YMCA World Record

As part of halftime at the Sun Bowl, a world record was set for the largest crowd to ever dance to YMCA at the same time.


Goofy world records seem to follow Oregon State around as students set the record for largest pillow fight back in 2003.

NBA Top 10 plays 12/31/2008

The Sun Bowl

It probably looked uglier on TV than it sounded on the radio, but Oregon State won the Sun Bowl with a 3-0 victory over Pittsburgh. The Beavers obviously missed the talents of Jacquizz and James Rodgers as they couldn't punch it in on their 2 trips inside the 10 yard line. However the Beavers defense stepped up to the plate and did what they needed to do to win the game. Obviously the highlight video isn't all that exciting.


Also whither Ryan McCants? 6 carries and 2 catches. We was talked about during pre-season as the second coming of Steven Jackson, what is going on here?

NBA Top 10 12/30/2008

The Rose Bowl

Much of the pre-game talk about USC and Penn State has revolved around how very different their games against Oregon State turned out. Penn State thumped OSU 45-14 while OSU beat USC 27-21. These two games against the Beavers are very different for myriad reasons:

1. Penn State was playing at home. This shouldn't be discounted the Beavers historically don't play well east of the Mississippi as evidenced by their recent trips to Cincinnati and Louisville attest. The exception to this have been in 2002 when they played Temple who weren't any good to begin with. Also Oregon State's QB was making his 5th career start. Of those starts only the Civil War game the previous season was played in a difficult environment, but with it being an in-state game there was a sizable OSU contingent at the game. Playing in Pennsylvania there weren't nearly the same supportive crowd. Thus this was by far the most difficult place that the Beavers had played in a long time. 
2. OSU didn't know how good Jacquizz Rodgers is. The Beavers figured this out during the Penn State game, notably during his first TD run, but by that point it was already 28-0
   
3. It isn't like the Beavers haven't beaten USC recently. The Beavers previously beat USC in Corvallis in 2000 and 2006 and played USC tightly in 2004. Had the Beavers capitalized on some USC mistakes, notably Reggie Bush muffing a punt, and gotten touchdowns instead of field goals on their trips to the red zone, the result may have been different. But once again all of those games happened in Corvallis. Recent games in LA haven't been nearly as competitive. 
4. The Beavers tend to get better as the year goes on. Especially this year as they were breaking in an entirely new front 7, had big changes on the offensive line and they didn't know how Jacquizz's skills would translate onto the college stage. These things took about a month to work out, just in time for the USC game.

It also is interesting why the discussion isn't centered around the other team that both Penn State and USC played, Ohio State. Penn State eeked out a close win on the road while USC blasted Ohio State at home, which seems much the same way that things probably would have worked out had the locales of the games with Oregon State had been flipped.

Shawn Kemp Highlights

4 of the top 10 dunks of Shawn Kemp's career came against the Warriors. This should say a lot about quality of their post defense during this era.



He was the definition of a manchild before the Jim McIlvaine contract and the lockout induced laziness took away his fire and his explosiveness.

This video should live on forever

The grass isn't always on the other side

Not long after singing a big contract to play for the Clippers, Baron Davis is allegedly looking for a way to come back to the Warriors. I can't say that I am too surprised. When Baron agreed to the deal, he thought that Elton Brand was going to be around and not jump ship to play in Philadelphia. Also when you basically have carte Blanche to take any shot that you want, and the fans love you, why would you want to leave?

Non-conference is over, the Pac-10 awaits

Oregon State defeated Seattle U 59-50 last night. Listening on the radio, it wasn't a pretty wing like the win over Howard was, but a win is a win.

During the radio broadcast, the commentator made the comment that OSU had the 16th highest field goal percentage in the nation coming into the game. That stat blew me away. Looking at some of the statistics from last seasons team, and none of them were good.

• Adjusted Offensive Efficiency ('08 squad)  - 94.4 points/100 possessions, 264th in the nation
  
• Adjusted Offensive Efficiency ('09 squad through Dec 28th) 102.9 points/100 possessions, 125th in the nation
• True Shooting Percentage ('08 squad) - 41.5%, 337th in the nation out of 341 teams. The only poorer shooting teams were North Carolina Central, Rice, NJ Institute of Technology and Maryland Eastern Shore
• True Shooting Percentage ('09 squad) - 55.6%, 9th in the nation

Needless to say (although I have said it before), these are good signs. Now, the true test begins. The Pac-10 will show how far this team has come from last season and how far they have yet to go before they are able to consistently challenge for the upper half of the Pac-10.

NBA Top Plays 12/29/2008

Play #2 was my favorite

Gary Payton a true Beaver great

Tonight while I was listening to the Beaver game on the radio, they interviewed former Beaver Lamar Hurd and identifed him as a Beaver great. While I was as big of a Lamar Hurd fan as anyone, I think that calling him a Beaver great is using the term a bit loosely. Here is a video of a true Beaver great.

Sun Bowl Memories

With the Beavers playing in the Sun Bowl on Wednesday, here is what happened last time they played in El Paso

0-16

Not having any Detroit Lions on any of my fantasy football squads this season, I was unaware of how poorly the Lions were playing until a couple of weeks ago. But to finish 0-16 is something that only rarely happens even in Tecmo Bowl. Predictably, the Lions have already fired their coach. While it seemed that going winless was almost impossible in the salary cap era, it seems that there is one thing that this should sear into the collective wisdom of sports franchises. Professional sports teams are multi-million dollar businesses, and as such it makes no sense to hand the duties to someone with no experience in the management side of the business. Ex-players like Matt Millen and Michael Jordan who have basically been handed the reigns of the franchise without showing the required acumen can't be expected to be better at running a sports franchise than people who have spent their entire adult lives working running various aspects of a franchise.

The Pro-Bowl is moving before the Super Bowl?

Reports are stating that the NFL is going to hold the 2010 Pro-Bowl the week prior to the Super Bowl. I am not a huge fan of the Pro-Bowl. While this move may make the Pro-Bowl a bit more relevant, I can't see it making it nearly as important as the NBA All-Star game or the MLB All-Star game. First, it won't include any of the players who are actually in the Super Bowl. Second, if the NFL continues to award the Super Bowl to cities to entice them to build new stadiums way would any player want to go to play a game in January in Kansas City? Going to Hawaii was also a mini-vacation, going to Indiana isn't.

NBA Top Plays 12/28/2008

Miami Dolphins=AFC East Champs

The Miami Dolphins took advantage of the opening that Tom Brady's knee injury provided and won the AFC East crown. They also became the second team in NFL history to have a 10 win improvement. The first were the 1999 Colts who were aided by drafting Edgerrin James. The Dolphins big changes in personnel were getting Ronnie Brown back from his knee injury, getting competent quarterback play from Chad Pennington, and some solid coaching from new coach Tony Sparano. Looks like the karma from buying Dolphin fans lava cake paid off handsomely for the first year coach.

Really old Oregon State Football Highlight Videos

I found a couple of really old Beaver football highlight videos on YouTube. A couple of my favorites:

J.J. Young:


Reggie Tongue:

Jumbotron Video

During the recent Portland/Phoenix game when Brandon Roy dropped 52, the following was shown on the jumbotron:


And now the best part on auto-loop:

Why Strength of Schedule calculations are skewed

People like look at relative strength of schedule of teams to help their argument of which team is better than another. However as far as college football is concerned, that is a bit of a flawed metric. Every power league in Division 1 play 8 league games, leaving 4 non-conference games to schedule according to their desires for a quick paycheck, an easy victory, a regional rivalry or what have you. Because of the goal of bowl eligibility is paramount in today's college football landscape, most teams will try to schedule themselves games in non-conference so that they will be able to win. This gives those leagues a good amount of 8-9 win teams based largely upon favorable scheduling.

Contrast this with the Pac-10 which plays a full league schedule so that if one team is terrible (i.e. Washingon) it impacts the schedule strength of all of the league members, not just some of them. Further, because the 9 game league schedule only gives teams 3 non-league games to chose from, even if the Pac-10 wins their non-league games at exactly the same rate as the other conferences, the other power leagues will have a higher total winning percentage due to their 4 non-conference games accounting for a larger percentage of their total schedule.

Wow

The Hoff was stoked

David Hasselhoff seemed pretty stoked to be singing the National Anthem at the Las Vegas Bowl

Basketball on the Radio

Oregon State avenged their season opening loss to Howard in emphatic fashion. Listening to the Beavers via an internet stream it sounded like they played well. They continued to play hard and work even after they opened up a 21-2 lead in the opening minutes of the game they never let Howard mount a serious charge. These are positive developments after the dismal results of last season, but the truer test will come when Pac-10 play starts. Then we will see how far OSU needs to come to get back to the way it was during the Ralph Miller era.

Tonight was also the first night in a while that I had listened to a basketball game on the radio. As a child I would often sit in my room and listen to basketball games on the radio and it was a fun thing to do. This of course was before the rise of cable television and there wasn't nearly the amount of sports on TV then. The idea of listening to the game via the Internet wasn't even in my wildest dreams as I had no idea that an Internet even existed. Listening to basketball on the radio is far different than football because there aren't many stops in the action so there aren't nearly the opportunities to try and catch your breath.

Jerryd Bayless

B-Roy drops 52 on Phoenix

Brandon Roy went off for 52 against the Suns tonight. As good as Brandon Roy is, I never thought that he would score 50 points in a game. Roy never has seemed like a player who could score that many points because he was too unselfish to score that many points. Turns out I was wrong. The chatter on BlazersEdge is predictably upbeat with posts asking whether Roy is mortal or not.

Looking at the list of players who have scored 50 points or more since the 1990 season there aren't a lot of fluke performances in that list. Some of the most fluky-est:

• Tony Delk - 53 points
• Charles Smith - 52 points (although this is tempered by the fact that this was against the 1990 Denver Nuggets who played no defense and played at an extremely pace)
• Mahoumd Abdul-Rauf - 51 points
• Vernon Maxwell - 51 points
• "Uncle" Cliffy Robinson - 50 points
• Dana Baros - 50 points
• Willie Burton - 53 points

The Hoff

Looks like the Las Vegas Bowl probably will have the biggest name singer of all of the non-BCS bowls for their national anthem. They went out and got David Hasselhoff to do it. This might be one time that having a TV would be beneficial as I am hoping that he will break out the jacket that he wore when they tore down the Berlin Wall.

All-Star Snubs

The NFL announced the rosters for the Pro Bowl. The Pro Bowl is the least interesting All-Star game of the major sports, largely because it is played after the season is over and because it has minimal violence which is what fans of the NFL enjoy. Contrast this with the NBA All-Star game which features what NBA fans love: lots of dunking.

Despite the dearth of interest there there are some people who are really incensed about some players being left off the rosters. I find all of this a bit silly, as do others.

A Promising Start

The Oregon State University men's basketball team defeated Seattle Pacific 71-67 Tuesday night. This brings OSU to a record of 3-5. Seeing that the Beavers were the first team in Pac-10 history to go through conference play with an 0-18 I view this as a promising start.

To hit rock bottom that soundly requires there to be a lack of talent and coaching that isn't matched to what the players strengths are. The Jay John, the former OSU coach, came to with dreams of playing the style of basketball that he watched being played as an assistant at Arizona. This didn't work out very well. I think that he failed to realize that to play Arizona style basketball you need to be able to recruit players with the same level of talent as Arizona recruits. There are several reasons that recruiting a lot of star athletes to go to Corvallis is difficult/impossible (weather, lack of recent success, distance from home, not on TV a lot, etc) if you recruit like all of the other schools recruit. So you need to change how you play the game. The early returns on Craig Robinson's tenure as head coach are encouraging. I think that he is smart enough to realize the challenges inherent in recruiting players to Corvallis and will find a way to play the game and recruit players that can play in a system that will be successful.

Stephen Curry

I have seen Stephen Curry play exactly once. I was on a business trip to Oklahoma, arrived after a long series of flights from Alaska, ate some dinner, and saw that Davidson was playing Kansas in the regional final. I finished up my meal, went up to my room and watched the bulk of the 2nd half of the game. It became clear after about 3 or 4 possessions that Stephen Curry knew that he was the best player on the court and he knew that Kansas knew it. He was fantastic, a little gassed by the end of the game, but fantastic nonetheless. Curry has had a fantastic college career. He has played big in the big games. He has given his teammates the confidence that they can beat any team they play.

That said, I think that people are getting ahead of themselves with him and his professional potential and his draft stock. I read this article last week about how the Bobcats shipping Jason Richardson to Phoenix opens up a spot for them to draft Curry. Then today I saw ESPN's mock lottery and saw that Curry was falling into the 4-6 range. Yes he is one of the best players in college basketball. But the NBA isn't a very forgiving place to players until 6'6" unless you are lightning quick like Chris Paul and/or indestructible like Allen Iverson.

I see Curry as a better shooting version of Delonte West. They are the same size and body build. Both played a sort of hybrid pg/sg in college. If Delonte West was drafted in the top 10 instead of 24th what would people think of his career? It would be pretty disappointing. It looks like the same fate would await Curry if he ends up a top 5 pick.

The Matrix to Cleveland??

Today while I was looking at Blazers Edge, I came across a report that Cleveland was thinking about sending Wally Szcerbiak and Anderson Varejao to Miami for Shawn "The Matrix" Marion. If this trade comes to fruition, I don't understand the logic of this trade for the Cavs. Varajao is one of the Cavs' best post defenders and setter of screens. He doesn't need the ball to help the team out. Marion was in the perfect situation in Phoenix for a player with his skill set and all he could think of was how he wasn't getting the respect he deserved. Is going to Cleveland where we certainly would be in the shadow of LeBron going to make him happy? If he wasn't happy with Steve Nash throwing him alley-oops what is there to suggest that he is going to be happy watching LeBron dunk on people? I don't think there is anything to support the notion that he would.

If the Cavs are concerned about improving their team, a move that is much more likely to work would be to spin Wally's contract off for a better shooter, like Michael Redd.

Oklahoma City is a small place

The Oklahoma Thunder are not a good basketball team. They aren't even a mediocre basketball team. The are terrible. ESPN is tracking them against several of the worst teams of all time. They are drawing well in their first year in Oklahoma City. Being that this blog is all about viewing the sports landscape outside of the prism of television, I haven't seen the Thunder play. But having been to Oklahoma City several times for work, I can't get my head around why any team would choose to relocate there.

When I arrived in Oklahoma City for the first time, the Sonics were still in Seattle but the owners were actively trying to move them to their hometown. My first thoughts as I was walking through the airport on the way to baggage claim was "They want to put an NBA team in this city? This airport is tiny." Here some things about Will Rodgers International Airport (the largest of the airports in the Oklahoma City metro area) that I have found interesting in comparison to the airports of other cities with NBA teams that I have found myself flying into for work.

Number of Gates:
There are 24 gates in Will Rodgers Airport. This is total gates, not the number of gates in one of the concourses. This is far fewer than the airports of Houston, Memphis, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake, Atlanta or Chicago.

Size of Airplanes:
Of the 8 times that I have flown into or out of Oklahoma City from various airports, I have yet to fly on anything other than a regional or a commuter jet. Nor can I recall seeing even a 737 parked at a gate. Thus Will Rodgers Airport is seemingly not much more than a regional airport.

Food:
The only places to eat in the Oklahoma City Airport are Sonic, Schlotsky's and 2 airport bars. This pales in comparison to the Memphis airport where the entire place smells like barbecue.

Mission Statement

I don't own a TV.

The reason why I don't own a TV is simple: my wife refuses to have one in the house. When we were engaged my parents offered me a spare TV they had lying around the house (bequeathed to them when my brother upgraded his TV) and my soon-to-be wife was quite firm that she didn't even want even a free TV around.

This creates some problems as a sports fan. The Texas/USC Rose Bowl occurred a couple of weeks after we were married. The next day at school I had the following conversation:

Buddy: Did you seen the USC/Texas game last night?
Me: I don't own a TV
Buddy: Wow

I also live in Alaska and due to some differences between how Internet services are priced here and in the Lower 48, it is ridiculously expensive to have unlimited Internet. So we have a monthly cap that we must manage. This precludes watching live game streams.

So what is a sports fan to do? I read blogs, look at ESPN.com and listen to the occasional audio feed of Oregon State sports. Does this make me less of an informed sports fan? Maybe, maybe not. But this blog is intended to be a look into how one fan manages to follow the sports he enjoys sans TV.