By Paul M. Banks
No Sideshow Bob, no problem. With Stanford’s Disney movie-loving Lopez twins (You know, Brook and the guy who looked like Sideshow Bob, or maybe Robin is the one with the hair I might have gotten them confused) now graduated, I think this is the year the Cats nip the Cardinal.
14-13 Stanford, 11:40 to go 1st half
things don’t look so good for the Cats right now. Shurna has 6, and Drew Crawford has made a couple of highlight reel plays already, but the Juice is not loose yet, as Juice Thompson needs to turn it on sometime. Also, this team chucked up 28 threes last game, after setting a conference record with 47 (the NBA record, by the way is only two more in case you’re scoring at home. But if you’re at home scoring useless sports trivia published on TSB…it might be time to take a long, hard look at your life). Anyways, NU is missing most of their threes so far tonight, leaving almost all of them short. Maybe it’s fatigue from living and dying by the trey?
22-20 Stanford 7:51 left
I can’t believe Kyle Rowley has scored for Northwestern. If you don’t know who Kyle Rowley is, he’s NU’s backup Center and if I had to choose one person as the worst overall player in the Big Ten right now, it’s him. Don’t get me wrong I’m sure the 13th man on Iowa or Penn State are pretty awful in their own right, but Rowley is by far the worst that I have personally seen get regular time on the college court.
Yesterday at the Outback Bowl Media Luncheon, how awful Rowley is at basketball was a popular topic of discussion among journalists attending. Does that seem like an odd choice of discussion topic given it was a football event?
Have you seen his game in the paint?
A seven footer with significant size who misses lay-ups and refuses to take it up strong when he gets the ball down low. Instead he often shoots this terrible turnaround stick-in type shot that makes him look like a shot-putter cut from the high school J.V. track and field team.
Stanford up 30-29 3:32 left in half
NU has no interior defense today, the Cardinal keep getting good penetration and looks inside. Stanford has had some balanced scoring led by senior swingman Landry Fields, who comes in averaging about 23 ppg. Sophomore guard Jeremy Green averages close to 16 a contest
Today reminds me of a question I meant to bring up when Illinois played Vanderbilt a couple weeks ago. Let’s run down the list of academically prestigious private schools in each power conference. The institutions that don’t quite fit in with the rest of the league, and also stand above the pack in education.
Big Ten, Pac 10- they’re playing each other right now
SEC-Vandy, obviously
ACC- DUKE
Big East- Notre Dame doesn’t count because 1.) the education is way overrated and 2.) you gotta be in a conference for both sports to be in this category. Georgetown maybe? but they don’t have football.
Big 12- Baylor?? is that a good school, is it private? I know Rice is really hard to get into, but they’re in a completely different conference.
Mountain West, MAC- tell me…I don’t know .
By the way 33 all at the half.
Juice is loose now. Thompson knocks down a big three that was heavily contested. 39 all with 15:14 to go in the game
With a break in the action I wanted to take this time to talk about the other NU blogs out there. I mean, obviously this is the best place to go on the web for NU sports, but these sites are pretty swell as well, and as Rodger Sherman of SB Nation’s “Sippin on Purple” put it:
There are so few NU blogs that you could conceivably read all of them
This can be advantageous though, especially when looking for stuff to link to. With fewer choices than most teams, I’m more likely to read up on ALL these sites, as they all provide great items for linking to.
Sippin on Purple is a site I highly recommend, and he schooled me to Carmody Court, which is all NU b-ball, all the time. And pretty in-depth.
Spread Far the Fame is another good site that updates frequently, and gets very creative and entertaining in their choice of graphics and pics.
And obviously Lake the Posts is the mother of all NU sports blogs, as he’s been at this game a long time, and seems to have a lot of good insider knowledge and connections to all things that satisfy your purple passion.
That’s pretty much it, other than a couple other sites that still have blogspot.com in their domain name (that’s so 2003, really!) or have zero pictures and still use the exact blogspot, or eblogger template on them with no additions or adjustments. As a rule, I avoid sites like that because if you don’t take the time to make your presentation original, than why should I believe your content would be original?
With NU up 60-52, 4:11 to play
this is the most electric I’ve heard/experienced Welsh-Ryan this year. A very good crowd, and they are getting loud now. As NU is starting to put this one away.
Now just 60-59 Cats with 1:35 to go. Spoke too soon.
This is what happens when you don’t make your free throws, you allow the other team to remain alive. The Cardinal have come back and hit a few big perimeter shots.
Juice hits a big 3 to put Cats back up 4. with 53 sec to go, hold on to your butts, like Samuel Jackson’s character used to say in “Jurassic Park”
Cats win 70-62 time to cue the fight song. See video below. I’ll be back in a few with any interesting quotes and observations from Carmody and the players.
Bill Carmody on why they almost blew the lead down the stretch
“We were playing not to lose. We were just walking on eggshells there. With still 4 minutes to go, those were not good possessions. I told them I know this is a different team, but it reminded me of the Purdue and Illinois games last year,”
So why was his team playing so tense?
“They’re 19 years old. I’m over 40, and I’m pretty tense.”
