We’ve been too hard on ourselves, blaming our runaway imaginations and caught in a trap with our superstitious minds. There is a Dept. of Linguistic Nonsense within TV networks. There is because there must be.
Having suffered the latest new-age nonsense football season — standard, self-evident, hardly-worth-speaking acts such as jumping were decorated with fantastic claims of “verticality” and “high-pointing the football,” basketball is now under siege.
Friday night on CBS, Kentucky was up on Kansas State 29-23 with 44 seconds left in the first half, thus nearly 21 minutes left in regulation. Yet, that’s when the NCAA Tournament’s lead analyst, Greg Anthony, announced, “It’s a two-possession game.”
It would be preposterous to even consider K-State’s strategy at that point would be to stop Kentucky from scoring on its next two possessions then shoot — and make — two consecutive 3-point shots to tie the game.
Yet, by saying “it’s a two-possession game,” rather than “it’s a six-point game” or, better yet, saying nothing and allowing the score graphic to serve its purpose, Anthony went with the latest foolish fashion — up there with “score the basketball” — telling us K-State was now just two possessions — both 3-pointers — away from tying the game (given Kentucky’s full cooperation).
Nurse!
(Coach Blatherskite: “We tried to make it a seven-possession game before the half, but we kept turning it over. We have to do a better job of reducing the number of possessions we’re down, especially three-point possessions, in the second half.”)
Minutes later, Len Elmore, analyzing the Virginia-Coastal Carolina game on TBS, noted, with Virginia up three, “It’s a one-possession game.”
That would have held some meaning if there were, oh, 43 seconds left, but Elmore’s observation — words he’d never have considered saying a few years ago — was seriously spoken with nine minutes left!
Yesterday, Stanford up 18-16 six minutes left in the first half, Anthony again chose the long-form way to say nothing, expertly noting it’s “a one-possession game.”
It’s not our imaginations. The easy and simple are now served larded in excessive, silly words and expressions, as needless as they are ridiculous. By experts.
Saturday, TNT studio host Matt Winer reported Iowa State’s Georges Niang will miss the rest of the NCAAs with a broken foot. “A versatile player,” said Winer, “he’s going to be missed, going forward.”
“Going forward”? That’s another one, as if … aw, forget it.
Real Sports segment an eye-opener
Given that HBO has no NCAA deals to stop it, and given that your better senses likely can handle the ugliest of truths, watch “Real Sports” Tuesday night at 10, featuring Bernard Goldberg’s piece on the staggering, worsening academic corruption on behalf of football and basketball at Baylor, Oklahoma, Memphis, Iowa State and North Carolina — all NCAA Tournament qualifiers.
The NCAA and the NBA have to eliminate that “three-to-the-head” gesture players make after hitting a 3-pointer. It’s hand-language for a gang/mob execution, bullets-to-the-head murder. If the throat-slash gesture is punished, how can this pass the sports-gone-nuts stink test?
Neither Jim Nantz nor Greg Anthony saw fit to note Sunday that Stanford, up three and with chances to commit a foul with under :08 left, allowed Kansas’ best long-range shooter a shot to tie the game near the buzzer!
Expert Tout of the Week: Kentucky cannot, will not beat Wichita State — Mike Francesa.
As seen Saturday on ESPN2, Fordham’s women were tough in their last-shot loss to higher-seeded, nationally ranked and much-taller Cal.
Follow the student-athletics TV money. Those Tournament games played Sunday night? Used to be played Sunday afternoons.
Apparently CBS couldn’t land anyone better to serve as a special guest studio analyst and a representative of what’s great about college hoops than Ralph Sampson. In 2006, Sampson did a stretch for mail fraud, a year after pleading guilty to owing $300,000 in support to the mothers of two children he fathered.
That Tournament-attached commercial starring ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt pushing Pizza Hut’s brand new and “award-winning” chicken wings is confusing. Given that they’re new, what kind of award did they win? A weekly ESPY?
TV shouters should take a cue from CBS’ Spanarkel
Not that TV’s shot-callers would know or care, but Jim Spanarkel, who neither shouts nor hollers, specializes in saying useful things.
Saturday on CBS, early in Michigan-Texas — Michigan up 11-6 and out-running Texas, Spanarkel claimed the Longhorns were short on oxygen. “There are a couple of guys out there who are waiting — desperately — for a timeout.”
Two seconds later, Texas missed a shot, Michigan rebounded then out-ran Texas the other way to score a quick, easy layup.
That unfathomable finish to regulation in Friday’s VCU-Stephen F. Austin (not affiliated with Stephen A. Smith) — SFA’s four-point play to tie with :03 left — became a high-def study in missing the larger point and picture.
While we were forced/encouraged, over and over, to view replays as to whether VCU’s JeQuan Lewis fouled the 3-point shooter, lost to this repetitive application of TV technology was the fact that with a four-point lead and :03 left, no VCU defender should have been anywhere near any SFA player!
The foresight-less lunacy of the NCAA’s basketball replay rules was in full view Friday. With 8.3 seconds left in Stanford-New Mexico, Stanford up four, the game stopped for the refs to inspect whether the right team was given the ball after it was knocked out of bounds.
The replay led to a reversal of the call — the ball last touched a New Mexico player’s hand. But those same replays showed the New Mexico player could not have caught the ball because he had been whacked across his arm by a Stanford player.
As reader Marc Salis notes, “getting it right, in this case, actually served injustice.” The officials were forced to punish the innocent, reward the guilty. Far better no replay rule than that.
It’s 8:30 a.m., Saturday. Many still don’t know the result of Friday’s late-night UCLA-Tulsa Tournament game. Surely, “all sports” WFAN will provide it.
But now that FAN’s the Yankees’ station, updater Peter Schwartz dutifully led with Friday’s Yankees exhibition game, including details and stats.
When Schwartz got to the NCAAs, he mentioned only two games, including Duke’s loss to Mercer, 17 ½ hours earlier. Not a word about that UCLA-Tulsa game that ended after midnight. Sports radio!