According to Ray Parillo of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

By the time Louisville tips off against Illinois on Saturday night in an NCAA basketball semifinal in St. Louis that promises to be memorable, Cardinals coach Rick Pitino will have his team convinced that it is the Bucknell of the Final Four.

Pitino might be able to convince his players of that. But those of us who follow the Patriot League know better. See Rick, we know Bucknell. And you sir, are no Bucknell.

All kinds of storieswere written early in the tournament pointing out the difference:

Georgia Tech (19 percent), Kentucky (8) and Louisville (17) had some of the worst overall graduation rates. Utah State and Bucknell had perfect rates.

Besides, Louisville doesn't have a German center.
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Once again, some local yokel Saint Joe's homer named Jack McCaffery in the Delaware County Daily Times has taken a backhanded slap at Bucknell:

Choosing those 34 at-large teams is difficult, so it was hard to make a scream-out-loud case for the Hawks, who won neither 20 games, their conference nor their games against Drexel and Bucknell.

This is the same guy who wrote back in February:

. . . the greater mystery was how the Hawks lost to Bucknell, not how they managed to recover once they did.

Next thing you know, Jack will start in about how great it is to be No. 66 or 67. He will probably even try to convince folks that making the NIT finals is better than getting into the real dance. When he finishes that, he can explain how it is better to be Miss Congeniality than Miss America.

Our suggestion to McCaffery would be to mark his calendar for a trip to Lewisburg next season when Saint Joe's visits Sojka. Then he should be able to get a refresher course on how Bucknell kicked the Hawks ass.
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The University of Rhode Island's college paper is known as "The Good Five-Cent Cigar." That probably tells you all you need to know already.

In its most recent issue, one of its sports columnistshad this Bucknell mention:

Look no further than Bucknell who layed the smack down on the tourney-choking Kansas Jay Hawks (and wasn't Bucknell just an intramural team last year),

Well, son, actually, no. Last year Bucknell was good enough to beat Holy Cross two out of three, a feat they repeated this year to get to the NCAA Tournament while folks in Rhode Island were busy getting ready for the opening day of the Pawtucket Red Sox.

You do remember Holy Cross, don't you?

Not trying to rub in one of your 22 losses or anything. Just making a point that folks whose teams are 6-22 and lose to a .500 Richmond team in the play-in round of the A-10 Tournament should be careful about all those windows when they pick up a stone.

Ditto for people who don't know how to spell "laid" (damn tempting to take this one a little further, but we do get some lady visitors).

And come to think of it, wonder if our buddy Jack McCaffery remembers Rhode Island?
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These are slow days for sports at the Boston Globe. There hasn't been a New England college hoops team to write about since they ignored Holy Cross in the NIT. North Dakota put an end to college hockey season in Boston. The Red Sox are not in town yet, the Celtics are, but won't be for long and the Bruins, well, we all know that story.

That is not all bad, though. The slow time gave the Globe a chance to do a story about Kevin Bettencourt's first visit home after the NCAA Tournament.:

The junior guard and his teammates rode behind police escorts, stayed in a posh Oklahoma City hotel, and signed autographs for adoring fans. The fairy tale Bison season ended less than 48 hours after that monumental victory, but the celebrity treatment endured. Fellow students greeted Bettencourt with an ovation as he walked into class last Monday and the Bison later boarded fire trucks for a parade through the town of Lewisburg, Pa.

Actually, the hotel was not "posh" (there is not a whole lot of "posh" in the whole state of Oklahoma from what we saw). It was a Holiday Inn out, as Pat Flannery put it, "where they put 14 seeds."

But the rest of the story is pretty well done.

Charles Lee's hometown paper in Gaithersburg, Md.gave Lee similar treatment.

Fluff pieces? sure, but certainly worth a read by any Patriot League hoops junkies, especially given how few and far between our fixes are this time of the year.
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From the Kansas City Star comes word that Kansas State and Missouri fans are stocking up on Bucknell gear to run in Kansas' shocking first round departure from this year's tournament.

The newest offering in the Hoop Time store

Say, have we mentioned our commemorative T-shirts?
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Seems in Kansas, the shock was enough to force them to give Bucknell's first-round upset over the vaunted Jayhawks a name of its own:

This year produced the Bucknell Bummer after things began to unravel with that humiliation at Villanova. The loss to Bucknell was the most embarrassing KU tourney game I ever witnessed (first time in Kansas City at age 15 in 1940).

We're starting to see what the folks from K State and Missou must love about those KU fans.
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Peter M. is on the verge of going wire to wire in the Hoop Time No Sponsor Bracket Challenge. With a 17 point lead and 2 of 4 alive in the Final Four, the computer wizards that do the computations say he has a 75 percent chance of winning.

Two others are still statistically alive. Andrew L., currently second, is in good shape if Illinois loses in the semis and North Carolina wins it all, instead of Peter's choice: Illinois. Should UNC beat Illinois in the final, though, Patrick O., who currently is languishing in sixth place, 31 points back, could rally to win it all.

There is still a real battle for last place and the Kansas Postseason Media Guide that goes to the bracketeer with the lowest points. Harry C. is one of only two completely dead brackets with just 71 points. Greg K.'s bracket is also dead, but with 87 points, assuring he will finish ahead of Harry.

But there are others with teams still alive that could sink like a rock if Illinois and/or North Carolina lose in the semis.

For complete standings, just click here.
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We are not saying folks in Des Moines Iowa are slow, or that things move at a different pace on the prairie.

But you can't blame us eastern elitists for wondering when a story like the about the Northern Iowa pep band didn't make it into the Des Moines register until a week after almost every other media outlet in the nation picked it up.
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According to Corky Blake, in today's Express-Times, Lafayette's Maroon Club is making a push for scholarships. The club, citing an internal survey, says supp[ort is there to convert need-based scholarship funds to merit aid. The plan would give Lafayette 19 full rides, 10 for women and 9 for men.

There is a problem with the plan that is not mentioned in the story. By cannibalizing the need-based aid funds, the Leopards might have a hard time recruiting a full roster of quality players. While they point out that Bucknell, with five scholarship players, won the league and beat Kansas, bring Bucknell tremendous exposure, they miss the fact that the rest of Bucknell's roster is need-based.

But wait, there's more. According to the latest issue of The Lafayette:

Rappolt also said the Maroon Club Executive Committee is about to recommend a pilot program, the same one that was described in the October 29 issue of The Lafayette. The proposed 19 basketball scholarships, which would cost no additional funds to the school, is already being spent in equivalency costs in the current 179 need-based aid packages for student-athletes. The pilot program would change the need-based aid and redistribute it as merit-based aid, while only drawing some of the costs from general funds of the school.

Unless we read that wrong, it sounds like the idea is to cannibalize all the need-based aid currently going to other sports, too.

No need-based aid for football? A year after winning the league title? It is hard to imagine anybody other than hardcore hoops boosters going along with that idea.

They also use the teams' records to argue for scholarships. According to Blake:

Since Lafayette's men won consecutive league tournament titles in 1999 and 2000, the Leopards are 67-75 overall and 32-36 in the league.

The women's program is 34-163 overall and 16-76 in the league since its last winning season (15-13) in 1997-98. Moreover, it has not produced a first team all-league player since Alicia Yapsuga in 1997.

On surface, compelling arguments. But dig a little. The men were 18-10 last season and in contention for the regular season title until the last week of the season. And they were 15-10, 8-6 in the league in 2002. Fran O'Hanlon is a victim of his own successes. His teams have stayed competitive. It would be easier to make the case for scholarships if they had Army's record.

The women, on the other hand, have been almost as bad as the Army men. That is not something new since the advent of scholarships. Lafayette has only had four winning seasons on the women's side since joining the league. It is going to take more than just full rides to make them better.

Before the Lafayette boosters start bombarding us with e-mails, understand one thing: We absolutely agree the school ought to offer scholarships like the rest of the league. We just don't think you convince Patriot League college president types that it is the right thing by using dubious win-loss numbers. And you don't do it by adopting a shortsighted, underfunded proposal.

Here is some unsolicited advice for the Maroon folks:

1) You need a better study. Someone as smart as a Lafayette College president or trustee will laugh you out of the building when you present an e-mail survey that shows 108 of 1,071 members favoring the proposal. Yes, we know that was 108 out of 157 that responded. But your case will be much stronger if you find a way to get at least a majority of the club to participate in the survey.

2) You are preaching to the choir. Getting Maroon Club members to support a proposal to benefit athletics should be easy. What you need is a way to win over those who are not athletics boosters. The single most important statistic you need to find is how Bucknell's win translates into increased qualified applicants that do not play basketball. If you can also find a link to increased non-athletic giving, that would be strong stuff, too.

3) Money talks. According to the article in The Lafayette, "About 25 percent of the Maroon Club members are also members of the Marquis Society, which comprises the largest donors to Lafayette." If those folks were to band together and threaten to withhold further donations until scholarships come about, or if they offered a significant pledge contingent on scholarships being adapted, it would have more influence than a 1,000 e-mail surveys.

Don't believe it? Talk to folks in the know at Bucknell about how their deal went down (including the funding for the new arena).
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Nothing hoops related in this story. Buct the Bucknell reference was more than we could pass up when we ran across this spring break story in the Miami Herald:

The point of Spring Break, according to one marvelously representative John Spivak, a young scholar from Bucknell University down in Miami Beach on vacation, is as follows: "Get drunk, get l- - - and get a tan, with an occasional meal thrown in.''

After all the good press from the win over Kansas, can't ya just see the looks on the faces on the hill when they read that?
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