You wrote for WRALSportsFan.com that essentially Miami is in the final four and that doesn't have to have anything to do with the ACC.
That Miami can simply be a good team and we get to this time of the year and we really lose all perspective because conferences do not advance in tournaments or get eliminated from tournaments even though the Big Ten has repeatedly done that prematurely. Teams do and that is the thrust of the piece, is it not? Yeah, I mean I'm just not necessarily here for the college footballification of college basketball, if you will. I also don't like those arguments in college football, as you know. I think you should look at a team on its own merits. I don't think Alabama is the same as Vanderbilt. Like I don't know why, you know, I just have always been annoyed by the coattail riding of other teams that aren't doing the work and, you know, look the ACC was crappy this year. Like we all have eyeballs, we all saw what they did, we see the strength of schedule numbers, we see it all. The bad teams were horrible, the good teams weren't that good.
But you know what? Miami all year and they did win the ACC regular season, ran into a hot Duke team at the end, lost one of their best players in the title game and he wasn't able to finish, you know. That's a good team, I'm sorry. Like you can lose games in conference even if your league isn't great.
Like it happens night in, night out, something's going to happen. And I just feel like, you know, there's, look at the other leagues that are in the final four. Are we, are we really going to look at all those leagues and go, oh, well, they're clearly better, you know, Conference USA was great this year. Right. I mean, come on.
Like, you know, San Diego State, the Mountain West always gets either propped up or, you know, kind of picked on in my opinion, you know, it's like, oh, these teams coming to the tournament don't do anything. Okay. We still buy the big 10.
Don't we? Yes. Right.
About it. Gonzaga always choked. They've got as many wins as a one or two seat, I think since 2015 as the entire big 10 does.
Okay. Seriously. I added them up and I was like, so why are we crying about Gonzaga?
At least they play to their seed more often than the big 10. Like, well, you know, I mean, why do we not do this? Why do we not do this with other leagues? It's kind of the point that I was trying to make too, if we're going to do it.
And I don't think we should do it at all because it's stupid. And I hate that I get dragged down to this level of discourse just because it annoys me so much that we try to act like, oh, well, we can't respect Team X because they came from this league or this league was so dominant. I'm not here for all that kind of chatter about college basketball. It's not what college basketball is. So Lauren Bralo is with us here.
And I'm glad that you wrote this today because I feel like I have somebody that is sharing my brain with me about this. We can't pretend that the ACC was good because Miami is in the final four because at the same time, we have to go, well, Duke lost in the second round and yes, they lost to a team seeded higher than them. I get it. Barely. But the league was dragged down in terms of the metrics because the bottom was so bad that it made everybody look worse.
I find it hysterical. There's no way that there were 30. What did Miami end up in the net at the end of the year?
Like thirty five. So there's no way there were thirty four teams better than Miami over the course of this season. But the metrics made it look that way. And what the metrics did was it devalued basically every decent win of the ACC. And I in the last four weeks of the year, I made a chart of the remaining games.
And next to the team, I put what is this opportunity on one. And there were almost all threes and fours because it's horrible. Right.
And that's what that drive. That's unacceptable. Like literally no power five league had as many teams in that situation as the ACC. So I came down on them hard in the article because I've been saying this all year to the people who make the bad nonconference schedules are often repeat offenders. And I'm over it.
I know Jim Phillips is over it, too. But too many teams did it this year. You see what can happen in net. All you have to do is play a bunch of good teams. Yeah.
You don't have to beat them. You know, I'm sorry. What was Mike Gray worried about losing his job for?
He had to retire to lose his job. Might he have lost it anyway? I don't know.
It's possible. Brad Brownell. He's a repeat offender. Y'all are at football schools.
And you know I love Mike Brent. This isn't but it's like this this kind of scheduling has plagued this league now for too long. And it's annoying. Honestly, it's like do better. Like at least Louisville and Florida State as bad as they were at least they tried to schedule especially Florida State. Like, at least Florida State had no business being as high as they were in net considering what their record was. But they scheduled better. It has to be a team effort, y'all.
No one's getting in the tournament if everyone does this. It's really not complicated. Do better. It's not hard.
It shouldn't be hard. You know what's interesting? We went to more conference games and I'm convinced that playing 20 conference games, the theory was it was supposed to help the league. I think more conference games killed the league. It did. This year. It did.
What the other way? To be fair, I don't know that anyone predicted or could have. That Florida State would do that. That Louisville would be that bad. Who could have known that?
Nobody, right? Even Notre Dame had no business being as bad as they were with all the experience they had coming back. So I get it a little bit from a league perspective of like, well, we're gonna play 20 league games.
How many games am I trying to lose this year and not get fired? Okay, fine. But at the same time, like you've got to, you know, the thing is this has been going on since before they went to 20.
And so that's part of my issue with it too. Some of like Clemson. Hi, you're in this position because this is what y'all do every year. I don't feel sorry for Clemson from that perspective. You know, I feel sorry for their players. I feel sorry for their fans.
I don't feel sorry for Brad Brown now because this is what he does. This is what they do all the time. Like, did they have some things go against them? Yeah. But then also don't lose to Loyola by 17.
Yeah. Loyola is not usually this bad, but you can't lose to them by 17. Don't lose at Louisville. Don't lose to South Carolina.
Like, I'm sorry. A lot of other teams this year managed to not do any of those things. In fact, almost everyone on Louisville schedule. Including the easy games that they scheduled. They lost almost all of those. Louisville was, that was in a historically bad season for anybody.
I've never seen anything like that. I mean, it's easily the worst season that blew. I mean, they've won more games when they had seasons vacated, I believe.
You have to, I feel like you almost have to try as a Power Five program to get to that bad. I agree. Like, it's almost, it was, I was like, they can't be this bad. Then I would watch them play and go, oh no. Yeah, they are. They were tanking for a better draft pick.
That's, I just always assumed. Now that we have Lauren Brownlow right there on your television, if you're watching on your laptop or on your radio, can I ask you about the Carolina Panthers? Well, sure. Why not?
I'm here. Are you excited that they made the move for the first overall pick? Are you, do you have a tingle about that? Not a tingle, no.
Unless the tingle is accompanied by like gastrointestinal distress to the nerves. Because my thing with them is like, all right, I don't hate the trade necessarily. I don't like hearing they don't know what they want.
That's very nerve wracking. I think they do. Well, but you don't hear anybody be like, oh yeah, like you would think something like that. It's not like David Tepper is good at keeping secrets. Like you would think that something would have come out and, and you have heard some rumblings about like Tepper likes this guy, you know, Fitter likes the other guy, whatever. I'm sorry if I am terrified at the actual thought of the Carolina Panthers having the current people in place to make decisions, assuming David Tepper is involved in that process. Yes, that scares me. It doesn't excite me and tingle me and make me have tingles as much as it does frighten me, really, for being honest, because there's no Cam Newton in this draft. Well, there's somebody who, well, there is well, there is somebody who described himself as a Cam Newton type.
And I watched some highlights of some highlights of the Anthony Richardson pro day today. Absolutely not. Please don't know. That will upset me. That will make me blow it. I watched him play college football this year.
No, thank you. No, no, I'm not here for that roller coaster. I understand. I totally understand. But he is a freak athlete and he's got a ridiculous arm and I think he'd be fun.
But here's the way I look at it. I think there's only one quarterback in this draft who looks like he will be a good NFL quarterback. And that's Bryce Young. I am obviously afraid that at five, 10, 180 pounds or whatever he is without drinking 10 gallons of water, that he'll break in half. But he played two full seasons at Alabama without breaking in half. So we had one.
And he didn't have a good outline. Yeah. Yeah. I don't even know what we're doing here other than, well, we have to go through the dog and pony show. To me, the thoroughbred in this dog and pony show is Bryce Young. To me, it's an easy pick.
For me, it's hard. I like CJ Stroud as a player personally better from what I've seen in college. I'm not an NFL scout. I don't pretend to be. I don't know who's going to. And it's hard with Ohio State.
And this is where I'm going to try to invoke my own rule. Look at the player, not the team and the history. Like I did with conferences. Look at the team, not the conference. Look at the player and not his school's history. But it hasn't always been great. But I wanted Justin Fields. You know that. And so it's also annoying to me that now this team is in this position after wasting their time on absolute garbage that was undisputedly garbage before that they could have had him.
You know how I feel about that. That's who I wanted. And now to see him start to kind of turn it around, you're like, have we a little bit? I think so. I like, I like him.
I think he's got potential. Okay. I don't know.
I mean, who knows? Right. But that's the thing. I don't know that I don't feel that much more confident than anybody else in this current draft. You know what I'm saying? Like, if you had asked me to rate my confidence level on who's going to be an NFL quarterback, I probably would have said Fields before all of them.
So why are you doing this now? And they didn't even have to trade up to get Justin Fields. He was sitting on the board when they saw that. I remember. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I remember because I wanted them to do it. I was like, please do it.
They didn't do it. Lauren Brown, you're the best. I appreciate your time.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-04-01 23:26:21 / 2023-04-01 23:31:48 / 5