Bob “Huggy Bear” Huggins As Himself

Bob Huggins keeps Movie Reference Thursday rolling with this charming gold suit from last night as the man they’ve called “Huggy Bear” really does resemble the Huggy Bear:

Surprisingly enough, Huggins motivational tactics fell short as his West Virginia Mountaineers were trounced by the coach’s former team, the Cincinnati Bearcats, by a score of 39-62. The ‘Neers move to 15-6 on the season and fall to .500 (4-4) in Big East play on the same night Huggins’ more recent former team, the Kansas State Michael Beasleys, upset undefeated and #2 ranked Kansas at home for the first time in 24 years. I am sure Bob doesn’t regret leaving as West Virginia was his alma mater but it does go to show that a good coach and even just one solid recruiting class can resurrect a program.

And hopefully Bobby will continue to resurrect his 1970s wardrobe…

Yeaaaaaaaaaaa boieeeeeeee!

♣ Linkage: ESPN.com

One Reason Why I Hate The NCAA

A month ago, when I was just starting as an irrigation supervisor for the University of Memphis, I was told by my boss that the director of the department that my job fell under was annoyed by my I-Pod player.

“It’ll create a distraction,” she said to me at a employee function where I had my ears (read: I-Pod headphones) on.

Of course, these days on campus, because of what I do during the day, I still manage to play my I-Pod (now Zune) to keep me company.

But if I wanted to liveblog for the College World Series for this blog or my own blog, I would more than likely get the Bobby Cox treatment thanks to the NCAA, who found something else to gripe about that to me, was no big deal.

A couple of days ago, the Louisville Courier-Journal’s Brian Bennett, who writes a fan blog on the University of Louisville for the paper, was ejected from the decisive game of the Super Regional between the Cardinals and Oklahoma State during the fifth inning, claiming that his blog was in a way “broadcasting the game.”

From what I read in Bennett’s blog periodically during Sunday’s game, the stuff that he was writing in the entries were borderline analysis, but it still didn’t sound like he was trying to use his blog as a tool for broadcasting a game that was shown nationwide on ESPN and seen by thousands in Louisville in person at Jim Patterson Stadium.

But due to the fear of not being able to host a regional or probably any other NCAA-sanctioned event in the near future in other sports, the same thing that was told to University of Illinois officials for years about Chief Illiniwek’s performances and how they were offensive to Native Americans (until the university decided to put an end to the performances this year), Louisville officials did the next best thing to stay in the NCAA’s good graces.

Send the blogger packing to some remote outpost by the Ohio and have him liveblog the game on some old barge with lumber.

Despite the fact that during the Cardinals’ games in the Columbia (Mo.) Regional, Bennett was doing his blogging without incident and none of this was brought up when the Cardinals were a longshot in making the Super Regionals.

And now since the NCAA is now in the business of ejecting bloggers/reporters, let’s eject Josh Katowitz (Cincinnati Bearcats football and basketball), Paul Klee (Illinois Fighting Illini basketball), and any other college beat writer from the press areas for liveblogging games.

It’ll make the Nazis (see NCAA) happy.

Wednesday News Break

ESPN.com is reporting, at roughly 10:45AM, that a NCAA committee is considering a ban of text messages to recruits through an approved measure to be decided at the April 26 meeting of the Board of Directors. This would close a HUGE loophole in the rules limiting the amount of contact with recruits, a rule that does not yet cover text messages. This will have a large and instant impact on recruiting for the University of Kentucky basketball program as Billy Gillispie is an AVID user of the text message to keep in contact with his recruits. We will keep you posted as the story develops.