It's a Bird...no, It's a Babbitt

Well, the skin pigmentation is the same.

We'll try not to make much of this but the comparison of Luke Babbitt to Larry Bird was hopefully more of a throwaway line to inflate the worthiness of an opponent. Chris Murray/Reno Gazette Journal has the details:

Is Luke Babbitt the new Larry Bird?
Chris Murray
Reno Gazette-Journal
11/25/2009

Well, look at how far Luke Babbitt has come. Earlier today, I put up a "Blast from the Past" post from his freshman season in high school when one of his main goals was to beat his coach, Matt Siebrandt, in a game of one-on-one. Five years later, he's being compared to Larry Bird. But by whom?

Go here for the remainder.

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So why not bang?

Fewer fouls called on home team
Associated Press
November 23, 2009

They don't all need glasses. But if you always suspected basketball referees are biased -- well, you're right, according to a couple of professors who've studied the matter.

Refs favor the home team, the academics say. They're big on "make-up" calls. They make more calls against teams in the lead, and the discrepancy grows if the game is on national TV.

The professors studied 365 college games during the 2004-05 season and found that refs had a terrific knack for keeping the foul count even, regardless of which team was more aggressive...

Go here for the remainder.

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While we are no fans of (Them Who Has The Gold, Rules) ESPN, it's difficult to work up any sympathy for the Gazelle Group (mentioned late in the following), an entity that hasn't exactly cornered the market on truthiness:

ESPN's big push alters early-season hoops landscape
Luke Winn
Sports Illustrated
November 24, 2009

On a week when we can be thankful that ESPN networks are televising more than 50 hours of college basketball, let us consider the way this came about. In January 2006, the NCAA made two moves that it knew would precipitate a boom in the number of early-season tournaments, or "multi-team events," on the November-December landscape. It repealed the "two-in-four" rule that kept teams from playing in multi-team events more than twice in any four-year span, and, in a less-publicized rule change, eliminated the events' certification process, which had required operators to provide detailed financial information to the NCAA and have the school or conference sponsoring the event be responsible for selecting the field.

The explosion in multi-team events (the attraction of which is that a team gets to play up to four extra games on top of the NCAA's 27-game base) initially happened, with the number of tournaments surging from 35 in 2005 to 58 by 2006. But it has since subsided: By SI's count, there are only 35 in 2009. Ultimately, the rule changes' effect wasn't to increase the quantity of multi-team events -- it was to empower the dominant cable television network in college basketball, which was freed to create its own programming without the NCAA's financial supervision.

"I don't think it was the NCAA's intention at the time, but they anointed ESPN king of the [early-season tournament] world from one day to the next," says Steve Cobb, the athletic director at University of Alaska-Anchorage, which is the last school left that owns and operates a full-format early-season tournament, the 32-year-old Great Alaska Shootout. The Maui Invitational and the Shootout had long been the game's signature early-season events, but when ESPN didn't renew the Shootout's television deal after the 2007 tournament, it fell from prominence. This year the event has shrunk to six teams. "ESPN didn't need me anymore," says Cobb. "All the barriers to them owning their own tournaments were lifted..."

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