The NCAA tournament starts Thursday and the Tarheels (18-10) will be heading west as the sixth seed. Their first round opponent: 11th seeded Air Force (22-6), a team that hasn't made the tournament in 42 years. Here's part of an article from today's Raleigh News & Observer:
"UNC's players were apparently looking a little nervous during the NCAA Selection Show because their team was one of the last to be announced. They were excited to get the sixth seed, (Roy) Williams said. But probably not more jubilant than 11th-seeded Air Force, the Tar Heels' first-round foe.For a slightly different perspective, here's what's being reported in Colorado Springs.
With a win in that Denver matchup, Carolina would meet the winner of Texas-Princeton, setting up a possible meeting with former Clemson coach Rick Barnes, now with the Longhorns.
The winner would then advance to the Atlanta Regional.
"I think Air Force is a little unique, and that's the part that scares you a little bit,'' Williams said. "Sixty [points] a game is all they average, but you look and they're 22-6. So whatever they do, they're doing it very, very well. And we don't have that many teams in the ACC that control tempo that much..."But the ACC prepares you for about everything.""
Adam Hyzdu, jack of all trades, master of none?
Red Sox outfielder Adam Hyzdu has been to 15 spring trainings and has yet to make an opening day roster. Drafted in the first round by Giants (five spots ahead of Mike Mussina), and from the same high school that produced Ken Griffey Jr., Hyzdu has yet to have that breakthrough season that keeps him in the majors. If nothing else, the guy has good taste in movies (at least if you're going to play in Boston).
From today's Boston Globe:
"He also has a "disease," as he calls it: his extreme fascination with "Good Will Hunting," the film (Matt) Damon and (Ben) Affleck created about a couple of working-class kids trying to make their way in Boston.I wonder if when Hyzdu was acting this scene out, Manny Ramirez played Ben Affleck and Kevin Millar played the wise professor, Robin Williams.
Hyzdu knows the movie by heart, as he demonstrated yesterday in the Sox clubhouse by play-acting a bar scene in which Damon's character, Will, upbraids a smarmy Harvard student who tries to wow a couple of women with his scholarly wisdom. While Hyzdu's teammates at nearby lockers pulled on their uniforms and listened quizzically, Hyzdu reeled off a rapid-fire recitation of Will dissing the pseudointellectual:"You're a first-year grad student. You just finished some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably, and so naturally that's what you believe until next month when you get to James Lemon and get convinced that Virginia and Pennsylvania were strongly entrepreneurial and capitalist back in 1740. That'll last until sometime in your second year. Then you'll be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood about the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization."
Hyzdu continues rolling right through the final diss, when Will tells the smart guy he would sadly realize in 50 years that "you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you could have picked up for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.""
Will the real Chad Scott please stand up?
Here are a couple of articles from the Post-Gazette from yesteryear (1999 & 2001) that talk about what an effective (and sometimes game-breaking) player Chad Scott was. Maybe this is why the Steelers are keeping him around one more year. I would certainly think he's due for a breakout season after a string of mediocre ones.
Tuesday, August 24, 1999
Cornerback Scott raring to go after sitting out '98 season
Sunday, August 12, 2001
Chad Scott lifts hurt ego at corner
