Friday, February 22, 2008

Mid-Majors: Please quit wasting this man's time


… the man to the left of the Figurehead, that is.

Selection Sunday is just over 3 weeks away when the field of 64 will be set for the best tournament in all of sports and one for which the 23 yr. old female intern always seems to win the office pool.

There were two specific instances that inspired us to give this blogging thing a start: One was a flurry of email exchanges last July regarding college football and the other was a frenetic round of email carpet-bombing revolving around college hoops last March.

Of course, March Madness means the return to center stage of that Oscar the Grouch of college hoops announcers, Billy Packer.

There are a few things you can nearly take to the bank come March every year: Duke playing its first and second round games in North Carolina, Packer broadcasting early round games in the East Region exclusively and this same person making cranky/snide comments about certain teams making the tournament that he did not feel were worthy…. and cheesing-off the maximum number of people possible in his manner of doing so.

Despite his curmudgeonly persona, we love the guy... probably because of it. How Jim Nantz puts up with him, though, is anyone’s guess. We imagine Packer phoning Nantz’s room at 1 in the morning to bitch about a technical glitch during the previous afternoon’s broadcast and then chuckling himself to sleep over waking up his broadcast partner.

Anyway, we hope to have much more college hoops in the weeks to come including an audio montage’ of Gus Johnson, probably the most insanely enthusiastic of all the March Madness announcers and a near cult figure in the sports blogosphere.

Click here for a Billy Packer approve/disapprove poll at Deadspin. The results of which show us to be in a Mondalian electoral minority.

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