Thursday, January 12, 2012

More thoughts on Louisville-Providence

Forget the Republican primary in New Hampshire. The bigger news is what was going on in nearby Providence, Rhode Island. The Providence Friars honored former head coach Rick Pitino—who led them to the 1987 Final Four with the aid of lead scorer Billy Donovan, of course—in the only fucking way possible.

They did not just beat the University of Louisville Cardinals but they gave them a shellacking! With a final score of 90-59 (that’s not a typo), the Cardinals got fucking blown out on the road. To a team that had yet to win in their first four conference games in Big East play.

This was a team that was ranked in the preseason top ten?!? Of course, the voters didn’t have a fucking clue that McDonald’s All-American freshman Wayne Blackshear would be out for a majority of the season with recovering from a torn shoulder labrum. Without him, the Cardinals are not even worthy of being in the top ten.

What they are, though, is a killer example of teams that literally play nobody until they get to the conference portion of the season. Do you really count Butler as a big non-conference opponent at this point? They don’t have Matt Howard or Shelvin Mack anymore as they graduated or went to the NBA. It’s not the same team.

The really humiliating part about the Cardinals? They’ve lost 4 times in their last 5 games and now sit 1-3 in the Big East. Next up? A DePaul team that beat a Pittsburgh team but not by much. Both Pittsburgh and UConn were ranked in the preseason top 25 but not at the moment.

Meanwhile, all those Louisville fans who facebooked and tweeted right after the Kentucky loss on the road to Indiana are not that talkative when it comes to Louisville losing at home and on the road. Not so funny now, is it?

The moral of the fucking story here: Don’t take opponents for granted when it comes to a horrible record in conference play.

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