Archives › Eric Angevine
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Alfred Hitchcock knew how creepy birds can be. He proved it with his legendary 1963 horror film called, appropriately, The Birds. Now, imagine how soul-suckingly horrifying it would be to enter the KFC Yum! center this fall and see 22,000 dead-eyed, human-sized cardinals staring down at you. Would you have the courage to jump the…
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The good ol’ RPI. It’s an imperfect tool that plays an inordinately large role in determining Big Dance invites. It’s easily manipulated by anyone who knows what they’re doing, but many big-time schools place a higher value on quantity of wins than they do on quality. Losing to a ranked opponent is more valuable than…
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Some of us here at College Basketball Talk are not known for our mathematical genius. I count myself paramount amongst the numerically baffled, and Twitter will again be awash with the sardonic tag #Daustermath this season, without a doubt. That doesn’t mean we don’t like or value statistics, especially in the hands of those who…
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Nobody really knows what to expect from Hawaii basketball this season. The Warriors are joining the suddenly loaded Big West while still struggling to build a contender under third-year head coach Gib Arnold. The team has a solid inside presence, with senior center Vander Joaquim suiting up beside Nebraska transfer Christian Standhardinger, but the rest…
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Billy Gillispie is having a rough weekend. According to a report in the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Texas Tech coach called 911 early Friday morning in extreme pain, fearing that he was suffering a heart attack or stroke. Speaking with the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal today, Gillispie claimed to be unaware that his players had met with the…
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Here at College Basketball Talk, we love a mid-major coach with the guts to schedule tough games. Oakland’s long-time guru Greg Kampe has made a habit of facing big-time opponents every season. Last year, the team lost roadies at Alabama, Arkansas and Arizona, but won at Houston and beat Tennessee in front of home fans…
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Under Cliff Ellis, the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers have become a good team. Which is a nice thing to be, but in a one-bid conference, it’s less than satisfying. The goal is to not only win the Big South regular season crown, but carry momentum into the league tournament, earning the Chanticleers their first bid to…
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Self: KU players ‘thought they were better than Kentucky’ before title game
Aug 25, 2012, 7:30 PM EDT
The Kansas City Star recently published an interview with Kansas coach Bill Self. The piece ran in the newspaper’s weekend magazine section, so it was a bit more of a ‘puff piece’ than a hardcore sports interview. Many things a long-time hoops writer would have skipped asking about — questions we might consider to be…
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The Duke/UNC matchup is absolutely ponderous with story lines each and every season. The legend of Tobacco Road and the nation’s hottest hoops rivalry has taken on the patina of living history, to such a point that it’s simultaneously easy to write about (the aforementioned pre-vetted story lines) and very difficult to write about (finding…
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Get off your butt and get on the bench! It’s walk-on season!
Aug 25, 2012, 6:10 PM EDT
I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to be a walk-on at a DI college program. Fans seem to really embrace the guys at the end of the bench, calling for them to enter games that are out of reach and screaming like crazy on those rare occasions when a practice player scores a…
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Jocks are jocks and art kids are art kids, and never the twain shall meet, right? Canadian artist Hazel Meyer had to make that choice when she was a teen. She had to choose whether she would attend a high school that focused on the arts, or one where she could play interscholastic sports. She…
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Former UNC power forward/defensive end Julius Peppers released a statement today, addressing the recent unauthorized release of his student transcript. He was unequivocal in his denial. “This statement is in response to false allegations regarding my connection to an academic scandal within the University of North Carolina athletic and African-American Studies departments. This week has…
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When I want news about the Hawaii basketball program, I turn to Court Sense, the hoops blog of the Honolulu Star Advertiser. You want to see a guy who’s got his beat locked down, stitched up and duct taped in place, it’s Brian McInnis. And yet that doesn’t stop him from working the dickens out…
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Indiana’s Assembly Hall to get quickie renovation before season
Aug 18, 2012, 6:27 PM EDT
With many predicting a Final Four-type season for the Indiana Hoosiers in 2012-13, Assembly Hall might have lacked one very important feature for anyone coming along for the ride: handrails. Count me among those who have not yet had the pleasure of attending an Indiana game in person. As such, I had no idea that…
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Waiting for the new college hoops season to start… well, it stinks. Football season is a distraction from the void, but it doesn’t fill every day of the week with televised action in quite the way our overstuffed hoops calendar can. Football is still, primarily, a weekend event. Come September, however, Kentucky fans will have…
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For years now, N.C. State fans have chafed under the view that they are the little brother of Tobacco Road hoops. As much as everyone loves the Jim Valvano story, the methodical, frequently successful pursuit of Final Fours and national titles has been largely the province of Duke and UNC. Herb Sendek was a fairly…
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College of Charleston’s Andrew Lawrence to be documentary subject
Aug 15, 2012, 7:02 PM EDT
Apparently, it’s film trailer day here at CBT. Worse things have happened. Courtesy of Hoopsfix.com comes a teaser trailer for a new documentary about Andrew Lawrence’s journey to London as a member of Team Great Britain. Lawrence is a London native who just happens to be a star player at College of Charleston. Along with…
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You will be hard-pressed to find a more meaningful, emotional, powerful film about basketball than The Other Dream Team. The documentary about the 1992 Lithuanian team, which was blown out by the USA Dream Team in the Olympic semifinals in Barcelona, is the story of a basketball revolution that mirrored a literal political revolution in a…
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We all know what a great time Team USA had in London, winning all the games and the gold medals and all. Spain, Australia, Brazil and Lithuania all had memorable moments as well. But what about the host country? A year ago, there were doubts that the Great Britain team would even be allowed to…
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No, I’m not being a hater. I just saw some interesting stats and wanted to share them. John Templon of Big Apple Buckets is in the vanguard of the tempo-free stats movement in basketball. He did some numerical analysis of LeBron and company in London, and came up with some figures that put the effort in…
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Some college basketball players move from school to school because of academic troubles. Others because they can’t stay out of trouble off the court. Billy Baron keeps moving out of loyalty to his dad. Baron, a shooting guard, played one semester at the University of Virginia before bolting to Rhode Island, where his father Jim…
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Ever notice no basketball program ever takes a summer basketball trip to Siberia? It’s always Italy, France, Brazil, Bahamas. Sometimes Canada. Lather, rinse, repeat. And who can blame them? If you’re going to mess around and win a few games (or lose a few, that’s certainly been going around), why not do it somewhere nice…
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Former Ohio State assistant Alan Major took on a tough job in 2010 when he agreed to begin his head coaching job at UNC-Charlotte. The 49ers haven’t been to the NCAA tournament since 2005, when they were under the direction of Bobby Lutz (now an assistant at NC State). They’re frequent A-10 also-rans, and the…
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The best thing about this video of the Tennessee Volunteers in Italy is that every last one of them resisted the urge to do the cliched pose pretending to hold up the leaning tower of Pisa. The theories about what actually does hold the tourist spectacle up aren’t bad, either. Link to the video Just…
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The Tobacco Road rivalry is the biggest in college basketball. Bar none, end of discussion. As much as we like to believe that the games played between North Carolina and Duke supersede all bonds of family and national pride, it turns out that two of the men at the heart of the game’s most vituperative…
