Bad sports, good sports: Cornell is more than just smart people, it would seem
The Ivy League is known for many things. Most of them have to do with very smart people being very smart. Rarely are the member schools known for their athletic prowess. They don’t even give athletic scholarships. Despite that, the Cornell basketball team spent the weekend proving that sports really do exist in the Ivy League. They have made it to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament.
The Big Red has had a fantastic season, going 28-4 in the regular season. Still, most of those games were against schools like Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth, not exactly your murderers’ row among college basketball teams. Yet, they did mix in wins against St. John’s, Alabama, Davidson, and St. Joe’s, and two of their four losses were against Kansas and Syracuse, both of whom went into the NCAA Tournament as number one seeds. Cornell was made a 12-seed, and was pitted against fifth seed Temple in the first round. Many felt that Temple actually deserved a higher seed, so the Big Red had its work cut out for it. If they were supposed to be underdogs, though, no one shared it with them. They dominated Temple, winning 78-65.
The win moved them into the 2nd round, where they faced the fourth seeded Wisconsin Badgers. Again they were underdogs, although the 4.5 point line indicated that Vegas was giving Cornell a lot of respect. Not enough, it turns out. Wisconsin could do very little as Cornell crushed them, 87-69. This team is for real.
On Thursday, Cornell will face the top seed in their region, the Kentucky Wildcats, who are a mere 34-2 on the season. This may be a far different deal than their previous tournament games, but after what they did to Temple and Wisconsin, I wouldn’t count them out. Their performance has been so impressive that Northern Iowa’s win over Kansas, the overall number one seed, gets barely a mention here.
Good sports, continued:
2) Have you ever gone cross-country skiing? It’s a grueling sport. The athletes who excel at it are truly great athletes. Imagine then, how awesome Brian McKeever must be. He won his event at the Paralympics by a huge 42 seconds, which is quite a margin of victory. And oh yeah…he’s blind.
3) There are a lot of athletes that shrug off the idea that they are role models to children. Then there are people like Ty Warren. Rather than attend his team’s voluntary workouts and collect a bonus of a quarter of a million dollars, the New England Patriots defensive lineman chose to use the time to take classes at Texas A&M to complete his degree. I like that message.
Bad sports:
1) A football player from Boise State, who was suspended last week for violating teams rules, has been arrested and charged with felony aggravated battery. Jason Robinson, a defensive back, will be arraigned this week.
2) What a waste. Shawn Andrews was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in 2004. Early in his career, he looked to be a future Hall of Famer. He made the Pro Bowl in three consecutive years, and was expected to anchor the Eagles’ line for years to come. A combination of injuries, depression, and a lot of truly bizarre behavior led to his release this week.
3) Continuing the theme of talented but odd football players, Bryce Brown, a rising sophomore at the University of Tennessee, has decided to leave the team. He was one of the top recruits in the nation last year, and helped trail blaze the growing trend of high school drama queens who love the recruiting game so much that they prolong it as long as possible. Brown, who was once committed to play at the University of Miami, de-committed and then waited until long after Nation Signing Day to commit to Tennessee, assuring that there would be a lot of attention focused on just him. There was already a lot of drama surrounding him from the Miami de-commit, combined with his relationship with an adviser who helped raise money for him to take college visits. Now he is bailing on the Vols after one season. Maybe he’ll follow Lane Kiffin to USC. They deserve each other.
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Allan … re: NCAA basketball tournament … the defeat of my beloved New Mexico Lobos has turned my March Madness to March Sadness :-(
Glad to see you didn’t include Harvard in your sarcastic “murderer’s row”
Jeff – thanks for reading. New Mexico losing did pretty solid damage to my bracket as well. Not as bad as what Kansas did to it, though.
Jon – nice to see you hear, bud. I thought of you when I was making the list. It helped your cause that Harvard won 21 games this year. Penn should have made the list, but I couldn’t do it. Also, your comment made me realize I misplaced an apostrophe, which horrified me, so I immediately made an edit. Thanks!
You will be even more horrified when you realize that in your response to Jon, you wrote “hear” when you meant “here.”
I absolve you of this error and note for the record — in case anyone dares to say otherwise — that you know the difference. I sometimes have the same brain freeze and type the one when I mean the other. It’s odd.
Wow! You’re right, I am now even more horrified.
We need to be able to edit comments. Maybe I should just keep my mouth shut.
(Proofreading comment now)