Trash -Talking the 2012 Sweet Sixteen

Now that  my brackets are so much smoldering wreckage, and now that my teams are out, it is time for a big dose of what the original purpose of this blog was: a profanity-filled triade about shit I don’t like. And since I can’t like this tournament anymore…

In alpha-suck-abetical order:

Baylor

When the hell did Baylor start to mean anything in college sports? Whatever happened to the good old days when Baylor was just the “free square” in the bingo card that was the Big 12 schedule? I blame women’s basketball; after they gave up immolating religious whackos, that was the first sport anybody in Waco anybody paid any attention to until a few years ago, and it’s only gotten worse now that Joakim Noah plays for their womens’ team.

Cincinnati

If I were a doctor and were going to give the state of Ohio an enema, Cincinnati is where I would stick the nozzle.  What amazes me is that this miasma of suck has two universities, and both of them got into the Sweet Sixteen (more on that later).  Shit-cinnati is a subtle blend of all that is wrong with city-living and all the suck that bucolic splendor brings. Want to know what walking down a street in downtown Cincinnati is like? Dress all the zombies from “The Walking Dead” in Ohio State shirts, Bengals hats, all in various states of filth and mis-sized. If you get past this parade of freaks who will attempt to panhandle you to death, you get the upscale Cincinnatians who are all rude and pretentious just because they have reservations at the “Steak and Shake” that has tablecloths.

Florida

I think the above photo says it all.  That’s the university president.

Indiana

I know this may be hard for anybody under 50 to realize, but there was a time within the last 30 years where a college basketball team in Indiana could actually win something. Obviously, that was never Purdue or Notre Dame , and it got so bad in the land of basketball people were actually rooting for Butler…fucking Butler. Calling Butler “real college basketball” is like calling a hot dog “real meat.” Now that Indiana is back in the Sweet Sixteen for the first time in a decade, every in-bred slackjaw south of Fort Wayne is resplendent in his IU 1981 NCAA Champs t-shirt that he wore while doing a lube job on his 1985 Ford pick-up truck, because nothing hides your sister-mom’s DNA like a few quarts of Quaker State.

Kansas

The fundamental problem is that Kansas fans believe that they should win every single year, and when the Jayhawks don’t, their fans cocoon themselves in this layer of false history.  Jayhawk fans think the entire sport is their birthright; that its history is proprietary to Kansas simply because their legendary coach Phog Allen was rumored to be Dr. James Naismith’s gay lover.  To understand this fraudulent nature, let’s break down that history they love so damn much. First of all, while Naismith was the inventor of basketball, he didn’t invent it in Kansas. Do you know what did get invented in Kansas? Shooting people over slavery. But that’s not as “feel-good” as believing your basketball team is historically elite.

Kentucky

It says all you need to know about Kentucky to notice this is a program which replaced Tubby Smith with Billy Gillespie, then replaced him with career criminal John “Don’t Drop the Soap” Calipari. Think about that; this is a program so myopic they dumped the last guy to win anything for them and ultimately ended up with a guy who has managed to make Final Four appearances disappear at  two different schools because of NCAA violations. Despite the fact that other than last year, they hadn’t earned a trip to the Final Four in thirteen years, UK fans still believe they are relevant, and will continue to think that even after this season inevitably gets wiped off the books.  It must be a great time for bail bondsmen in Lexington.

Louisville

Dear Residents of Louisville,

Let me explain to you why nobody has any respect for your city.  First of all, to be a world-class city, you have to settle on a standard pronunciation. You would never see a sign the like the one above in a real city. Secondly, you keep describing your city as the “capital of Kentuckiana.” If it weren’t bad enough there is no such place, you’ve created one out of the two worst parts of two of the worst states in America. Combining Indiana with Kentucky is like joining infected, oozing hemmorhoids with a bowel obstruction.

Now, let’s talk about this basketball team for minute, shall we? Somebody in Louisville needs to tell Rick Pitino that coaching basketball in Kentucky in a building called the KFC Yum! Center while wearing white suits is just begging for “Colonel Sanders” jokes…and having a bird mascot doesn’t help.  I’ll get you started – “Cardinal basketball – a special blend of eleven secret fouls and turnovers.”

Marquette

Since Marquette is a catholic school in Wisconsin, insert your own “alcoholic pedophile” joke here.  That also means they really aren’t worth thinking about,  so here’s exactly what I said about them last year. I think you will find it is all pretty much still true.

This place ought to be renamed The University of Gutless.  Marquette’s basketball team used to be known as the Warriors, until every member of their board of trustees grew multiple vaginas and decided AGAINST the will of the student body and the alumni that the nickname was “insensitive to Native Americans.” Of course, this completely ignores the fact that a “warrior” is defined as a person experienced in or capable of engaging in combat or warfare, especially within the context of a tribal or clan-based society that recognizes a separate combatant class. There’s a whole range of cultures to which that applies, ranging from the Bushido Samurai to the Spartans. Yet, the pointy-heads at Marquette decided it could only apply to those who when they cash their government checks get blind-drunk on the “firewater,” then build casinos.

This begs another important question. Since when does the Catholic Church give a flying fuck about political correctness? Don’t forget that Marquette is a Jesuit school, and the Jesuits aren’t just garden-variety papists; they are the Waffen-SS of Catholicism. They can show up in any diocese and do whatever the hell they want, and the local bishop can’t say shit to them. In other words, these aren’t exactly the guys who cower at a bunch of soccer moms who think “we might be being mean to the Indians.”

If that weren’t enough, the Catholic Church as a whole isn’t exactly the “canary in the coal mine” when it comes to being sensitive to public opinion.  In fact, their only recent change on the position of contraception is it is acceptable to use a condom only when the altar boy has diarrhea.

Michigan State

Really, I should just write a generic bit for all the Big Twelevten in this tournament; Wisconsin, Ohio State, Indiana, and Sparty.   They all really do the same thing. They get into the tournament, and then somehow lose to some peckerwood SEC team like Kentucky.  But Michigan State deserves a special layer of scorn and derision as they aren’t even an original member of the Big Tweleveten. They didn’t join until 1949 when it was still known as Michigan State Sit When You Pee College and Tire Care Center.

North Carolina

Once again, I will quote the good people at Deadspin since I can’t improve on the accuracy of their assesment.

No school has benefited more from having an archrival who happens to be even more haughty and douchetastic. I’m onto you, Tarheels. You think just because you hate Duke that you can sneak by without anyone hating your fucking guts. But you are WRONG. But the truth is that, if Duke didn’t exist, YOU would be Duke. You’d be the most hated program in the country, what with your gross sense of entitlement and Dickie V lapping up Roy Williams’ seminal fluid like it’s cereal milk. You people owe Duke a steak dinner for covering up so much of what makes you despicable.

FACT: Every three seconds, a person in the North Carolina wilderness is being raped. I drove through the state once, and you see the forests on the side of the road and you just know, twenty feet in, someone has a penis inside them that they don’t want inside them. North Carolina is also the only state where it’s legal to rape someone and fish at the same time.

North Carolina State

Thanks to the fact that Georgetown’s John Thompson III is one of the shittiest tournament coaches in the history of shitty tournament coaches, I’m going to have to re-live this moment about a bazillion times between now and the time NC State wakes up and remembers they are NC State. 1983 was almost 30 years ago, Jim Valvano is dead, so is Lorenzo Charles, and NC State is still the school people only go to when they can’t get into to Appalachian State.

Ohio

According to the good folks at Listverse, Ohio University is the most haunted university in the country.

This should not be a surprise. It is well known and documented that Ohio University is perhaps one of the most haunted places in the world. From ghost teachers that talk to students, sounds and voices heard in sealed rooms, to an entire ghost basketball team, this campus is truly full of haunts. Nearly every single building on campus has at least one ghost associated with it. In a place literally full of ghosts, one manages to stand out among the rest. Wilson Hall is said to be one of the most haunted buildings in the United States, and was featured in the TV series “Scariest Places on Earth”. A female student practicing satanic rituals supposedly died violently in room 428. While this story has no real backing, what is true is that school officials have closed and sealed the room because no student could live in it peacefully. Voices are heard throughout the halls, doors lock and unlock, open and close on their own, and ghostly figures wander the building. The building is also dead center of a pentagram formed by five cemeteries which surround the campus. Rumor has it that this building itself was built on top of an old mental hospital cemetery, however this was proven to be untrue.

So in other words, this university has a student body that gets wigged out by the same kind of faux spooks that even Shaggy and Scooby-Doo could figure out in under 30 minutes. Perhaps this means we will see Daphne and Velma on the court for the Bobcats come this weekend.

Ohio State

Even though he was  a football guy, nobody was a more loyal Buckeye than Kirk Herbstreit, and even he was giving double-birds out the window on his way out the the shit-hole formerly known as Columbus.  In other words, even he had to split town because he only fellated the statue of Woody Hayes once a day rather than the expected thrice. This is exactly the problem with Buckeye fans; they have so little else that unless you swear your undying devotion and back it up on an hourly basis, they declare you a heretic and kill your house pets. In all honesty, the best description I’ve ever read about Ohio came from the good people at Deadspin:

“We make fun of Ohio here at Deadspin an awful lot, and with good reason. If you placed an electrified cupcake in the center of the state, half the population would be dead by morning. And the other half would be asking for extra sprinkles.”

What else can you say? These are the people who expect perfection while investing only idiocy; the kind of people who try to “return” foster children after they’ve raped them. Buckeye fans belong in that same circle of hell reserved for pederasts, people who run scams on the elderly, and deadbeat fathers.

Syracuse

Syracuse fans are always bitching because they feel they never get any respect. Half the time, they don’t deserve it, like when they kept trying to tell me Gerry McNamara was the best scorer in college basketball. The other half of the time they spend missing the point; like during all that McNamara twaddle they forgot they had Carmelo Anthony.

Then there’s this year.  First, longtime assistant and Jim Boeheim’s right-hand man Bernie Fine was accused of sexually molesting two young boys.  To top that off, it seems Fine’s wife may or may not have slept with players while they were members of the team.  Then it was revealed that the school violated its own drug policy and that the school may or may not have reported it to the NCAA years ago.  And if that weren’t enough, Fab Melo was ruled out of the tournament because may or may not have been academically eligible this semester.

Despite all that Syracuse, makes the big dance as a #1 seed, and advances to the sweet sixteen. The fun part: Earlier this season,  when Syracuse was #1 in the AP poll they received 61 out of 65 first-place votes, and Syracuse fans, after all the shit that team had been through, did nothing but bitch about the four writers who didn’t vote Syracuse first.

Fuck Syracuse.

Wisconsin

As long as the state of Wisconsin exists, R.J. Reynolds will never go broke since they own Kraft Foods, Miller Beer and Marlboro cigarettes, which happen to be the three dietary staples in America’s Dairyland. Sconnies drink and smoke on an Olympic level because Wisconsin basketball is to watch four sausage-fed forwards and one guard who doesn’t play like Herman Munster.  It’s hard to watch, hence the Wiscy-level of drinking, which easily can put even the most moonshine-riddled southern peckerwood to shame.  If you see a Badger fan on the street, crash him over the head with the nearly-empty whiskey bottle he’s carrying and bring him to the local hospital for a liver transplant. He will need it, trust me.

Xavier

Here’s a fun, yet useless fact I’ve been hearing all day: there are as many schools from the city of Cincinnnati (2) left in the tournament as there are from either the SEC (2), Big 12 (2), or ACC (2).  Here a more accurate statement. There are as many teams from those conferences that anybody gives a shit about as there are from the entire state of Ohio. Whats’ funny is that at the beginning of the season, Xavier and Cincinnati got into a brawl in a game for intra-city bragging rights. This is like two bums fighting over the least piss-stained raincoat at the Salvation Army.

-Dubsism is a proud member of Sports Blog Movement

Why You Shouldn’t Cheer For Duke: Largely Because Thanks to Lehigh, You Can’t…And Mike Krzyzewski Is a Dick

First of all, Duke sucks. Even when they don’t suck, Duke sucks.

Second of all, I honestly didn’t think I would have to write my annual “Fuck Duke” post until next weekend, but thanks to the Mountain Hawks of Lehigh University, now that annual screed becomes more of a Blue Devil post-mortem.  I went into this tournament thinking Duke was over-rated as a two-seed, but even I didn’t have them going out in the first round (check out my bracket destruction at Sport Blog Movement).

So, having said that, let’s take a look at why I thought Duke was over-rated:

• They have no inside presence
• They rely to much on perimeter shooting
• They can’t defend against speed

All three of those thing congealed to end Duke’s season early.  But a big part of the problem with this season’s team is that it traveled too far on a reputation that it couldn’t back up, and a big part of that problem is the complete sham that is the reputation of Mike Krzyzewski.

What I’ve never understood about Krzyzewski is that he’s a known disciple of Bobby Knight, and carries on just as much as Knight did, but Krzyzewski never gets called out for being such an unconscionable asshole. Sure, he doesn’t throw chairs during games, nor does he have outbursts at press conferences, but all the other signs are there.

Raise your hand if you are tired of watching Krzyzewski scream unrepentantly at officials until every call goes Duke’s way.  Raise your hand if you wonder why the media has never exposed Krzyzewski for being every bit the abusive tyrant his mentor Bobby Knight was.  Raise your hand if you don’t get why nobody has ever noticed the Paterno-like ring of sycophants willing to lay down their lives for him.  Raise your hand if you wonder when Krzyzewski and Dick Vitale are going to pick out a china pattern together.

Naturally, that last sentence explains a lot about why none of these questions ever get asked; resident ESPN analyst and personal Krzyzewski fellatrix Dick Vitale just can’t understand why there is all this Duke hatred out there.  Let’s see if I can clear this up for Dicky V. While Knight may have been an asshole, at least he was an honest asshole. It is one thing to be an asshole; it is an entirely other thing to spend thirty years hiding you are an asshole.

The definitive rundown on this attitude toward Krzyzewski comes from a work called Duke Sucks authored Reed Tucker and Andy Bagwell. It is described by the good people at Deadspin as “a thorough charge-by-charge frisking of the worst college basketball program known to man.” The following excerpt gives a detailing of the tone of this work, and if you still don’t get it, we here at Dubsism will break it down for you.

Charge #9: [This charge has been redacted for fear that Coach K might call us and scorch the earth with f-bombs for twenty minutes.]

There’s really no way to sugarcoat this for sensitive palates, so we’re just going to come out and say it. Coach K is probably not the sweet hoops coach/business genius/grandfather-of-five that he, the media, the Duke basketball information office, Nike, Chevy, and American Express would like you to believe he is. In truth, he’s probably kind of a jerk. Or a nickname-for-Richard. Take your pick.

Of all the high-profile coaches in the games, is there one you’d less like to spend a night drinking beer and playing Boggle with?

Okay, Rick Barnes, but after that? Really think about it for a minute.

Well, Bob Huggins always looked to me like he might be in the Russian mafia, especially when he took to wearing the track suits.  Not to mention, Frank Martin from K-State..well, if he’s not a KGB agent in the off-season is just a fucking scary dude. But, I digress…

On the likeability index, Coach K rates somewhere between Chris Brown and whoever runs Uzbekistan’s intelligence agency. Krzyzewski is prickly. He takes himself way too seriously. His ego is inflated. He must be a little paranoid—a fingerprint scan is required to open the elevator doors to his office. No one would describe his sense of humor as “winning.” He seems constantly in a bad mood and is quick to anger. He once told the media that he agreed with a player’s assessment that his teammates were all a bunch of “fucking babies.”

In the Old West, he’d be called “ornery.” He’s like one of those villainous dads from every high-school movie—the retired military man who makes his son’s life miserable because of his unbending code of discipline. Hell, he probably uses military time. (“Practice is at oh-nine-hundred, sharp!”)

That’s a generous rating on the “likeability scale.” In the old west, he’d be the guy who gets ambushed along the trail and left for the buzzards.  For a West Point graduate, Krzyzewski is the kind of guy who becomes the Army officer who gets shot in the back of the head by his own troops, precisely because he does little beyond berating them. We’ll come back to this point.

Here’s a fun little exercise you can do yourself. Pull up a Google images search for “Mike Krzyzewski” and look what you come up with. See all those photos of him frowning or yelling? Keep scanning. Do you see any of him smiling? We mean, aside from his official university head shot where they probably ordered him to seem halfway cuddly? Do you see any candid photos of him on the sideline, out in the real world or at a press conference smiling? You don’t. He looks downright constipated in most of the pictures.

But so what? He’s an intense guy, we get it. That’s probably, in part, how he’s able to win so many games.

And that would be just fine, except that like so much when it comes to Duke, there’s an element of hypocrisy here. You don’t have to look too deep into Coach K before you realize that there’s a huge disconnect between the guy’s public image and the real person. Here’s a man who theSporting News dubbed “what’s right about sports.” Here’s a man who’s beatified during practically every telecast. Here’s a man who smugly intoned during his awful American Express TV commercial a few years ago, “I don’t look at myself as a basketball coach. I look at myself as a leader who happens to coach basketball.”

How easy is it to dislike someone who exemplifies the most human characteristics of a rat all while being a two-faced elitist scumbag? This is Krzyzewski’s major contribution to Duke; he is the titular head of the Hypocritical Douchebag Committee. At once, the Duke athletic culture (led by Krzyzewski) has developed a drum-beat, party-line rhetoric about creating scholar-athletes at a private university, which Krzyzewski seems to believe is the sacred ground for all that is holy in college athletics. This becomes more important later.

And when it comes to leadership, this guy is clearly more Dick Nixon than George H. W. Bush.

“I guess the thing that surprised me the most was you don’t realize how much he curses and how much he’s on the refs all the time,” says former UNC guard Bobby Frasor. “I remember someone telling me about [former Duke player] Taylor King during his freshman year and how he thought his name was ‘motherfucker,’ because that’s how Coach K got his attention. I don’t know how true it is. I mean, he’s a great coach and I’m not going to deny that at all, but the way he handles his players or acts with the refs and media, sometimes it kind of rubs people the wrong way.”

Here’s the part where you have to understand the difference between a leader who happens to be a dick (Bobby Knight), and a dick who is in a leadership role (Krzyzewski). While Knight had a reputation for being harsh with players, when he got the “bum’s rush” out of Indiana, there were tons of former players who came forward in his defense.  Again, he was an asshole, but he was an honest asshole.  I get the feeling Krzyzewski would not get the same brand of loyalty, if for no other reason he has a huge case of “ivory tower syndrome,” which is just a nice way of saying “complete hypocrisy.”

Knight built a winning program and graduated his players at a public university, which Krzyzewski clearly has contempt for. What Duke and Krzyzewski simply don’t get is that they have created a culture which mirrors all of the false idolatry which has gotten so many other people into trouble, yet stick their collective heads in the sand clinging to the “can’t happen here” mentality with the false belief that Duke’s ivory towers have some sort of shielding capability.

Duke and Krzyzewski in many respects have built each other. The Duke campus is rife with things named for Krzyzewski, there’s a tightly knit culture in the program funded by wealthy donors and protected by an unwritten code about “keeping family business in the family.”

Krzyzewski said it himself.  In his 2007 book To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever, Will Blythe quotes Coach K  as saying “Let’s say at Ohio State that we did what we have done at Duke. There would be statues. There would never be anybody looking for anything wrong with what you did.”

In retrospect, that’s a chilling statement. While he uses Ohio State as his example of a large, public university with a brobdingnagian athletic department where a “Penn State” style problem can exist, there’s no denying that Penn State completely fits the description he offers. Even worse are the suppositions hidden in that statement. Krzyzewski believes himself, and wants you to believe that such idolatry can only happen in a big, public-school setting, and that it is only because of private-school envy that people begrudge him in his success.  Pot calling the kettle black, pure and simple.

So, how does that sort of hypocrisy affect one’s leadership style? Well, for starters, it allows you to breed a culture of hypocrisy.

A New York Post reporter, sitting behind Duke’s bench during a 2005 game, described the proceedings during a team huddle thusly:

“Krzyzewski himself was an unfiltered Chris Rock concert for much of the day, but one of his assistants was worse. During one timeout, with the starters sitting on the bench, gulping Gatorade, this was his idea of “coaching” them: “You’re a bleep, and you’re a bleep, and you’re a bleeping bleep-bleeper of a bleeper-bleeper. You bleepers don’t bleeping deserve to wear the bleeping colors of Duke University! Bleep! Are you bleeping bleeping me? Bleep all of you. Get out of my bleeping faces.”

“At which point, he was replaced by Krzyzewski, whose assessment was far more succinct: “You bleeping make me bleeping sick.”

That’s more bleeps than a Source Awards telecast.

“His mouth is terrible. He has that reputation. You don’t want kids sitting behind the bench, that’s for sure,” says former UNC guard Dewey Burke. “It takes a certain kind of player to deal with that over the course of four years. As players sitting around, yeah, we’ll talk about how I don’t know how I could play for a guy like that.”

Of course, to really build such a culture, you have to let it spill down beyond the coaching ranks.

One of Coach K’s tried-and-true motivating tactics is reportedly to completely blast the freshmen and other weak-link players during practice, only to later send a senior over to the player’s room to explain why he was so angry.

After a particularly poor 2005 workout, during which Coach K reamed his players in front of more than two hundred invited guests, including NCAA president Myles Brand, forward Lee Melchionni told Sports Illustrated, “That’s one thing about the Duke program: You’re always going to get the absolute truth from Coach. You may go back to your dorm room and cry, but you’re going to come back the next day and be better because of it.”

This is the part where Dukies will try to tell me Krzyzewski gets loyalty from players.  Sure they do, as long as they are still on the team. Krzyzewski is an unquestioned ruler, and you have two choices in Durham-istan; you can either toe the party line, or you can get shipped off to Siberia in a cattle car.  I don’t care how much hate mail I get for this, but I’m convinced Mike Krzyzewski is like the church minister who secretly likes little boys. He’s got all the respect of the people who could out him, but none of them do because, after all, he is the minister. Besides, he’s also that hypocritical asshole who preaches about character and discipline, then stomps around on the sideline like the biggest petulant shithead out there.

Oh, and then there’s the fact that he treats everybody with a complete lack of respect.

And it’s not just his players that he can be peevish with. It’s also members of the media, whose existence Coach K seems to barely tolerate.

How many other head coaches won’t deign to spend fifteen seconds with the designated TV sideline reporter at halftime, dispatching a lowly assistant instead?

“I don’t agree with coaches doing that. It’s a philosophical thing,” Coach K has said. “The only people I should talk to are my players.”

About the only time anyone gets access to the coach is during the postgame press conference, which can often turn churlish.

“Obviously, you didn’t see the game tonight, okay?” Krzyzewski snapped, interrupting a journalist who was asking about Duke losing a lead during a 2004 game versus UConn. “Which question would you want me to answer?” he later barked.

During a 2008 press session for the U.S. Olympic team, the coach ridiculed a foreign journalist who asked in hesitant English whether the American team was showing off by dunking too much.

“There was no showing off,” K said defensively, glaring at the journalist. “You dunk when you have to dunk. Maybe it’s a difference in our languages. Maybe in your language playing hard means showing off.”

And then there was Krzyzewski’s most infamous run-in with the media—the student media, that is. In 1990, the coach blew his stack after a student sports reporter in the university newspaper dared to give his team a B+ midseason grade.

He summoned ten newspaper staffers to the locker room and let loose with an eight-minute profanity-laced tirade that would have given a gentler man a stroke.

Unbeknownst to K, one of the reporters secretly recorded the blowup with a tape recorder hidden in his bag.

Coach K began by calling the midseason report card “full of shit,” and went on to whine, “I just wonder where your mindset is that you don’t appreciate the kids in this locker room. I’m not looking for puff pieces or anything like that, but you’re whacked out and you don’t appreciate what the fuck is going on and it pisses me off—I’m suggesting that if you want to appreciate what’s going on—get your head out of your ass and start looking out for what’s actually happening.”

Another coach might have been fired for a blue-streaked outburst against—again—student reporters. And not only students, but ones at his own school. But Coach K’s reputation took only the slightest ding. Dick Vitale was probably on the air that very night gushing about how much K does for charity.

Are you starting to get the picture here? Lot’s of other coaches would have at least been called on the carpet for such behavior. But not Krzyzewski, because he is the head of the Politburo in Durham-istan. That means he can get away with being a derogatory ass-hat, which by the way, is NOT a quality associated with great leaders. Nor is being a petulant cry-baby.

But let’s face facts. The dude is just plain mean.

When Nick Collison, who was heavily recruited by Duke, called Krzyzewski to tell him he was going to Kansas, K didn’t exactly wish him well. Or even pretend to. “He was like, ‘I don’t care. We got a commitment from Casey Sanders anyway,’” Collison told Kusports.com. (Sanders, a six-foot-eleven center, averaged 2.7 points for his career. Collison, meanwhile, currently plays for the Oklahoma City Thunder.)

During a 2005 Duke–North Carolina game at Chapel Hill, Coach K became incensed by a fan who yelled, “You’ve got [referee] Larry Rose in your pocket!” The coach had security move the fan farther away from the bench, according to the New York Post. The fan later turned out to be Scott Williams, son of UNC coach Roy Williams. Oops.

Anyone want to hire this guy to entertain children at a birthday party?

Why don’t Krzyzewski’s accomplishments come with a big, fat, shiny asterisk? Why does the man continue to be canonized in the media, while his surly side gets buried? Does winning basketball games make him that bulletproof?

No one is asking Coach K to become soft and cuddly, or even to clean up his language. His players, at least the ones that don’t transfer, seem to like—or at least tolerate—his raw approach, and far be it from us to question that. But why can’t a fuller picture of the coach be presented, so that we, the public, can form our own opinions, free of all the manufactured BS that Duke, Coach K, the media, and the advertisers want to shove down our throats?

When Yankees owner George Steinbrenner—another sports figure who was known to be demanding and prickly—died in 2010, his obituaries presented him as he was, warts and all. The New York Times recounted his felony conviction and the way he had been “overbearing and even verbally abusive” toward his children.

We can hope for nothing less for Coach K. But why wait until he passes away? No time like the present to start setting the record straight.

Verdict: What’s former VP Cheney’s first name again?

Frankly, to me, hating Duke always seemed so self-evident.  It doesn’t require Jim Rockford or the NASA supercomputer to figure out why.  All you have to do is watch watch Coach Krzyzewski on the sidelines.

-Dubsism is a proud member of Sports Blog Movement

The 2012 Dubsism NCAA Bracket Challenge

In conjunction with our partners at the Sports Blog Movement, Dubsism is hosting an NCAA Bracket Challenge. You won’t win anything other than bragging rights, but it doesn’t cost anything either. Rather, your biggest enjoyment may come from watching my bracket from becoming a bigger smoldering hunk of wreckage than an Italian cruise ship.

You can still enter this challenge by e-mailing dubsism@yahoo.com before Thursday, March 15th by 8 A.M. Eastern U.S. time – then by filling out a bracket by noon Eastern U.S. time that same day.

Meanwhile, you can check out the official Dubsism Bracket over on Sports Blog Movement, as well as updates throughout the tournament.

Ten Pointless USB Devices Compared To Their Equally Useless Sports Figures

Being that the holiday season is upon us, there is a lot of thought begin given to gift-giving. If you are reading this, then you must be thinking, “Gee, what do I get for the sports blogger in my life?”

This allows for another of our comparison pieces with a list published by the good people at Listverse.  Since most sports bloggers spend a lot of time around their computers, and since most sports blogs (especially this one) are generally pointless, what better that a list of pointless USB devices and blogging it up by comparing it to a list of equally useless sports figures.

10) USB Fridge

“The time has come to stop forcing yourself to drink tepid Pepsi while forgetting yourself in the mountains of work at your desk! Plug the USB Fridge into your computer while you are working,  place a beverage inside and get ready to enjoy your choice of tasty liquid at a cool 47 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Equally Useless Sports Figure: Curtis Painter

What better way to represent a refrigerator which only holds one drink, and only partially cools it than with a quarterback who can’t complete passes and only gets close to winning?

9) USB Monitor Smasher

“As useful and compliant as your PC may be, at some point you probably just want to clobber it into a million tiny pieces. Here we introduce the device that will save you thousands of dollars and hours of cleanup time. The ScreenSmasher is a foam mallet that comes with a USB sensor. Take the stress relieving smack at your screen and your Windows Desktop will automatically display the image of shattered glass – also with a realistic crash sound effect.”

Equally Useless Sports Figure: The Regular Season in College Basketball

What better description is there for the college basketball regular season than a foam rubber mallet which allows you to expend a ton of time and energy and not get anywhere? Last sesson’s run by Connecticut proves it. The Huskies finished the regular season with a 9-9 record in conference play for a 9th place finish in the Big East. Yet, they hit a ten-game winning streak at just the right time, sweeping throught he Big East and NCAA tournaments. The 22 wins before that meant nothing.

8 ) USB Gold Flash Drive 

“True, the flash drive is a far cry from a bizarre USB device – but it is the price tag of this attractive accessory that puts it on this list. Introduced at the CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany, this exclusive USB key seems to be marketed mainly for its exquisite exterior – as its memory capacity wasn’t even mentioned at its premiere. It was later released that capacities will include 128MB, 256MB, 512MB and 1024MB. This gold-plated, diamond-encrusted USB memory stick is also adorned with a hefty price tag of 2,950-euro or $3,500!”

Equally Useless Sports Figure: The Ridiculously Over-Priced Free Agent

I’m not singling out Soriano per se, but he does make a perfect example of a guy who has been paid far more than he’s performed. Let’s be honest, every team that’s ever spent money has bought a $20 flash drive for $3,500 at some point.

7) USB Hampster Wheel

“Tired of your monotonous office work day after day, caught up in the rat race of the working world? Ready for the perfect way to lift your spirits and send laughter tearing through the office? Introducing the USB Hampster Wheel! Just plug it into your USB port, load the software provided and watch your furry friend as you type: the hampster gets running and spins the wheel around in the process, spinning even faster as your typing speed increases!”

Equally Useless Sports Figure: ESPN News

For a media outlet to continue to run a sports-news network that does little more than runs the same 30-minute show all damn day long suggest they a) don’t understand that now every sports fan in the world has a smartphone which obviates TV newscasts, b) never heard of the internet, and c) actually believe people want to see the same highlight clips 75 times per day.

6) USB Exercising Dog

“You’ve got to do something with your unused USB ports, so why not fill it up with something totally useless like these USB dogs? A more family-friendly version then its “humping dog” predecessor, you can watch the USB Exercising Dog as he works his washboard abs to perfection!”

Equally Useless Sports Figure: Pitching Coaches

What does a pitching coach do for a major-league moundsman? That is besides walking out to tell him “Uh, Skip’s thinking of pulling you if you don’t start throwing strikes…so, uh, you probably want to  start throwing strikes.”

5) USB Ghost Radar

“For the multitasking, facebook-addicted Ghostbuster, here is the USB device you’ve been searching for. The USB Ghost Radar supposedly does just as it says, detect ghosts. This gadget is actually quite complex. Using sensors and alert lights, and an algorithm it detects any paranormal activity – all the while factoring in biometric feedback from your skin, along with many other features. Plug in the USB Ghost Radar and it will beep in rhythm with specific light patterns depending on the paranormal activity around you. The volume and intensity of the beeps supposedly indicates how close your ghost is. The lights help you figure out the ghost’s position, movement, and the risk possibilities.”

Equally Useless Sports Figure: The Radar Gun Guy

Isn’t this guy’s job really to tell us what we already know? The first time I saw Justin Verlander’s fastball I said “Holy shit! That kid’s got a heater!” I didn’t say “Holy shit! I wish there was a radar gun guy around to tell me that kid’s got a heater.”

4) Mr. Tengu

“Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little buddy that could just sit right next to your computer and make stupid faces? Plug Mr. Tengu into your USB port and he will sit contently at your desk making weird faces with changes in sound, and will take naps when his daily face making routine becomes too exhausting.”

Equally Useless Sports Figure: Tim McCarver

Honestly, when I read the description “he will sit contently at your desk making weird faces with changes in sound, and will take naps when his daily face making routine becomes too exhausting,” I thought all they have to do is add “comment on the completely obvious” and Mr. Tengu would be a perfect McCarver-Bot.

3) Coffee Mug-Mouse

“Now I know what you’re thinking…. “Besides the high ‘coffee-spilling-all-over-the-desk’ chances, isn’t that going to be tough to use?” In fact, the MugMouse was created with the deliberate intention by SLOWEB Peripherals “to provide an alternative to the fast global flow of information”. This infrared mouse follows your movements and the mouse button at the bottom of the mug is clicked by pushing the whole mug towards the table; And as an added bonus, this handy mug not only holds 150mL of your favourite hot drink, but keeps it steamy with the built-in heater. So for those who are looking for a speed reduced computer mouse  that doubles as a coffee mug – this little diddy is for you!”

Equally Useless Sports Figure: The NFL Playoff Overtime Rule

Until I discovered this coffee-mug mouse, I thought having different rules for the regular season and the playoffs was the dumbest thing I ever heard. Even the officials can’t keep it straight.

2) Bowling Ball-Flash Drive

“Though this “heavy duty” memory stick is not yet patented and ready to sell to the public – I can’t help but applaud this device’s creator Chris Spurgeon for attempting to find the solution to our age’s miniature flash drives going missing. Converting his 16 pound bowling ball into a memory stick he asks himself “Let’s see if I send that through the laundry by mistake!” On the practical side though, I hope when using it he doesn’t attach it directly to his laptop…”

Equally Useless Sports Figure: A 96-team College Basketball Tournament Format

I can’t think of two better examples of taking a good thing so far over the top as to make it completely impractical.

1) USB Scan Toaster

“Ever wonder what it would feel like to see your face on a 5 dollar bill? A postage  stamp? How about a piece of toast? A finalist in the 2008 Electrolux Design Lap competition, the USB Scan toaster uses hot wires that rotate within a 30° radius to “burn” anything you want onto your piece of toast; the news, weather or snapshots – the delicious possibilities are endless!”

Equally Useless Sports Figure: The NFL Pre-Season

Remember the saying “neccessity is the mother of invention.” Whoever decided they needed to place their likeness on a slice of toast is likely the same type person who thought it was a good idea to schedule a slew of games every year that mean nothing, for which fans get to pay full ride only to see guys who will be loading trucks at UPS in a few weeks.

The Dubsism March Movie Spectacular…And the Winner Is…

We started with 64, and after four weeks, six rounds, and tons of votes, we are down to one. According to you, the readers of Dubsism, the greatest sports movie in history is:

The Dubsism March Sports Movie Spectacular – The Finals

After all the upsets, the highs, the lows, the whatevers, we have a championship match. The only two #1 seeds to make the Final Four face off for the title of greatest sports movie ever according to the readers of Dubsism, which, lets be honest, is the only audience that matters.

Vote away gang; voting closes on Sunday at midnight.

The Finals:

The Dubsism March Sports Movie Spectacular – The Final Four

Here we are…down the the Final Four. There have been upsets, there have been Cinderellas, but let’s be honest. Any movie that has survived this far must be both pretty good and has a fair amount of fans. Now, it is time to see which will be the last one standing. The voting will close at midnight on Wednesday.

The Final Four:

The Dubsism March Movie Spectacular – The Elite Eight

Regional Finals abound in our sports movie tournament. It is begging the question “does life imitate art or does art imitate life.” Just like real basketball tournaments (perhaps not this year’s) some top seeds perform, and there’s always a Cinderella looking to crash the ball.

Voting in this round will close Friday at midnight.

West Region:

Midwest Region:

South Region:

East Region:

Trash-Talking the Sweet Sixteen

Now that  my brackets are so much smoldering wreckage, and now that my teams are out, it is time for a big dose of what the original purpose of this blog was: a profanity-filled triade about shit I don’t like. And since I can’t like this tournament anymore…

VCU:

Know what a “VCU” is? Fifteen years ago, it was that machine my post-stroke grandmother thought played movies, but instead constantly blinked “12:00,” as if it were mocking her inability to drool out “VCR.”Worse yet, if you make the mistake of asking anybody at VCU what that acronym actually means, you will get a 25-minute lecture on how the “C” stands for “Commonwealth,” because Virginia is technically a “commonwealth” and not a “state.” Of course, the people who say that are simply trying to pretend they don’t go a state school that by law has to admit every resident mouth-breather who can drop a Skoal-loogie on the correct spot on the application.

Wrong one...you're thinking of Virginia TECH.

Richmond:

Here’s a fun, yet useless fact I’ve been hearing all week: there are as many schools from Richmond, VA in the tournament as there are from the whole Big East (2). Here’s a more accurate statement. There are as many teams from Richmond that anybody gives a shit about as there are from the whole Big East (0).

Ooooh, spiders...I'm soooo scared.

Besides, how can anybody have any respect for a team whose mascot John Goodman knew how to eliminate 20 years ago?

Butler:

Thanks to the movie “Hoosiers,” Larry Fucking Bird, and now you assholes, everybody thinks any little piss-ant school from Indiana means something when it comes to basketball. Let’s do a rundown of the D-I basketball schools from Hoosierland and you tell me which ones matter.

• Butler – A private, liberal arts college which is best-known for its dance program. This means there are two types of Butler students: meth heads whose daddies have too much money for Indiana State, and Daddy’s Little Fruitcup who will spend four years auditioning for “So You Think You Can Dance?”
• Indiana – The school that brought you both the burly,  masculine assholery of Bobby Knight and the sheer once-a-month-crampy bitchiness of Myles Brand.  Once a proud program, but hasn’t been relevant in nearly a decade.
• Purdue – Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, was a Purdue alum. This shows how far people will go to get the fuck out of West Lafayette.
• Notre Dame – A great school with a great tradition, especially if you want to be gang-raped by drunken football players or sent careening to your death off a 70-foot scissor lift. If you happen to get gang-raped while falling off a scissor-lift, you will be honored by having your name etched on one of the mosaic tiles that forms “Touchdown Jesus’” ball-sack.
• Indiana State – Located in beautiful Terre Haute, ISU competes for local talent along with two prisons and a mental institution. This is precisely why if you want to major in schizophrenia, meth production, or pumping out bastard children, ISU is for you.
• Ball State – Too easy…Insert your own joke here. Better make sure those jokes are funny, because this walk-in VD clinic school has produced such comedy titans as Jim Davis, Joyce DeWitt, and David Letterman (who was funny once, but not since the Civil War).
• Evansville – Another small liberal arts college; this one is known for its physical therapy and theatre departments. So, when the therapist who is helpinbg you after your stroke insists on putting his thumb in your ass, chances are he went to Evansville.
• Valparaiso – Not even people who live in Valparaiso can tell you where the hell the campus is, and they sure as hell can’t tell you why it even exists.

Connecticut:

Can somebody explain to me why people in this town think women’s basketball is such a great thing? Between these assholes and those shit-eating, inbred, hillbillies in Knoxville who think Pat Summitt is actually a woman, they have convinced a disturbingly large enough segment of the sports-watching population that womens’ basketball ISN’T a bunch of six-and-a-half foot tall lesbians who can’t play basketball while looking like a boys’ high-school team somebody cut the nuts off of five years ago.

Wisconsin:

Do you know why Wisconsin is home to so many  great serial killers? Because somehow Wisconsinites have taken two great things like sports and booze and managed to completely fuck them up. As far as the University of Wisconsin is concerned, the sport they really are the best at is hockey, which is why they play every other sport like the are on the ice. Badger football is like an old-school NHL game; they get a big offensive line and just beat you into the boards for sixty minutes, Bucky hoop is like watching that adapted version of floor hockey they let the retarded kids play; lots of passes so bad they look like shots, and shots so bad they look like passes. Even the girls teams only change their pads every three periods.

Worse yet is their coach, Bo Ryan. Now that Bruce Pearl is toast at Tennessee, Ryan is the only guy left who makes it a point to color coordinate his blazers in some awful school color. This is a fact only made worse by his extreme resemblance to a modern-art nightmare.

BYU:

You know what the worst part of this college basketball season was? It wasn’t the fact that somehow you turned some nearly-albino virgin kid into the biggest white-guy basketball sensation outside of Duke. It was the fact that I had to defend your silly-ass honor code. I don’t have a beef with your having an honor code. I don’t even have a beef with you kicking that kid off the team over violating it. He knew the drill when he signed up, nobody put a gun to his head when he made the commitment to follow it, and nobody forced him to stick his dick in his girlfriend and screw his teammates by breaking the commitment he voluntarily made.

But what pisses me off to no end is the fact that you as a university made it a point to run out in front of the press and shout this story from the mountain top.  You didn’t have to tell the whole world the story; there’s some real honor in keeping “family business” inside the family. Instead, you decided you needed to show the whole world how honorable you are through humiliating this kid needlessly by putting his business in the street, and for that I offer you my heartiest of FUCK YOUs.

Marquette:

This place ought to be renamed The University of Gutless.  Marquette’s basketball team used to be known as the Warriors, until every member of their board of trustees grew multiple vaginas and decided AGAINST the will of the student body and the alumni that the nickname was “insensitive to Native Americans.” Of course, this completely ignores the fact that a “warrior” is defined as a person experienced in or capable of engaging in combat or warfare, especially within the context of a tribal or clan-based society that recognizes a separate combatant class. There’s a whole range of cultures to which that applies, ranging from the Bushido Samurai to the Spartans. Yet, the pointy-heads at Marquette decided it could only apply to those who when they cash their government checks get blind-drunk on the “firewater,” then build casinos.

This begs another important question. Since when does the Catholic Church give a flying fuck about political correctness? Don’t forget that Marquette is a Jesuit school, and the Jesuits aren’t just garden-variety papists; they are the Waffen-SS of Catholicism. They can show up in any diocese and do whatever the fuck they want, and the local bishop can’t say shit to them. In other words, these aren’t exactly the guys who cower at a bunch of soccer moms who think “we might be being mean to the Indians.”

If that weren’t enough, the Catholic Church as a whole isn’t exactly the “canary in the coal mine” when it comes to being sensitive to public opinion.  In fact, their only recent change on the position of contraception is it is acceptable to use a condom only when the altar boy has diarrhea.

Florida State:

Dear ACC,

You should be fucking embarrassed that a low-rent school like this represents your sorry-ass conference. With all the blather you spew about what  “hallowed” basketball institutions other members like Duke and North Carolina are, you have the unmitigated gall to subject us to the likes of the Seminoles. What can you say about Florida State that can’t be summed up in the phrase “FSU: The strip mall of universities.”

Florida:

If it weren’t for Florida State, Florida would be the Sunshine State’s’ supposedly “academic” collection Kool-Aid and cheap vodka drinkers, jean-short wearers, and hillbilly rapists.  If you’ve ever been to UF, then you know exactly what the statement “It took Tallahassee to make Gainesville look good” means.

Kansas:

I used to have nothing good to say about Kansas until I read that one of their state legislators actually proposed controlling the illegal immigrant population in the same manner they use for feral hogs; picking them off with rifles from helicopters. Once you get past the monstrous racism in that comment, you are struck with the realization that even its crushing stupidity, this represents a “man landing on the moon” advance in Kansan-type thinking. The only thing that is funnier is the people who think this guy gives Kansans a bad name; like they didn’t already have one.

Oh, and I’m pretty sure Bill Self molests collies.

Ohio State:

Even though he was  a football guy, nobody was a more loyal Buckeye than Kirk Herbstreit, and even he was giving double-birds out the window on his way out the the shit-hole formerly known as Columbus.  In other words, even he had to split town because he only fellated the statue of Woody Hayes once a day rather than the expected thrice. This is exactly the problem with Buckeye fans; they have so little else that unless you swear your undying devotion and back it up on an hourly basis, they declare you a heretic and kill your house pets. In all honesty, the best description I’ve ever read about Ohio came from the good people at Deadspin:

“We make fun of Ohio here at Deadspin an awful lot, and with good reason. If you placed an electrified cupcake in the center of the state, half the population would be dead by morning. And the other half would be asking for extra sprinkles.”

What else can you say? These are the people who expect perfection while investing only idiocy; the kind of people who try to “return” foster children after they’ve raped them. Buckeye fans belong in that same circle of hell reserved for pederasts, people who run scams on the elderly, and deadbeat fathers.

Kentucky:

This was a "high-water mark" in the history of Kentucky cleverness.

Kentucky tears me. On the one hand, I believe Kentucky bourbon is the definition of “manna from heaven;” single drinking-handedly I’m probably 40% of the economy of the Bluegrass State. If you ever see me on one of those “Intervention” shows, dump your stock in Jim Beam.  Don’t wait to call your stock broker in the morning, break into his house that night and get your money the fuck out NOW. But on the other hand, when it comes to basketball, these people still revere that racist asshole Adolph Rupp. They ran Tubby Smith out of town for no real reason, and brought in a snail-trail-leaver like John Calipari. The person who roots for Kentucky basketball also likely roots for the New York Yankees, the bad guys from the “Karate Kid,” and Moammar Khadafy.

North Carolina:

Once again, I will quote the good people at Deadspin since I can’t improve on the accuracy of their assesment.

No school has benefited more from having an archrival who happens to be even more haughty and douchetastic. I’m onto you, Tarheels. You think just because you hate Duke that you can sneak by without anyone hating your fucking guts. But you are WRONG. But the truth is that, if Duke didn’t exist, YOU would be Duke. You’d be the most hated program in the country, what with your gross sense of entitlement and Dickie V lapping up Roy Williams’ seminal fluid like it’s cereal milk. You people owe Duke a steak dinner for covering up so much of what makes you despicable.

FACT: Every three seconds, a person in the North Carolina wilderness is being raped. I drove through the state once, and you see the forests on the side of the road and you just know, twenty feet in, someone has a penis inside them that they don’t want inside them. North Carolina is also the only state where it’s legal to rape someone and fish at the same time.

Duke:

At once, I agree with the above statement about North Carolina and yet need to infuse it with my own hatred of Duke.  Oh, Duke, how do I hate thee; let me count the ways. Here’s two good ones.

• Mike Krzyzewski himself. I get that he is a disciple of Bobby Knight, but there is a major difference. It is one thing to be an asshole; it is an entirely other thing to spend thirty years hiding you are an asshole.
• Duke pretends it is a great place to send your sheltered, privileged kids all while it is located in an exceptionally dangerous neighborhood.

San Diego State:

San Diego is a wonderful town, but there are two things about it you cant trust: mid-westerners who move to southern California thinking it is a panacea, and any of its sports teams. The common problem is the beach…there is no such thing as a town that has both a fierce sporting tradition and a desirable beach. The only exceptions are the Miami Dolphins of the early 70′s and the Los Angeles Lakers of forever, both of whom are/were supported largely by transplants from other locales who are old enough to where beaches just present a source of irritating sand in various artificial joints and/or ostomy ports.

As far as the midwesterners who make the “fantasy” move, I have far too many examples in my personal life from which to make examples, but all of them sound pretty much the same. The problem is that almost all of them will bitch if they think I’m talking about them, when in reality I don’t give a frog’s watertight ass about them, other than their stories are at the same time predictable and hilarious. These are almost like those “novels” you read as a kid that allowed you to pick your own ending, the trouble the story is fucked up to begin with. For example:

• Boy meets girl in (insert midwestern state here)
• Boy and girl decide for what ever reason to move to SoCal
• The plan works for one and not the other
• If the plan works for the boy, skip to page 32
• If the plan works for the girl, skip to page 48

PAGE 32:

Boy somehow becomes successful and realizes he has an opportunity to trade up from midwestern girlfriend. He does so, and midwestern girlfriend goes back to (insert midwestern state here), gets some job that pays by the hour and eats her way into a subscription from the Lane Bryant catalog.

PAGE 48:

Girl falls into a pattern that starts with “look at how cool I am because I live in California” and ends with “I will out spend anybody to maintain my ‘look at how cool I am’ mindset.” Despite what she earns, she outspends it several-fold, until the boyfriend says ‘no mas’ and pulls the rip-cord. He heads back to (insert midwestern state here), while she now invests in a string of “relationships” all of which are designed to continue the life-style choices she has made.

PAGE END:

None of these douche-hammers give a shit about sports, which is why San Diego gets no fans for anything.

The Dubsism March Movie Spectacular – The Sweet Sixteen

While all the #1 and #2 seeds are still standing, this tournament has not been friendly to favorites. There’s only one each left of the #3 and #4 seeds. There are three #5 seeds still standing. There’s a Sweet Sixteen match between a #5 and a #10.  There’s even a #13 out there wearing a George Mason “Cinderella” costume.

With that, here are the Sweet Sixteen match-ups…Which will be the first #1 to fall? You make the call; voting will be open until next Monday at midnight.

West Region:

Midwest Region:

South Region:

East Region: