snow day ramblings

Wheeeeeeeeeeeee I don't have to go to work today. So comin' at you a little early with the weekend's activities, sport by sport. I'll start with the fastest and most emo:

Basketball

We suck. It's really just depressing anymore. Three games left in the season: first, at Clemson, which is going to be a demolition of epic proportions for several reason. Second, the home finale against Maryland. Third, the tournament game against whoever's sixth-seeded, which will be one of Clemson, Maryland, VT, or BC. I'll admit - the last few games have been competitive and it wouldn't have taken much swing back our way to make this a much sunnier section of the blog. But then again, that's what happens to bad teams - they can't make their own luck.

I'm working on some form of season recap which I plan on posting sometime between the Maryland game and the tournament game. Til then I'm going easy on the basketball stuff. I can only take so much emo.

If you like, you can read the Basketblogpoll breakdown here, as well as those of previous weeks. I should have been pimping this earlier because the arguments of yours truly have been featured in past weeks. Good thing? Sometimes. Sometimes its because your ballot is messed all to hell and you're simply being given your shot at asplaining yourself.

Swimming

Dominance, again. Things are in their rightful order with a sweep of both the men's and women's ACC championships. What's most exciting though is that, as with the women, much of the dominating is done by underclassmen. Particularly in the freestyle, where we have three sophomores and a freshman taking home scads of long-distance points. Any swim team that wants to win any championship has to have a deep base of talented freestylers because free is (in the case of the ACC championships) 8 of 18 swim events, leaving 10 events to be spread among the other four disciplines. This team will be champions for a long time to come with this kind of talent spread.

In particular, Matt McLean, who:

- Won three events
- Took home the most valuable swimmer award
- Made history by being the first ACC swimmer to do that two years in a row, and....
- Is a sophomore

I'm already looking forward to the chance at a three-peat.

Lacrosse

Big win. Big win. The furious comeback we almost gave up, that's a little bit worrisome, but the game was on the road and the crowd was huge for a regular-season lacrosse game - it wouldn't have fit in the JPJA - so I'm willing to overlook that despite the second-half trend this season of letting off the gas. I'm especially happy about two things: Big-time scorers (Glading, Billings, and Shamel Bratton) stepping up in a big-time game, and of course, the excellent advantage on the faceoffs. I'm now officially excited about that. If Gaudet and Ryan Benincasa can keep up the pace they've got going now, it'll pay huge dividends when the games are for all the marbles. VMI is next, and the only real danger here is overlooking a bad team that got sandwiched between two pretty good ones.

Football

Recruiting, obviously. The board is updated with the following:

- Added QB Andrew Hendrix, whom we have offered, to the yellow section. He is a teammate of DE/LB Marcus Rush, a player also in the yellow section but if I had, like, bluish-yellow and reddish-yellow, he'd definitely be closer to blue.

- Added LB Kevin Pierre-Louis to the red section. I meant to do this last week, as he decommitted from Boston College, and completely forgot. I don't think our chances are exactly spectacular though, and he might well end up right back at BC.

- Moved WR E.J. Scott from yellow to blue now that he has his offer. He's looking good for us.

Some notes from the pros regarding our graduates....

- Chris Canty is getting paid, and as a bonus, now you can root for him without having to pull for the Cowboys.

- The Texas traded Sage Rosenfels to the Vikings and replaced him with the Lions' Dan Orlovsky. Meaning? They traded away a guy who was once considered a threat to Matt Schaub's starting job and filled the hole with a guy who did this. Consider Schaub's job more solid than it was a week ago.