Notes from the Periphery: All things College

Hello from the other side of the world. While I'm sequestered away in the land of the flaming soccer fields I have managed to keep pace with the wild world of college sports. February seems to be a great month of sports as the NBA is in midseason form, pitchers and catchers are on their way and college sports pockmark the landscape. So here's a few updates on the college world. I leave the other sports to those more knowledge and speaking English on a regular basis..

College Basketball
While this is the heart of college basketball season its not as crucial as it used to be given today's weighting of the conference tournaments for tournament selection. That said this time of your will be crucial for two groups of teams...teams vying for a top selection and bubble teams. There is a big difference between a 1-2 seed and 4-5 seed. To ensure that, you need to play to near perfection and build up the national hype. While UNC's youth laden team has been inconcistent at teams (starting lineup at right) they had more than enough talent to stomp the Dookies at Cameron. If UNC can play the way they did in the second half they should have no trouble securing a number one seed.

On the flip side a team sliding around the other end of the tournament spectrum is Kansas State. Kansas State you say, they have sports teams? While they might not have evolution classes, central heating or team colors that won't make your eyes bleed K-State landed old drink em and drive em Bob Huggins. Say what you will about Huggins but he can recruit them. As such K-State has suddenly whipped off some wins in the wacky Big-12 and has the Purple Cornwackers (or whatever K-State's mascot is) at 17-7. However their rivalry game against Kansas ended up in a police style beatdown 97-70. Its signature games like this that the tournament selection team will look at to sort out that bottom part of the selection process. So watch for those upsets and those let downs.

College Football We all know the insanest part of any sports calendar is the NFL Draft. Grown men and in the case of Idaho, grown potatos, have been known to follow the NFL Draft with insane intensity. Even though draft is less of a science than a colossal random clusterf**k and that the only information available is either misinformation or from THE HAIR people still follow draft news. Well I'm here to tell you as inexact as the NFL Draft is College recruiting is ten times worse. Imagine 10 times the players with maybe half the accouracy. There's no HAIR to tell us who's good or what to make of it, just a half dozen geeks, who possibly spend most of their time playing cheeserolling (pictured at right ) . Frankly these people are less likely to have brain cells than the US Senate is to have verterbrae. That said a few very very broad strokes to paint. USC and Florida by far were supposed to have the best recruiting classes. USC landed Joe Mcknight, who is supposed to be the next Reggie Bush (he scored a TD in high school every 2.1 touches. and that was off the field). Notre Dame landed the supposed best QB in the land (Jimmy Claussen) for the first time since Ron Paulus and will probably start right away. Three surprising great recruiting classes were by South Carolina, Illinois (Ron Zook) and North Carolina (Butch is back). Oklahoma and Ohio State had solid classes but were fairly small as both were waiting for next year's solid in-staters (which is also short hand for a little disappointing).