More On Last Night's Awfulness: Great Wall of Vagina Strikes Anew
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
A new dawn has arrived for the 2008-2009 Vol basketball team (aka The Great Wall of Vagina) and hopefully they're reading the ridiculing of their performance last night. If I were Bruce Pearl I wouldn't allow a basketball to be used in practice for the next two days. I'd go old school. I might even bring in Eric Berry and let him talk to my team full of big-talking vaginas so they'd have some idea what an actual man looks like.
In fact, I'll go this far: I believe that if Tennessee simply put Eric Berry in a basketball uniform and told him to follow Meeks everywhere he went on the floor and play hard defense that Meeks wouldn't have gotten 54 last night. I really do. Because Berry has something these guys don't, toughness, pride, and he doesn't quit. Also, if Berry was getting lit up worse than any defensive team had in the past ten years (more on that later), I don't think he'd still be talking.
Making him different than the Great Wall of Vagina all-star team that kept trash-talking until the final minute of the game. Cue Patrick Patterson: "I wouldn't be talking at all," Patterson said. "My mouth would be shut. Especially when a guy's got 54 in your own gym. They can talk all they want. Jodie's shots speak for themselves." Somehow this doesn't surprise me at all. UT's players are much better at talking about how good they are than actually proving it.
Other things that jumped out at me about the game:
1. I watched this game with two UK grads, Tardio and his roommate Keven. And you thought watching it where you did was tough. Try rooting for the Great Wall of Vagina while Jodie Meeks goes Genghis Khan on the lot of them. I'm really starting to question what I've done to justify this string of bad luck. I have to watch my team collapse via 12 football games, GW, who I still root for, has lost six in a row including a loss to someone called Longwood, then I go to the Titans epic playoff loss on Sunday, and now the UT men's basketball team gives up more points to a single player in an SEC game than has happened since 1970. It's enough to make a fan want to curl up in the fetal position and sleep until this basketball season is over. At least I wasn't there to watch this in person. Which I very nearly was. Thank God for small victories.
2. How was Tennessee a 7 point favorite in this game? Honestly, that's one of the dumbest lines I have ever seen. I wish I'd put my house on Kentucky. Do yourself a favor and take Vandy in one week at Memorial Gym. No matter what the line is. One of Vandy's players will go for 35. Book it.
3. Someone identify the tool who was doing the Gator Chomp during the Pat Summitt interview. (By the way, did we really need to see the Lady Vols upcoming schedule during this game. Or have Summitt on as a guest for a half-hour?) Because once this guy is interviewed I want internet justice meted out. Namely, who he is, where he works, what his email address is, and why he felt compelled to make a complete and total ass of himself on television. Then I want us to exact revenge on him. If this sounds like I'm making this guy a scapegoat because I can't stomach watching the The Great Wall of Vagina play basketball anymore, then that's completely accurate.
4. Meeks went off for 54. Yeah, that sucks. But you know who else has gone off on the Vols defense this year for their career high? Everyone. From Dionte Christmas of Temple to Matt Bouldin of Gonzaga, from Sherron Collins of Kansas to Alex Renfroe of Belmont, this team gets lit up more frequently than should be humanly possible. Want to think about something entertaining, what would Chris Lofton score playing against this defense? What if you gave him five games? Could he break 60 in one of those games? Yeah, he could. Easy.
5. I'm going to reiterate what I wrote last night. Why didn't someone from the Great Wall of Vagina take it upon themselves to at least foul Meeks hard at some point during this game? I'm not saying you send in a goon a la John Chaney and ask him to seriously injure the guy, but at least draw up a play that leads to Meeks getting wrecked on a screen. You have to do this.
5. Pat Forde of ESPN.com puts Meeks' scoring in context here. Important takeaway? This bracketed quote:
Consider how rare nights like these are in college basketball:
• It's the most points by a single player in any regulation game over the last decade.
• No player from a BCS conference had scored this many points since Arizona State's Eddie House went for 61 against California in overtime in 2000.
• Six Division I teams scored fewer points Tuesday night than Meeks. Memphis, the 2008 national runner-up, outscored Meeks by a point. Kentucky itself scored 54 points in a win against West Virginia back on Nov. 29.
6. How much does it suck to be Tyler Smith right now? You've gone from having Chris Lofton and JaJuan Smith in your back pocket to a bunch of guys who can't shoot in your back pocket. Worse, they all have similar games to you but aren't anywhere near as good as you are. Tyler Smith is a slasher who can create. But he's surrounded by such bad shooters that all teams have to do is clog the lanes. No one extends their defense. Watch how hard Smith works to get to the basket or get shots. He has to make five or six moves to get a fall away jumper in the lane. What's worse than that? No talent ass clowns like Scotty Hopson and Cam Tatum are trying to slash to the basket as well instead of just making their wide-open threes.
It's getting so bad Tyler is going to add some new teardrops tattoos before all is said and done.
7. Why did Jodie Meeks thank his teammates? They didn't do anything for him all night. Other than wear the same jersey. I've never seen someone create all of his own shots like this before; I don't know how many of Meeks' baskets came off assists, but I can only think of two or three all night. It wasn't like Kentucky's offense was a well-oiled machine and Meeks was coming off quadruple screens for open shots. It was simply a case of a the perfect player going up against the perfect foe. (And by foe, I mean the Great Wall of Vagina. Calling this team's defense a foe is almost too much credit.)
8. How in the world did someone watch Scotty Hopson play basketball and name him the fifth best player in the country? This is laughable. He shoots a basketball like it's 1948 and the ball can't come out of the peach basket. If you were playing basketball and someone shot with this much arc on their shot, you'd ridicule them to the high heavens. Last night after another Hopson airball I said that 40% of Scotty Hopson's shots end without touching the rim. Without skipping a beat my friend Junaid says, "Really?"
He believed this stat!
And I started thinking to myself, you know, I might have believed it too if someone had told me that. Hopson has that great ability to either make a shot or not touch the rim. He looks like he's throwing really high-lobbed hand grenades. If we ever need to storm the walls of a castle, Hopson is our guy. How bad is his touch? Scotty Hopson's shooting touch makes Wayne Chism look like the second coming of Pistol Pete.
Let's go ahead and call Hopson what he is, the most overrated UT basketball recruit since Charles Hathaway. Who was, you guessed it, also a McDonald's All American. But at least Hathaway was a big man. Big men are notoriously hard to project. How could so many people be so wrong about Hopson's relative talent level? They did him a disservice by ranking him as highly as they did. Can we send him back to Kentucky in exchange for a case of Bourbon?
I know, I know, he's a freshman and freshman take blah blah blah. Shut up. He is not a good basketball player. Period. I'm not saying he needs to be rewriting the Vol record book. I'm just saying he needs to be capable of passing, shooting, jumping, and dribbling like an average player. I've seen no evidence of this yet. The fact that anyone called him a one-and-done player is an indictment of the basketball recruiting industry.
9. Having said all that, I don't blame Bruce Pearl for anything. Why? If he was playing Bruce Pearl would have set the screen that rattled Meeks' teeth. Although, to be fair, I do wonder what happened to Ryan Childress. Is he ever playing again? Last night would seem to have been the perfect time for him to come into a game and throw some elbows on screens, get physical, do something, anything, on defense. Where is he? What happened to him? We need an Amber Alert for him.
10. With the weakness of the SEC I have legitimate questions about whether this team makes the NCAA Tournament this year. There, I said it. Right now UT is #34 in the RPI. And plummeting. What's worse than that? UT is still the highest RPI team in the SEC. Meaning we gain nothing to speak of from beating most teams this year. And right now we're not good enough to worry about beating anyone yet. I believe the Temple, Kansas, and Kentucky games are three of the four worst games of the Pearl era (the blowout loss at South Carolina during year two is the other one). The fact that three of them are this year is ominous. I have a feeling this season is going to get worse.Labels: great wall of vagina ut basketball kentucky jodie meeks
Posted by Clay Travis at 10:38 AM
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