Dumb and Dumber

Florida basketball played their worst game of the season last night - it was absolutely awful to watch. When you're shooting 68 percent at the half and your opponent is shooting 38 percent, it's almost impossible to only be up by four. Twelve turnovers in a half, many unforced, will do that for you. Free throw shooting couldn't have been much worse - I've seen guys called out of the stands to shoot for a free pizza look better. Having a six man rotation is clearly going to be an issue going forward, and Dan Werner almost counts as only half a player at this point because it's clear he's terrified to shoot. This one hurt the NCAA chances some, but if UF wins against Xavier they'll repair a decent amount of the damage.

Duke continued North Carolina's nightmare of an ACC season by knocking them off in Chapel Hill last night. That wasn't the biggest surprise of UNC's day by a long shot. John Mayer managed to say enough stupid things in his latest magazine interview that hit the web yesterday to keep Roy Williams from getting a lot of attention for his own braincramp. That's too bad, because Roy deserved the grief he likely would catch for comparing his team's bad season to the Haitian earthquake disaster in an interview with SI.com...

"Our massage therapist told me, 'You know, coach, what happened in Haiti is a catastrophe. What you're having is a disappointment,' " said Williams. "I told her that depends on what chair you're sitting in. It does feel like a catastrophe to me, because it is my life."

I'm sure that was supposed to be a joke (and it's still not worse than Nick Saban's comparing Bama losing to Louisiana-Monroe to 9/11 two years ago) but it's positively idiotic for Williams to have said it. Some things just don't make for good analogies or joke material, and disasters with a six figure death count tend to be pretty high on that list.

While Jimbo Fisher was an assistant coach, he was allowed to speak with the media. He even had a regular weekly radio appearance in Tallahassee on the local sports talk show. Now that Fisher's FSU head coach, he's announced that none of his assistants will be allowed to speak with the media. The supposed reason is that this way the football program will have "one voice" - Fisher's. FSU fans who want to know about how the secondary is picking up the new defensive scheme will have to settle for the supposed answer from a guy who's spending no time with them because he's busy running the offense. This kind of crap is the sort of thing coaches do when they're paranoid, petty men. It's insulting to the assistants they've hired to act like they can't be trusted not to say something stupid. Nick Saban does this and he wins. He also eats two Little Debbie cakes every morning and wins. Both of those things have the same amount of relevance to his team's success on the field - zero. Fisher is a colossal hypocrite for the way he's treating his guys when his career might have turned out differently had he been put under these restrictions. Not impressed at all with this move.

Interestingly enough, the way Jimbo Fisher was elevated at FSU has led to an NCAA rule change to close the loophole of "coaches in waiting" being able to make extra recruiting visits. Head coaches can only make one home visit and aren't allowed on the road in spring. Before this, Will Muschamp could go out as the acknowledged future head man at Texas and get lots more face time with recruits than Bob Stoops could. The Longhorns and Maryland are the only two places with a "coach in waiting" right now. I imagine this will make other schools think twice about appointing any new ones anytime soon.

Earlier in the week I noted the NCAA had failed in its efforts to have Ed O'Bannon's lawsuit against them for using his image thrown dismissed. Now they'll have to undergo the discovery process, which will give O'Bannon's lawyers access to the NCAA's books. In a remarkable coincidence, word just came out that there won't be any college basketball video game produced next year. Basketball games never do as well as the football ones, so I imagine we'll continue to see NCAA football for at least another year. If word gets out that one is going away, feel free to assume the NCAA is about to get crushed in court.