plan is supposed to be: defend, rebound and run the other guys out of the gym. The result last night was that Nebraska shot 28 percent from the field and turned the ball over 16 times. And that’s not to mention the ten shots St John’s blocked. That’s a lot of deficit to overcome and Nebraska is not the team to overcome it. Because they stink, which means there’s not a lot to take away here except to remember that this time last year St John’s was losing to Delaware State  and everyone was soiling their nappies and calling for the formation of a new search committee … Mullin was once again animated and engaged and managed things well. He got T’ed up early in the second half for they said on the telly smashing a water bottle, but they didn’t show the smashing on Fox and I couldn’t tell what he was upset about anyway.

PLAYERS: Ponds had 22 points, 7 rebounds and five assists but was oh for five from three. Threw a nifty alley oop to Ahmed on a break and one off the backboard to Simon … Simon had his second double in a row, 13 points, 12 rebounds, plus four steals and three blocks. Which is Dom Pointer as a senior production … Ahmed had 15 points and 5 rebounds and really only took one bad shot  …. When Tariq Owens entered the game the usually reliable Jim Spanarakle said that he’s a “senior” who can “play any position,” which no he’s not Jim, he’s not any of those things. Six points, six blocks, nine rebounds … Lovett finished with 14 in a team high 35 minutes … Clark had seven points and five rebounds, but fouled out in 25 minutes. Which makes nine fouls his last two games which does not bode well moving forward … Signs of life from Kassoum Yakwe, who had five rebounds in 15 minutes, after having just one the previous two games … Trimble didn’t play much and Alibegowitz not nearly at all. If that’t the rotation, that’s seven men, which is not ideal, but Villanova only goes eight deep and they’re pretty good

NOTES: I’ve written a a bunch about what a load of nothing Nebraska is relative to regular opponent Creighton so there’s no need to plow that dust bowl again. Nebraska the University though turns out to be not as much of an intellectual wasteland as you might think, boasting as alumni three Nobel laureates in science, Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather – who dressed like a man, referred to herself as Bill and lived for 39 years with a special friend called Edith – the great Johnny Carson – whose shit sanctimonious gasbags Jimmy Kimmel and Steven Colbert are not worthy to sniff;  inventor of the all-you-can-eat breakfast Warren Buffett; and not surprisingly a bunch of football players, although not as many notables as you’d think, the most recognizable being Roger Craig and Irving Fryar. Nebraska’s sports teams are called the Cornhuskers, corn being the state’s bumper crop and husking its past time, but they didn’t settle on that until adopting and discarding the Hawkeyes (oddly Iowa, now the Haweyes used to be the Cornhuskers), the Antelopes, the Old Gold Knights (save the coupons), the Bugeaters, the Tree Planters and the Mankilling Mastodons, which I don’t know why you’d pick huskers over any of those last couple. At basketball they’ve never been any great shakes, having made the NCAA tournament only seven times since 1897, which makes St John’s look like UCLA in comparison … Speaking of UCLA it wouldn’t be a recap if I didn’t shit on halftime analyst the repulsive Steve Lavin. Over the summer I spent an afternoon editing Lavin’s wikipedia page, which before I got to it sounded like Lavin had written it himself: it was a smorgasbord of half truths, lies, and damned lies and reading it you’d think Lavin was an accomplished and respected basketball mind, as opposed to a histrionic cunt of a sociopath who in his short career destroyed not one but two storied basketball programs. I mean, the article mentions “cancer” seven time – which is about as many times as cancer is mentioned in the article about cancer – and gives Lavin’s win loss record minus games he missed “due to Father’s passing.” Which Olympic level faggotry I set about correcting. For example, the article noted that

to which I added

The article then ejaculated said that

Which I changed to

This

became this

and this

became this

and this

this

and this

this

All of which you have to admit was pretty fair, except maybe this, which even I’l admit was gratuitous

Those edits lasted nearly six months, until they were reverted this past week. Which is a victory for post modernism, because only in a world where there are no standards can Lavin be considered a good basketball coach or even a good human being. One small consolation thought is that they didn’t quite revert all of my edits. They missed this one.

Which must be true, it’s on the interweb … Speaking of California Charlie Manson is apparently at death’s door. No doubt the St John’s family’s thoughts and prayers go out to Charlie and his … Finally for poster Desco, who complains every time I don’t post titties, here’s Carol Wayne, who walked off into the ocean in Mexico in 1985 and was never heard of again.

Central Connecticut, saint john's

CCSUssudio

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Back when I was in law school Joe Biden was running for president – this was before it came out that he was a serial plagiarist who cribbed speeches from everyone from Robert Kennedy to Sally Fields, they like  me, they really like me – and one evening he attended an event on campus, which was in New Hampshire and where his college room mate taught Evidence. At the end Joe answered questions from students that had previously been submitted on 3 x 5 index cards, this being before the internet. Being even back then a bit of a wag I asked “whether Senator Biden thought the American people so shallow that they would elect as president a man who combs the last few remaining strands of hair over his pate in a forlorn attempt to hide his baldness.”  (I had not then yet imagined President Donald Trump.) Joe didn’t answer my question but the expression on his face when he read it was priceless, and I’m reminded of it each time I see him and his fashionable plugs – for which I credit myself – on television, which I did yesterday morning when he appeared with the repulsive Matt Lauer as part of his Darn-I-wish-I’d run-for-president tour.  Joe didn’t run last time – no doubt he didn’t want to end up like Seth Rich and Vince Foster – and so instead he spends his days rehearsing a bald version of Hamlet: to be president or not to be, that is the question; I didn’t run, I wish I did, I might, I could win, the sight of which is enough to make me throw myself in the river atop Ophelia. Hey Joe where you going with that gun in your hand : make up your mind and run or don’t and may the best moron win but for god sake shut up about it. I mention all this because the original paragraph I wrote here, since excised, was my own version of Hamlet. Because when I woke up yesterday morning my nearly very first thought was, shit, there’s a basketball game tonight and  I have to write 2000 words about it and another 2000 words about Nebraska on Thursday, and so on, and so on, and so on. And it occurred to me that I’ve taken two of the few things in life I enjoy, writing and college basketball, and turned them into one thing that’s a chore: writing about college basketball. It’s as if I combined cigars and horse racing and ended up setting the barn on fire. Which is why I started this essay the way I did. But you know what? That sort of hand wringing is just not very interesting – even when I’m writing about it – and so I’ve told myself exactly what I told Joe. Write your stupid little blog or don’t, but pull your head out of your ass and stop being such a little bitch … To wit

About the game it’s once again too early to tell anything much except that the guards are really quite good: Simon had a double double and Ponds almost had one; Lovett scored 15 points, all in the second half. Ahmed (13 points, 3 rebounds) looked a little better but still forced it a bit. Owens had six points, five rebounds and two blocks, which is almost exactly what he had last game (5/6/2); if you asked me whether I’d take that all season I might say yes. Clark was a non factor with four fouls and Yakwe was once again a non factor and  really has no excuse for his behavior, except maybe he doesn’t like playing basketball. Brian Trimble Jr. can shoot a bit and isn’t shy about it. Alibegowitz didn’t come in the game until there were about five minutes left and I didn’t miss him; still there were 187 posts on various fan boards about what a great  center he’d make if he only was a completely different player, by which I mean a talented one who played center. Which he isn’t, he a stretch stinks. As a group they look to be a bit more committed to playing defense than they were last year – it’d be hard not to.  Still 21 is a lot of turnovers  to force and it may be that there are not so many blocks this year because the guards are occasionally stopping people from getting in the lane. Probably we’ll know more after Thursday. Nebraska stinks but they stink in the Big 10, which currently comprises 14 teams.

Speaking of plagiarism, here’s the game recap courtesy of Reuters

St. John’s rolls over Central Connecticut

St. John’s produced three extended scoring runs to pave the way for an 80-55 non-conference victory over Central Connecticut on Tuesday night at Carnesecca Arena in New York City.

Sophomore guard Shamorie Ponds led St. John’s (2-0) with 21 points and nine rebounds. Sophomore guard Marcus LoVett delivered all 15 of his points in the second half while Arizona transfer Justin Simon posted a career-high 12 points with 11 rebounds.

Junior center Deion Bute paced Central Connecticut (0-3) with 19 points and nine rebounds while senior forward Mustafa Jones added 13 points. That duo combined to hit 14 of 21 shots from the field, but their teammates canned just 6 of 27 (22 percent).

Central Connecticut lost its first two games by a combined five points at Hartford and Rutgers, but couldn’t cling as closely to St. John‘s.

The Red Storm subdued the Blue Devils with 9-0 and 11-0 runs in the first half, but saved their 16-0 knockout blow for the second half once Central Connecticut pulled within 12. The final spree featured multiple behind-the-back passes on fast breaks as St. John’s regained control.

St. John’s canned 8 of 14 3-pointers until junk time reduced its final showing to 9 of 21 from long range. The Red Storm forced the Blue Devils into 21 turnovers and won the rebound battle by nine.

Good grief but that’s some shit writing. You know why? Because it violates the number one rule of good writing: don’t try to be interesting. (Rule two is don’t use adverbs, badly. ) I don’t mean don’t write about interesting things or don’t be interesting when you write, I mean don’t try to make mundane things interesting by describing them using grandiose hackneyed language. If e.g. someone says something, say “he said,” not he declaimed or interposed or speculated or good forbid ejaculated. If someone scored, say they scored; they didn’t deliver; they didn’t can anything. Dominos delivers and  Chicken of the Sea cans and I occasionally ejaculate. There was no rebound battle, no final spree, no knockout blow. Nobody rolled over anybody and no one didn’t cling as closely to anything else, which is anyways redundant, because cling means “to hold on tightly,” so if you’re clinging your you’re close by definition. It’s atrocious writing and these dopes get paid to do it and I write like this for free. There’s something wrong with this business model.

Notes: Central Connecticut State University is in – wait for it – Central Connecticut. Turns out there’s not a lot of their they’re there there – CCSU’s most famous alumni in nearly 200 years is pretty boy actor Richard Grieco, the least successful member of 21 Jump Street. (The most successful member belongs to Johnny Depp.) The basketball team is coached by Uconn’s Donyell Marshall – not to be confused with Donnie Marshall’s terrifying eyebrows – the fourth pick in the nineteen I can’t be arsed to look it up NBA draft. Marshall spent 15 years in the league, where he played along side amongst others Chris Mullin. Last night however CCSU was coached by someone called Witkoskie, as Marshall  is currently suspended for slapping around one of his assistant coaches after practice. Besides having a coach whose name is impossible to spell or pronounce CCSU shares with the finest Ivy league school in the ACC, that’d be Dewk for those of you scoring at home, a sports mascot, similarly being called the blue devils. Considering those coincidences I’ve decided to help the dopes at Reuters by putting together a brief guide to telling the schools apart. Probably the easiest was is to note which coach had his tail cut off after being chased up the clock by the farmer’s wife: that would be the dook blue devils of the ACC, coached by Mike Schrewshrensky. A second way is to compare horseflesh. This for example is an ACC coed who was featured as “Cheerleader of the Week” by Sports Illustrated magazine.

Chubba Chubba. Hubba hubba.

As you can see, Dook girls are not terribly attractive, although I have it on good authority that they’re easy.

(Speaking of bad writing Sports Illustrated once wrote an entire article about verse penned by America’s then poet laureate, JJ Reddick

My life story is read in poetic stages
I was once weak-minded, now I’m courageous
The cause and effect of a thousand actions
The mathematical breakdown of micro-fractions
It’s difficult to fathom the coming of the rapture
What if I awoke in an empty pasture?

The answer is that if you awoke in an empty pasture it wouldn’t be empty, would it stupid, and also you’d risk being confused with a cow patty.

https://deadspin.com/5591005/americas-dumbest-student-athlete-jj-redick-duke-university)

This on the other hand is a random CCSU coed, not even a cheerleader

This is another one

So to recap.

Dook University:

Central Cameltoe State

To finish up, how about some shitty music about bad writing.

new orleans, saint john's

Po’ Boy

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I’ve been dreading this moment since the horn sounded on March 9th of 2017, when St John’s was last seen dropping a 41-point squeaker to Villanova. Not the sounding of the horn that will herald the beginning of a new St John’s basketball season, one that will inevitably end in failure and disappointment. That I’m inured to. What I was dreading was the task of chronicling it. So much so in fact that for most of the summer I considered myself retired into casual fandom: that is, one who gets drunk, watches the game and gets progressively drunker and drunker until even lobster rolls sound appetizing. It wasn’t until mid Friday morning, when I trended briefly on Twitter – just below Roy Moore, the alleged ephebophile who will be the next senator from the great state of Mississippi and just above Louis CK, a serial Onanist – that I resigned myself to my fate: writing 60 thousand words about a basketball team that’ll make the NIT if everything goes well. Because 60 thousand is a lot of words, just about a novel: Lord of the Flies and As I Lay Dying come in under that and Nineteen Eighty-Four and Catcher in the Rye just above it. And really unless you’re a gaseous hack like David Foster Wallace or a blind lunatic like James Joyce that’s all you need. My own unfinished great American novel, a tale of Jewish gunfighter in the old west with a working title of A Man Called Chutzpah (although I’ve also considered The Oy!Klahoma Kid) clocks in around there, and if I put as much effort into that as I’m going to put into this I’d be short listed for a Booker Prize come October. But really, what’s a the value of a Nobel Prize in literature when weighed against the opportunity to rehash box scores and post pictures of titties on the internets for 200 readers. I think you’ll agree I made the right decision.

About the game there’s not a lot to say – it’s still early in the season as one genyious fanboy posted during the second half of St John’s first exhibition game a week ago – and besides at this point I can hardly tell one player from another. In  general they looked okay. The ball movement was there (17 assists on 25 made baskets) and there seemed to be a bit more effort on defense, although whether NOP shot 40 percent from the field and 30 percent from three because of St John’s defense or because they stink I can’t say. Lovett (23 points, 4 steals) and Ponds (12 points, 7 rebounds, six assists) looked as they are touted to be, one of the better back courts in the league and maybe the country. Clark and Simon looked like legitimate D1 players. Tariq Owens is still a twig but he had six rebounds in 20 minutes and made five of his six free throws and committed zero personal fouls and that’s not a misprint. Even Bryan Trimble looks like a player. The bad news is that the guys who’ll need to step up for St John’s to overachieve their way onto the tournament  bubble – Yawke, Ahmed and god help us Amar Alibagowich – did not look particularly sharp: Ahmed had four of SJ’s 11 turnovers, Yakwe had no points and no rebounds in eight minutes, and AA was worse than those two … For his part Mullin wore most of a suit and didn’t sit anywhere inappropriate and looked active and engaged. Which is good, because this is the year when things have to start getting better.

NOTES: I had a bit of a kerfuffle with Direct TV at the start of the game, which was supposed to be on but wasn’t. Credit them though, a quick call to a beddy beddy solly representative righted things, meaning I only missed the first 10 minutes or so. The bad news is that I had to watch in real time, meaning I had to sit through at least a dozen commercials for some weird cult called values dot com that featured John Lennon caterwauling his way through Imagine, which made me want to hang myself. I know it’s fashionable to think Lennon was the genius in the Beatles but at his worst he was just as treacly as McCartney and a pretentious hypocrite to boot: a faux socialist multimillionaire junkie who described himself as bigger than the Baby Jesus explaining how we could all live as one if only we had no possessions or gods, which lyrics he wrote on a $100,00 Steinway grand piano he could barely play in a chalet he rented in the south of France where he lived while his castle was being renovated. I also had to sit through the first appearance of Steve Lavin’s double chins during halftime. I don’t remember what was said but I’m sure it was stupid and self-aggrandizing and similarly shameless… New Orleans University is located in – wait for it – New Orleans, New Orleans being located in the Louisiana, home of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who once won the Democratic Party vice presidential primary in the state of New Hampshire. (Look it up.) Famous alums include the lesbian Ellen DeGeneres; modern first collector and Emmy winner John Laroquette; former MLB players Wally Whitehurst, Jim Bullinger (one of five pitchers to have hit a home run on his first major league pitch) and Ellen’s favorite player Randy Bush, a two time World Series champion with the  Minnesota Twins; and the actor Billy Slaughter (no relation to Enos), who I’ve never heard of but who once appeared in a movie with Margot Robbie, the talented actress seen above …. New Orleans mascot is the privateers, privateers being a species of swashbuckling rapists that included such luminaries as Harvey Weinstein, Francis Drake, Captain Kidd (whose buried treasure I searched for futilely as a child during idyllic summers on Long Island’s north fork) and Jean Lafitte, an otherwise degenerate frog whose heroics in the battle of New Orleans in 1814 are as much responsible for existence of the United States as pretty much anyone. Still, he’s french, so fuck him. (Lavin’s a POS, check. Democrats are racist, check. The french suck, check.) Despite their recent entry into Division I the Privateers have arguably been as successful as St John’s over the past generation (five NCAA tournament appearances) and in their taste in head coaches as well: Butch Van Breda Koff, Tim Floyd, Tic Price, Monte Towe (all five foot seven of him) and Buzz Williams all coached there before moving on to better things, which used to be a show Louis CK produced, until yesterday, when it was discovered that he forced women to watch him pleasure himself. So having come full circle, imagine banging this for 20 years, you’d invite Mark David Chapman in for coffee: