basketball

This is a complete beatdown with 5:19 to go.  I was expecting a loss but not to this degree.  It seems the talent just isn't there for them to compete.

While the gov't is kneeling to the pressure of TV and cable and attempting to crack down even harder on streaming sport games, CBS has chosen to go the opposite direction.

http://www.ncaa.com/mmod/player/console.html

They stream every second of every game.  If you missed the Morehead State upset of Louisville (like I did), you can go back and watch every second of it.... or like I did, skip ahead to any part of the game you'd like (last two minutes for me - underdogs!).  Tired of watching Wisconsin score less the UM football team?  Skip over to BYU loosing to mighty Wofford/

The streams are fast and near-HD.  Everything damn game is available for the entire tournament.  For free.  The catch of course is that they show the commercials just the same as the TV broadcast.... so their revenue source is still getting their investment.  The key is that when the stream goes to a commercial, you can't click out - you have to stay on that stream until the game resumes.  Not a bad price to pay.

Why can't other sports/stations do this?  It must take an incredible amount of bandwidth to do what CBS is doing, but I bet they're raking in the viewers.

I live in South Korea and watch all my games online (I'm the one in my apartment building screaming at 4am Sunday morning to not kick the field goal).  But even if I lived back in AA, I'd have the TV on as well as CBS' streams.

The future of online streams will either be more restrictions or more freedom.  Looking as how well CBS does this, I can't imagine why others wouldn't follow suit. 

Michael Wilbon has an article at ESPN on Jalen Rose & Grant Hill. (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/commentary/news/story?id=6227464.) I am not sure what I think of the column. However, from Wilbon's perspective, there isn't a huge difference between where Jalen and Grant are today.

Wilbon also has some good observations on how black culture is not monolithic, and how the "Uncle Tom" debate is centuries old, and one that blacks have every day. He writes,

Still, except for the part where Calvin and Janet Hill were left hanging out there, depicted as anything other than the model parents that they are, the documentary and Grant Hill's response is part of a very necessary conversation, one which plays out in what I like to call Black World every hour of every single day in this country and has for the past 400 years. It sure as hell didn't start with basketball players; it started with the resentment that field niggas had for house niggas, and there will be no sanitizing of the term here because the feelings were even more raw than the language. It's a conversation most, though not all, white folks are unfamiliar with, one Spike Lee captured with both insight and humor in his movie "School Daze" including the differences between "good" and "bad" hair, and "talking" white. These are the primary elements of emotional and at times painful discussions that take place, sometimes between members of the same family, one set of children whose father bailed and the other set whose dad stayed and provided a life that in time led to an entirely different reality.

If you're interested in this whole topic, I'd encourage you to take a look, although it is a bit long.

I was driving through Knoxville this afternoon and got to listen to part of an interview of Jalen by local AM radio host Tony Basilio. I only got a chance to listen to a small portion of the interview, but what I did get to hear was good. I caught the tail-end of some of the Fab Five Documentary questions and after that Rose talked a bit about his relationship with UT assistant head coach Tony Jones and how he, Jones and UM assistant Bacari Alexander (all Detroit Southeastern alums)have shared scouting info for tomorrows game. Rose also went on to say that he felt that firing Pearl would be a huge mistake, that his good deeds outweigh the negative things he has done.

BEWARE: I'm still at work and have yet to try to listen to the archive of the show, I just thought I would post it for people who end their workday earlier than I do.

http://www.tonybasilio.com/index.php?page=mp3_archives

EDIT: I'm not sure if the interview is in segement 1 or segment 2

http://www.midwestsportsfans.com/2011/03/photo-story-the-truce-starring-jalen-rose-grant-hill-and-mike-krzyzewski/

Just getting something out there while I do no work and watch on CBS MMOD... Clemson looks pretty good again, that win of ours @ Clemson is looking better and better...