Notes from the Periphery: Final Four Edition

Well the Semi-Finals of the Men's NCAA Division I tournament is in the books. Here are a quick four things I think:

1) You have to be insane to listen to the radio in your apartment screaming at a computer for you team which is playing 6 time zones over. Luckily I am that crazy. Technology is fairly impressive that I can even keep up and read about the tournament let alone listen to the local Columbus radio station. It is well worth the lack of sleep.

Surprisingly I look very much like Homer Simpson while listening to the Buckeyes

2) The Clash of the Titans kind of fizzled. The NCAA refs seemed a little perplexed how to call a game that has individual's over 7 foot. The much anticipated dinosaur matchup of Oden and Hibber never really materialized due to some quick and dubious officiating especially in the first half. The second half the refs swallowed their whistles. That said while in Hibbert seemed to gt the better of the younger Oden. In 24 minutes Hibbert put up 19 points and six rebounds while Oden in only 20 minutes had 14 points and 9 rebounds. Both will good pros although as Oden develops it will interesting to see these two go at it agiain....

3) The true MVP of OSU is not Oden but Mike Conley Jr. The son of an olympic gold medalist Conley has showed time and time again that OSU can win against good competition without Oden. Conley is currently reminding me of when Isiah Thomas won a national championship while on Indiana. The ease at which both could slice through the opposing defense and the sense of when to throw a perfect floating shot and when to kick it out for the three.

I just wanted something classy for once. Take some notes from here on tasteful but beautiful

4) Two-peat? Returning to our previous conversation of the comparison between UNLV and Florida I think last night showed what the two squads have in common. While UNLV never let off the gas and continually crushed opponents Florida seems to sleep walk at times. However when Florida plays at they are capable of you can almost see the other team wilt, which is what happened against UNLV opponents. The raw athleticism, the variety of scorers, the ability to dominate both sides of the ball was too much of UCLA. You could literally almost see the point where it dawned on them that they had no chance at winning and internalized it. Simply put UCLA was scared of Florida no different then teams were scared to play UNLV. OSU has already experience a thrashing in basketball this season at the hands of Florida so the key to this Final's match up is fear. Will OSU remain as mentally tough as they have been throughout the tournament when facing deficits or will they fold like UCLA did last night.

The star matchup will be Oden versus Horford