This Decade in Wrenball

He didn't make the list, but Paul Rowley may well wind

up the most accomplished human of all of the decade's 

Tribesmen

We're thirty some-odd days from the end of this particular artificial demarcation of time, and our readership is clamoring for the kind of fin de decade content that they got at the end of the last one. Which is to say, more of our usual crap.

But there is one particular content category that's well-suited to a ten-year retrospective. 2010-2019 marked the best decade in the history of W&M men's basketball - the most wins in a decade (161), the most conference wins in the CAA era, and the most conference tournament finals (3). It was the first decade since the 50s that the Tribe even posted a winning record. There's an argument to be made that the three best players in school history matriculated this decade, and no argument at all to be made that the best game in school history took place during the 2010s.

So in the best tradition of our brethren (and sistren) in bloggery, we'd be remiss if we didn't offer a top ten list of W&M best players of the decade. And in our best tradition, this one goes to 11.

11. Connor Burchfield (2015-18)

6.2 points/game, 1.9 rebounds/game, 0.9 assists/game, 50.7% career 3-point FG %

This is really an honorable mention nod in recognition of how much Burchfield improved. He was a relative non-factor his first three seasons in Williamsburg, though he could shoot the ball from the beginning. As a senior, though, he was both excellent and necessary. The slender 6'4" guard led the nation in three-point shooting percentage (52.0) and true shooting percentage (.730). Burchfield drained a school-record 10 threes in a win over Marshall. And he led the nation in dagger three-pointers made to clinch games at George Mason while I was talking to GMU AD Brad Edwards about how bad it would be for the Patriots to lose at home to William & Mary.

10. Brandon Britt (2010-14)

11.1 ppg/2.1 rpg/1.8 apg

Britt wasn't superior at any one thing - he was a decent scorer, shot well (50% from deep his senior year), was steady on the ball, a good defender. He excelled as a leader. My favorite memory of Britt came against Drexel in Philly his senior season. Then-freshman Daniel Dixon had missed a handful of open looks, but had done a good job defensively on the Dragons' dangerous Chris Fouch. In a late-game huddle, Britt put his hand on the young Dixon's head and whispered a few words of encouragement. The Tribe went on to win that game in spectacular fashion (we'll see more about that later). Britt was a CAA All-Academic honoree three times, too.

9. Justin Pierce (2017-19)

11.1 ppg/6.5 rpg/2.3 apg

After a nondescript freshman season, Pierce burst into CAA prominence as a sophomore, averaging 14.7 points and 8.6 boards per game (4th in the CAA). He improved in both categories as a junior, to 14.9 and 8.8 (3rd in the league) respectively, and added 4.1 assists/game. He owns three of the top six highest single-game rebound totals in school history (18 against JMU in 2018, 17 against the Dukes in 2019, and 17 against Savannah State in 2017).

Pierce's athleticism and all-court skills would've given him an outside shot at an All-CAA first-team nod as a senior (he made the third team in his sophomore and junior seasons).  We'll never know - Pierce was probably the best player to leave W&M in the wake of Tony Shaver's firing. He's averaging 7.0 points and 6.2 rebounds as a major bench contributor for North Carolina. Goddammit.

8. Omar Prewitt (2013-17)

14.5 ppg/5.1 rpg/2.5 apg

Unlike Pierce, Prewitt played a big role from the beginning of his Tribe career. As a freshman, his driving dunk in the CAA Tournament final turned momentum W&M's way, and should've been the catalyst for a breakthrough win. Fuck.

If we're being honest, Omar was always just a little bit inconsistent - an enigmatic star who could go for 33 in a CAA semi almost as easily as he could disappear for games at a time. He regressed across the board as a senior, when we might've expected him to make the leap after a first-team All-CAA nod as a junior. It was fun to say Omar comin', though.

7. David Cohn (2015-18)

10.0 ppg/2.5 rpg/5.9 apg

It's not a stretch to say that the transfer from Colorado State is the best point guard in the history of the W&M program. He holds all-time school records for total assists, single-season assists, and assist/turnover ratio. His three seasons in Green and Gold all rank among the top 4 in assists/game, including the all-time best of 6.67 in his senior campaign. In that year, he led the CAA in assists, free throw percentage (91.2), and Offensive Rating. Dude was fun to watch.

6. Tim Rusthoven (2010-14)

10.5 ppg/5.4 rpg/1.5 apg/0.8 blocks per game

The Teej says he should be higher on this list, if only because he has the program's best nickname, and I can't really argue with that. Beasthoven is another who saw his numbers dip as a senior after a stellar junior campaign, but in his case it was because Terry Tarpey and Omar Prewitt were getting some of his rebounds (he still wound up 19th all-time in rebounds at W&M), and Marcus Thornton and Prewitt increased their scoring at his expense (he's 23rd in school history). He shot a career-high 59.0% from the field that year, and led the league in Offensive Rating. He's seventh all-time in the CAA in FG%.

Rusthoven also won the 2014 Dean Ehlers Leadership Award, given annually to the male and female CAA basketball players who "embody the highest standards of leadership, integrity and sportsmanship in conjunction with his academic athletic achievement."

And, again, his nickname was Beasthoven.

5. Quinn McDowell (2008-2012)

12.9 ppg/4.8 rpg/1.5 apg

The Mighty Quinn did Beasthoven one better, winning back to back Dean Ehlers awards his junior and senior seasons. On the court, he was another who peaked as a junior, averaging 15.5 points and 5.4 boards while making 45.5% of his threes. The Tribe's 8th-leading all-time scorer dropped a then-record 35 points against James Madison in the first round of the 2011 CAA Tournament, the definition of heat check. In his sophomore season, McDowell led the conference in Win Shares - he's 8th all-time in the league in that category. He was overshadowed as a senior by the emergence of the electric Thornton, but we'll hear more from the current assistant at Lehigh - he's not done as a leader in college hoops.

4. Daniel Dixon (2013-17)

11.9 ppg/3.3 rpg/1.6 apg

A confession: when Dixon was a freshman, I thought he was a nice defender who was just a little bit too stiff offensively to contribute much on that end. I don't know very much. There aren't many players who've consistently improved as much as Dixon across the course of a career. He went from a solid 12.5 ppg as a junior to a first-team all-CAA guard as a senior on the strength of his 19.2 ppg. That season, he was second in the league in scoring. As a sophomore, he led the league in three-point shooting percentage.

As we wrote in this very space, Dixon's senior season compares favorably with that of Marcus Thornton.

Oh, and he also hit that shot:



3. Terry Tarpey (2012-16)

7.6 ppg/5.3 rpg/2.2 apg/1.4 steals per game/1.0 blg

There has never been another player at William & Mary remotely like Tarpey. For my money, he's the best all-around basketball athlete in school history. As a 6'5" wing, he led the CAA in rebounds, steals, Offensive Rating and Defensive Rating, and finished second in blocked shots. He's fifth all-time in defensive rebounds in league play. He was a two-time CAA Defensive Player of the Year. The fact that he never made first-team all-league is a goddamned crime, for which I blame the media. Looking at you, Fairbank.

Tarpey was all red-ass, all the time. Again, as a guard, he led the Tribe in rebounds three straight seasons. He's fifth on the school's all-time boards list, 18th all-time in assists, third in steals, and fourth in blocks. All that for a player that averaged double-digit points his final two seasons is damn near unheard-of.

2. Nathan Knight (2016-20)

16.7 ppg/7.0 rpg/2.2 apg/1.8 bpg

If Cohn's the best point guard in W&M history, then Knight is the best big man to ever wear Green and Gold (with a great deal of due respect to Bill Chambers, who still holds the NCAA record for rebounds in a game with 51 against UVA in 1953). The only active player on this list (well, Pierce notwithstanding, dammit), Knight's taken a step up this year from an already lofty foundation.

The 6'10" lefthander is averaging 19.9 points and 10.3 rebounds a game in his senior season, when he's the absolute focus of every opponent's defensive game plan. He put 30 and 8 on Oklahoma in a game W&M absolutely should've won. He was third in the CAA in scoring last year, and led the league in blocked shots as a sophomore and a junior. Knight has a decent shot at finishing his career in the top five in school history in points, rebounds, and blocks (he's already second in the latter). Decent, that.

The 2018-19 All-CAA first-teamer and two-time CAA Defensive first-teamer took a peek at the NBA Draft after the chaos of the offseason. If he keeps up his play, he'll be the third Tribe player in the last five years to hear his name called on draft day.

1. Marcus Thornton (2011-15)

17.1 ppg/2.6 rpg/2.2 apg

Our feelings about Thornton are no secret. From the moment he exploded into our consciousness as a precocious freshman to his valedictory, W&M hoops has never seen anything like him. When he single-handedly carried the Tribe to overtime against a much, much better VCU team, or when he dropped 37 on Hofstra before giving the ball up to Dixon to make the game-winner in that epic game, or when everyone in the gym knew he was shooting against Drexel and he still rose, kicked out that leg, and drained it, when he did those things, he did things William & Mary players never did.

The 2015 CAA Player of the Year (the only W&M player so honored), Thornton is W&M's leading all-time scorer, and fifth in CAA history. He led the league in both three-point field goals and three-point field goal percentage in both 2012-13 and 2013-14.

He was electric at a school that was acoustic chamber music. When he plugged in, he changed the trajectory of a program. I don't expect to ever see his equal.

The New York Post is En Fuego

While we ponder and lament the downfall of local newspapers, it's important to remember that the NY Post, which is anything but a scrappy small-town paper, continues to deliver the goods. It gives you the news in a low-brow fashion, while putting lots of sizzle on the steak. When I used to commute to NYC via train, I would read the digital versions of both the Wall Street Journal and the NY Post each morning. I needed my business and local news, and I loved the high-brow/low-brow 1-2 punch of these two papers. I ignore the editorial sections of both papers, so I don't want to hear gripes about the evil Murdoch empire.

Anyhoo, the NY Post has been killing it lately. And by killing it, I mean having audacious titles designed to attract eyeballs. So as we prepare to eat turkey, drink alcohol and watch bad football, I wanted to share a recent trio of impressive articles. You should note that one of the articles relates to a trend I first brought up a few days ago. I am an influencer. 

Wishing you all and your tan perinea a happy Turkey Day. 

Gheorghe Explains: The Desertification of American News

Our man in the Outer Banks is dropping science this morning, and he ain't all that happy about it. Dave Fairbank laments the decline of the small-town news, a phenomenon that means "...residents in communities, hundreds of communities, even thousands, in this country have limited, very limited access to the sort of news and information that's been the lifeblood of our democracy, everything from when and where to vote, to topics such as education, health, emergency and safety information that we need," according to  University of North Carolina professor Penny Abernathy. Your assignment, cub reporters and G:TB readers, is to read this paean to what was and should be and come up with solutions in the comments. Crowdsourced community soul restoration, what we do best around here.

It’s no secret that the news business isn’t awash in good fortune these days. Journalists are routinely harassed, jailed and even killed by authoritarian regimes. Newspapers all over the country are hemorrhaging readers, advertising and staff. Meanwhile, our oaf-in-chief continually uses the media as a punching bag and prop at his rallies, making it increasingly perilous to simply gather and present information.

On a personal level, my old shop appears to have invited the vultures through the front door, which worries me greatly about friends and former colleagues. No telling how it will play out, but recent history is not encouraging.

The hedge fund Alden Global Capital recently bought into Tribune Publishing, becoming the
company’s largest shareholder at 25.2 percent. Tribune Publishing oversees some sizable, respected papers, among them the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel, and Hartford Courant. The company also owns small-to-mid size papers such as the Newport News (Va.) Daily Press, where I spent 30 years, and recent acquisition the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot.

Alden already controls dozens of newspapers and is the largest shareholder (50.1 percent) in a company called Digital First Media, whose stable of papers includes the Denver Post, the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer-Press and San Jose Mercury News. Alden’s stewardship has been disastrous for most of its newspaper properties. For example, when it bought into DFM in 2012 through 2017, staff at the St. Paul paper shrank from 259 to 109, in San Jose from 158 to 92, and in Denver’s newsroom from 184 to 85. In several small-to-medium DFM papers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Michigan, staff was cut by more than 70 percent during that five-year span. Cuts in Denver sparked an open revolt, with the paper printing a handful of critical op-ed pieces and demanding that Alden sell to local interests. The outcry generated national attention, but in the end Alden made more cuts, citing the need to meet specific profit margins.

Alden is by no means the only outfit engaging in such practices, but is among the most egregious. Media consolidation has been going on for quite a while, as companies such as Tribune, GateHouse, Gannett, McClatchy and Media General attempt to make money, or at least stem losses, in a business world gone digital. According to the Boston Globe, 65 percent of newspaper jobs were lost between 1990 and 2016, a greater decline than coal mining and iron and steel mill work. Newspapers shuttered in the past decade include Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, Tucson Citizen, Tampa Tribune, Cincinnati Post and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. More than 1,400 towns and cities across the country have lost newspapers in the past 15 years, according to data compiled by the University of North Carolina, expanding what observers call news “desertification” – areas not served by daily journalists.

Hedge funds don’t buy into newspapers because of some streak of civic responsibility, but because they see an opportunity to make a bunch of money relatively quickly. Newspapers represent a “distressed” business and therefore provide a relatively cheap buy-in, whether it be from market forces or current ownership looking for an escape hatch and sizable payout on their way out the door. If a newspaper or chain can gain financial traction, fine, and the hedge fund can profit from that. If it continues to flounder, the hedge fund often cuts expenses – usually in the form of workers – and extracts as much profit as possible before dumping and moving on.

Newspapers used to be family owned, and corporate and classified ad revenue made those families tidy sums. It wasn’t unusual for newspapers to have profit margins of 15-20 percent, or higher. Those profits turned newspapers into investments, and gradually they were run by business people, not newspaper people. When the Internet started siphoning off advertising, profit margins dropped. In response, bosses did what’s done at other businesses – cut expenses. But you can only depreciate office furniture, computers and cameras so much. The big expense is people, often reporters and editors.

I’ve argued for years that newspapers aren’t like other businesses. They’re more like public trusts than for-profit endeavors. Cut staff at many businesses and there may be alternative paths to success – technology, automation, retrenching. Cut staff at a newspaper, however, and stuff goes uncovered. Local government, cops and courts, business deals, construction and infrastructure contracts, never mind sports and entertainment and personalities. Nobody’s watching. Nobody has time. I endured a fair share of layoffs, early buyouts and staff cuts, along with the accompanying meetings and memos in which the message was “do more with less” and “work smarter, not harder.” I’m here to tell you that where news gathering is concerned, it’s damn near impossible to build greater efficiency into the process. No one does more with less, you only do less with less.

Major metropolitan areas are better equipped to deal with the shrinking newspaper field. There are generally more outlets for news, and a greater probability of a segment of engaged citizenry. But it’s the small and medium-sized towns and cities that suffer most when newspapers shrink or die. The local paper is often the only outlet for news, the sole watchdog on abuse and injustice and a community’s shared experience.

I have no idea how Alden’s tenure will affect my friends and former co-workers in Newport News and Norfolk. I would like to think that they’re far enough down the food chain to grant them some reprieve from the butcher’s knife. Both shops have been through several rounds of cuts and layoffs through the years, so little fat remains. But given the bloodless chase for profits and satisfied investors, nothing would surprise me.

A Whole New Meaning to Orwellian

Bear game recognize hog game

George Orwell's Animal Farm is widely understood to be an allegory for the arc of certain human revolutions, from their incarnation in idealistic purity to their eventual descent into betrayal of that idealism in the name of power.

A couple of recent events have me wondering if it's more of a warning, or at least more of prediction. Humans, it must be said, aren't exactly covering ourselves in glory at the moment. And I think the animals are planning something.

In Italy, a pack of feral hogs stole $22,000 worth of cocaine from a dumb group of traffickers and stashed it in various places around a forest in eastern Tuscany. Feral hogs are bad enough - those fuckers are mean as hell, and dangerous to boot - but if they're training elite commando units (with 30-50 feral hogs in each) and feeding them coke, we're gonna have a problem on our hands.

Moo, motherfucker

Meanwhile, closer to home, another apparent four-legged training mission took place on the Outer Banks. In May, as Hurricane Dorian hammered the Eastern Seaboard (and what better cover for a training mission than a hurricane), three feral cows slipped silently in the water near Cedar Island and swam the four mile distance to Cape Lookout National Seashore. Since then, the trio has been seen grazing on local sea grasses and lounging in the shade - both of which activities are the kinds of things they'd want us to think they were doing while they were really sending secret messages to Italian feral cows.

"Four legs good, two legs bad" may have been corrupted in Orwell's original manuscript, but if we know what's what, we'll keep our eyes on the four-legged in our midst. It doesn't take much imagination to conjure a scenario where the planet's decided that we're a fucking menace, and that it's done waiting for us to listen to our better angels. Feral cows, indeed.

Advice for Players

Starò qui, bella!

As we head into the weekend, Inter Milan coach Antonio Conte offers all of you serious athletes (the male ones, at least) a bit of advice to keep you competitively focused. The former Chelsea boss has strict rules for his squad as it regards relations with the opposite sex:

‘During the season, I advise my players to have sex for short periods and with the minimum of effort, and better use positions where they are under their partners. And preferably, with their wives, because if with others, well, that needs extra action.’

Have sex as fast as you can, as lazily as you can, and keep expectations as low as possible.

And that's...one to grow on.

Wanna See Some Shit?

Event ticket prices have been on the rise for some time. Not even just in that I'm-a-cranky-old-man-who-paid-$12-to-see-The-Ramones way. I've shelled out over $100-a-pop more than 20 times so see bands or sporting events now.

I will again this weekend at OSU-PSU, and you can't say it's not worth it. The Ireland-England Six Nations match cost us hundreds each.  More expensive than the international plane flight.

Springsteen on Broadway.  So glad my dad picked that one up.  Jesus.

The friggin' Cult... $60 in Jersey in 2 weeks, but it's a mini-Summit, so Gheorghe is picking it up.

That's life in a good economy. We could dedicate a whole post to what costs what these days, but the scope of this one is a simple parallel that makes me chuckle, marvel, grumble, shake my head, think about what could have been, shrug my shoulders, and chuckle again.

A couple of games in the National Football League this weekend... well, they're a same planet/different worlds situation.

Click on the images and look at the prices -- both of the lowest priced seats (at left), and the highlighted section.  Lordy.

New Music Tuesday, Featuring Michael Kiwanuka

I am an Apple Music guy, not a Spotify guy. I don't have a great answer why that is the case. But it's how I roll. Either way, today's technology is neat b/c we all have a nearly infinite music selection on our phones. I often hear about, and then download, music without much thought and then give it a whirl whenever I feel up for it.

I caught a mention in a magazine (remember them?) last month about a new album by a young British singer/songwriter named Michael Kiwanuka. The review was very positive, so I found and downloaded the album in ten seconds on Apple Music. I listened to the album, and to quote a smart guy I saw on the TV...



It's sometimes funky and more often mellow, and this seems like the right time of year for that mellow vibe, as I chill in front of the fireplace with brown liquor at night. So I'll give you three recs to hopefully get you to fall down a rabbit hole. Two are from the latest album and one is from an older album.

The first tune is You Ain't the Problem, from his new album. It's a funky mix of rock, jazz, folk and Afrobeat grooves. The video is hard to explain, but the tune is awesome.

The second tune, also from his new album, is I've Been Dazed. It's mellow and mournful and blew my mind a bit. Its lyrics resonate to me for personal reasons.

The third tune is Kiwanuka's first big "hit" from his second album a few years ago, Cold Little Heart. You may have heard it on Big Little Lies or in movies. It's smooth and soulful. The video intro is 90 seconds, if you find it's too long for your meager attention span. And in case you're wondering, yes, that's Atlanta/Get Out star Lakeith Stanfield in the video.

He's touring heavily this winter.  Go get some.

This Week in Wrenball: The Pair Up There

Hurriedly getting one final Wrenball post up while we can still brag on the Tribe's undefeated record.

W&M topped Hampton on Friday, 78-65, to run its season mark to 4-0, the team's best start since 1992-93. Senior transfer Andy Van Vliet scored a career-high 22 points and grabbed 13 rebounds, grad transfer Bryce Barnes added a career-high 21, and stalwart big man Nathan Knight had a quiet game by his standards, going for 15 points and a game-high 13 board.

Knight's double-double was his fourth of the season - The Commodore has gone for double digit points and rebounds in every one of the Tribe's games and is averaging 18.5 points and 11.8 rebounds. Van Vliet's not far behind him at 17.3 and 9.5 per outing. The 7-footer has recorded double-doubles in three of W&M's four contests.

The two (forthwith known as The Pair Up There) present a unique challenge for opposing defenses. Knight's a classic post, with an array of inside moves and a powerful 6'10" frame. He's only made 1 of 9 three-pointers this season, and he's only a 24.5% career shooter from deep. Van Vliet's connected on 43.8% of his threes, extending the opponent's defense to open up the inside for Knight. And in the limited highlights I've seen, the transfer from Wisconsin's also got decent footwork in the paint himself. Oh, and both of the them are lefthanders, a vexing proposition in its own right.

Van Vliet was just named CAA Player of the Week. One of the Tribe's key challenges this season was figuring out whether anyone could share the offensive load with Knight and relieve the All-CAA pivot of the responsibility of carrying the team himself. With Van Vliet and Thornton Scott (12.8 ppg, 52.4% from deep), it looks like coach Dane Fischer's found something that's worked, at least in the early going.

That going gets a lot rougher this evening on the road against Oklahoma. We're not going to win, but it'll be really interesting to see how the dual-big setup fares against a Power Five opponent.

No One's Jamming Her Transmission

When we last checked in on Juliana Hatfield, she was righteously pissed that we left her out of our pantheon of cute rock babes. To which, bygones. And, well, we're sorry. That was a mistake.

She appears to have gotten over it. The former Blake Babies lead singer just released an album that's solidly in a musical strike zone that's so mine that I didn't even realize it existed. Hatfield's new record is called, evocatively, Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police. On it, Juliana Hatfield sings songs originally recorded by...The Police.

Sexy female voice singing one of my favorite band's songs? Wheel. House.

Denial, Handicapping, and Wardrobe Questions

Several members of the G:TB family have sent kids off to college, and a few more of us are on the cusp. My 18 year-old has completed all of her applications, written her essay (it's pretty good - she must have good writing/bullshitting genes), taken her SAT (a second time, and boy did she need it), and visited a decent number of campuses (this is a feature of the college search process, says this college town-loving dad).

In an effort to maintain some rationality about the process, and avoid thinking about how different my house will feel without her buoyant, emotive, large personality, herewith a catalog of the schools to which she's applied, along with some typically Gheorghian commentary (fluffy and largely made up). We'll go in alphabetical order:

College of Charleston
Charleston, SC
Undergraduate Population: 10,488
Tuition, Room & Board: $45,000 (out of state)
Colors: Maroon and White
Odds of Attendance: 25-1

Charleston is the farthest distance away from our home, some 9.5 hours by car. It's also, as you likely know, a phenomenal town - full of history, great restaurants, and a pleasant coastal climate. The College is smack in the middle of the city, just blocks away from an eclectic dining and shopping district. She'll probably get in here, but my sense is that she's only applying because she thinks her folks would like to visit Charleston more often.

Franklin & Marshall College
Lancaster, PA
Undergraduate Population: 2,324
Tuition, Room & Board: $74,600 (private)
Colors: Blue, Light Blue, and White
Odds of Attendance: 25-1

Each year for the past six, she's competed in a dance competition at the convention center smack in the middle of downtown Lancaster. As a result, we've enjoyed the opportunity to get to know a bit about the little town in Amish country. F&M is on the outskirts of Lancaster, just outside the downtown area. It's a beautiful campus, a mix of very old and modern with a ton of green space. There's a surprisingly robust food and beer scene, and more arts than I'd have expected in the middle of Trumpland. I've posted relatively long odds largely because I don't think she'll get in - F&M is highly competitive, and while she's got very good grades and above average SATs, I don't think that'll be enough.

Ithaca College
Ithaca, New York
Undergraduate Population: 5,852
Tuition, Room & Board: $59,600 (private)
Colors: Blue, Gold, and Gray
Odds of Attendance: 20-1

If we'd visited Ithaca as a standalone, I think it'd rank higher on her list. But we visited it on the same weekend we visited Skidmore, and as we'll learn later, she loved that little school. Ithaca's a great college town, with both IC and Cornell within a handful of miles of one another. Ithaca College is on top of a hill with spectacular views of Cayuga Lake. The downside to that location is that the winter winds whip across the relatively open campus, making three months of the year a dismal proposition. While I don't think she'll wind up here, we did have killer Thai soup at a little joint in Ithaca's funky downtown.

James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA
Undergraduate Population: 20,779
Tuition, Room & Board: $22,600 (in-state)
Colors: Purple and Gold
Odds of Attendance: 10-1

Her mom (JMU '95) isn't being terribly subtle about her preference. My daughter, though, isn't as high on JMU as I think she should be. Her complaint: "All of Loudoun County goes to JMU. I want to meet new people." While I think that's a bit dramatic (one thing she can do is drama), I take her point. She wants to have an opportunity to at least minor in dance in college, and if she's serious about that, JMU is likely her best bet. As one of her two in-state options, there a good deal of financial appeal, too. And I was more impressed than I expected to be when we toured the school - JMU has a ton of support programs in place to help kids succeed.

Skidmore College
Saratoga Springs, NY
Undergraduate Population: 2,680
Tuition, Room & Board: $71,200 (private)
Colors: Green and Yellow
Odds of Attendance: 15-1

There may be cooler college towns than Saratoga Springs, but there aren't many. Town and gown are pretty tightly interwoven. As we drove through the (very) upscale avenue that leads to campus, my daughter expressed intimidation at just how preppy-cute the place is. But once we got on campus proper (led by one of the most exuberant tour guides I've yet seen - dance/drama major, natch), my kid had her head turned. Skidmore has small classes, very student-driven academic tracks, a large emphasis on international study, and a really fucking high price tag. If she gets in, I think she's really going to want to go. A potential silver lining for me and Mom: like F&M, I'm not sure she'll be able to get in. (Bonus Skidmore fact: the school is about 45 minutes from the Teej's hometown. That's gotta be worth something.)

Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA
Undergraduate Population: 24,051
Tuition, Room & Board: $26,000 (in-state)
Colors: Black and Gold
Odds of Attendance: 4-1

Personally, I think VCU is the best fit for my girl. It's diverse, quirky, just far enough from home, offers dance and academic programs that align with her interests, and is replete with musical and artistic opportunities. Selfishly, it's a pretty good fit for me, too - the price is right (or as right as any college price can be) and I'll have an excuse to get down to Richmond to hang out with FOG:TB Mike Litos and watch the Rams play ball.

It'll be a few months before we start hearing from schools. Time enough to keep working on my daughter's understanding of just how much $70,000 is. We'll keep you posted on our progress. I think I'll look good in Havoc.

Who's the Man(dalorian)?

There's a lot of excitement in the Geekosphere about the first live-action series to be spun off from the Star Wars canon. None moreso, perhaps, than right here in our corner of the world. Observe:

Right on, Teejus. We knew you when.

JaMarcus Hustle

In early January 2012, we wrote a post about an electric moment authored by a precocious young basketball player. In that post, we said "Thornton's missed dunk was notable not for the result, but for its sheer audacity."

I was reminded of that dunk, and those words, earlier this week when I saw what Ja Morant tried to do against the Rockets earlier this week:

Ja Morant almost killed himself. pic.twitter.com/wM7ZX0f1SH

— Justin Russo (@FlyByKnite) November 5, 2019

Morant had his doubters when he entered the NBA. An undeniably spectacular college player, the combination of his slight build and lower-tier competition led to skepticism. Eight games in (and this weekend's back to back game load management vacation), the doubters ain't chirping all that loud. Morant's playing faster than fast, scoring 18.9 points on 46.2% three-point shooting, and averaging 5.5 assists and 3.5 boards. He's also turning the ball over 4.5 times per game, perhaps an unavoidable consequence of a guy learning at top speed.

If his game grows at this level as much as Marcus Thornton's did in college, Morant's audacious miss portends something special.

More zman Boulliabaise

I've been to lazy to write any posts but I've had lots of ideas. Here are a few.

1. Colin Quinn: The New York Story is on Netflix and it's funny. New Yorkers will love it and people from outside New York will understand why New Yorkers act the way they do. It's worth 60 minutes of your time.

2. You should watch The Chi. Sometimes it's like The Wire, other times it's like What's Happening!!, at all times it's good. It's written by Lena Waithe (from Master of None) and it stars Kima from The Wire, Ronsel from Mudbound, Mister June from True Detective, and a kid who is Rerun's spiritual successor.

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3. Malcolm Gladwell! Eddie Alterman! Autonomous cars? Keep an eye out for "Autonomy," coming soon to iTunes.



4. You should read The Bulwark. It's a website full of good writing by smart people who maintain a pre-2016 conservative worldview. Bill Kristol is the editor-in-chief. I estimate that 90% of the articles involve grinding axes against Donald Trump and his bootlickers. There are also well-reasoned think pieces addressing things like flaws in Elizabeth Warren's Medicare for All plan and Middle East policy. These pieces are thoughtful and respectful. Taken together with the other left-leaning stuff I read it's a decent approximation of the Washington Post op-ed section 15 years ago. I miss that.

5. You should sign up for The Dispatch. It's a daily email newsletter written by a couple of guys who defected from National Review when it went full Trump. You can sign up here for free. It's completely self-funded by the authors and by donations from readers. Bare bones, no pictures. It's like The Bulwark only it covers a broader range of stuff.

6. You should listen to Roy Ayers. He's been buried in my iPod for years without getting any run. zson wanted to listen to something he never heard before so I put it on. Everybody sampled him. His shit is dope.





7. X Clan still holds up. Speaking of sampling Roy Ayers, I haven't listened to X Clan in over 20 years until this weekend and they still bang.



This song was oddly prescient ...

Yet Another Bills-Browns Preview

Yeah, I’m doing one of these again. The Bills play the Browns this weekend. This game will be their ninth matchup in the past thirteen years, in large part because they both perennially finish fourth in their respective divisions. Buffalo won four of the last five games. This one is particularly huge.

I knew the Bills would be 6-2 at this point. I think I said so in a comment but I’m too lazy to look. Their six wins came against five cans of corn (NYJ, NYG, CIN, MIA, WAS) and a mediocre Titans squad. I was sure they would win at least five of those games.

They have three more pushovers on the schedule: DEN, NYJ, and MIA. They also have a tough stretch in the middle of those three games: @DAL, BAL, @PIT, @NE. That’s four guaranteed losses. I know that Pittsburgh is not great this year but the Bills are 2-10 against the Steelers over the past 26.69 years with the last win coming in 1999, and they haven’t won a regular season game in Pittsburgh since 1975 when OJ Simpson ran for 227 yards.

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All of this means, as I expected, that the Bills need to beat the Browns this week to have a shot at 10-6 and a playoff berth.

Cleveland is favored by 2.5 to 3 points as I write this, so the bookies view Cleveland and Buffalo as a pretty even match despite their respective 2-6 and 6-2 records.

Everyone expected Cleveland to be good this year. They play a very soft schedule from here out, with only one game against a good team (Baltimore) after this week, including home against the Dolphins and two against the Bengals. The way my life works, the Browns will beat the Bills and build momentum to finish 10-6 or 9-7. Their win over the Bills will be the tiebreaker that gives Cleveland the 6 seed, keeping Buffalo out of the post-season.

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Final score: Bills 17 Browns 31

This Week in Wrenball: Not in the Face

Here at the internet's third (maybe fourth)-leading purveyor of William & Mary men's basketball information, we're not in the business of beating dead horses*. Good thing, because the equine carcass of the fallout from the firing of Tony Shaver heading into a season where he had an odds-on chance to win the CAA is deader than Rasputin.

* Let's not kid ourselves. Beating dead horses, hitting recurring themes, tilting at familiar windmills - those things are our stock in trade. Bite me, Randy Newman.

"What have I gotten myself into?"

No, we're not here to wallow in what might have been. W&M's 2019-20 season starts today, and we've got to go to mock-battle with the team we've got. New head man Dane Fischer sends his team out against a fairly mediocre High Point team this evening, a team that will give the green in Green and Gold an alternative meaning.

W&M returns players that accounted for 38.2% of the team's 2018-19 minutes, 13.7% of made three-pointers, 38.6% of rebounds, 44.8% of assists, and 38.2% of all points. Without context, those numbers represent a daunting challenge. If you realize that senior pivot Nathan "The Commodore" Knight represents 65% of the returning rebounds, 41.3% of assists, and 73.3% of the points, you begin to understand the nature of the task at hand.

Knight, arguably the best big man in W&M history, enters the season on the short-list for the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar award, given to the best center in the NCAA. (Shouldn't it be called the Lew Alcindor award, though?). He averaged 21.0 points, 8.6 rebounds and 2.3 blocks per game last season, the first NCAA Division I player to do so since Tim Duncan in 1992. That's lofty territory. The first-team All-CAA and first-team CAA All-Defense awardee will undoubtedly be the center of attention for opposing defenses, and savvy coaches will go after him at the defensive end in an effort to get him in foul trouble.

Fischer will be counting very, very heavily on transfers Bryce Barnes (5'11" guard, averaged 6.1 points, 2.7 assists and 2.4 rebounds per in 25 games at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Tyler Hamilton (a 6'4" guard who averaged 1.8 points and 1.3 boards in 11.8 minutes/game at Penn), and Andy Van Vliet (a 7'1" center with excellent outside touch, who redshirted last year after transferring from Wisconsin, where he averaged 3.4 points and 1.4 rebounds his junior season) to augment returning point guards Luke Loewe and Thornton Scott. Scott showed flashes during his freshman year, while Loewe is a decent defender and not much more. Your humble blogger doesn't really know much yet about freshmen Miguel Ayesa (who apparently can shoot the ball with some aplomb), Ben Wight, and Thatcher Stone, other than the fact that he's going to confuse the latter with Thornton Scott a lot, and that at least one of them had better be a stud if this team's gonna do anything at all**.

** If you're thinking this all sounds like a shaky foundation upon which to build a winning team, you may be correct.

Lionel Richie's Commodores had depth and experience. Nathan Knight's Pips, a lot less so.

CAA coaches tabbed the Tribe to finish 7th, which says a lot about Knight, and not much about coaches' ability to forecast. CBS Sports' Matt Norlander rates W&M 296th out of 353 Division I teams, which feels about right. For me, if we win 10 games and finish out of the CAA cellar, it's a good season.

Which is a Huge step down from where this squad might've been had the AD given Tony Shaver one more year. Not over it. Not nearly.

Do Your Duty, Part Deaux(die)

That last post title teed this one up pretty well.

In Canada, I'm not sure if they impersonate Dylan Thomas and "rage, rage at the dying of the light." But it appears they do rage, rage at the refusal to let you use a Tim Horton's toilet. Not gonna lie. I like this woman's chutzpah. And I had never ever ever thought of that position in the event of dropping an emergency deuce. Brilliant move, although it's a bit disturbing to see somebody so comfortable/familiar with stand-up poops.



Naturally, Deadspin covered the event well here (this is pre-purge Deadspin). Happy Tuesday. Go out and vote!

Do Your Duty

Tomorrow, we take one more step towards reclaiming our national sanity.

That sounds great. Not sure if it's true. But here in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Election Day has significant import. Currently, Republicans control the Senate by a narrow 20-19 margin, with one seat empty. If the 2017 election is any indicator, Virginia is trending blue. If the Democrats can flip that 20-19 margin, even if it's only a 20-20 tie, a number of heretofore dead on arrival legislative proposals will sail through, since the tiebreaking vote would be Democratic Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax (whose own alleged history of sexual violence has been the center of at least a few Republican attack ads this cycle - ironic if Dems' unwillingness to investigate these allegations costs them the Senate).

Among a number of noteworthy acts possible with a Democratic Senate, Virginia would ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which would mean that the ERA would have the required 2/3 majority of states to become codified as law. There's some headache-inducing fine print that would mean that it wouldn't actually happen right away, but it'd be a huge symbolic victory for equality.

So get out there and do the right thing, Virginians. And for those of you that live in other parts of the world, I'm sure there's something you can do to give the GOP the middle finger. Get out there and vote!

Big Pain Relents (A Little)

It's a bit of cliche that stepping on Lego bricks is one of the banes of parental existence. Cliches, my friends, have a kernel of wisdom in them. My kids are now 18 and 15, so it's been a long time since the corner of a Lego dug deep into my hypodermis, eliciting howls of pain and creative cursing, but it happened more than once. Now it's my daughters' steadfast laziness that elicits most of the cursing.

Legos have been around for 66 years. Only now have those sadistic assholes decided it might be in their customers' interest to solve this pain-delivery problem. Lego teamed with a French advertising agency (I don't know, man) to create purpose-built anti-Lego slippers, which feature a heavily padded sole to protect tender dadfeet (momfeet, too, though Moms seem better equipped to deal with a little bit of temporary pain).

Apparently the Lego jerks are only making 1,500 of these, to be distributed randomly this holiday season. Because they like mocking our pain.

Self-Preservation

Guys and gals from my graduating class are starting to turn 50. Which, in the way of things, means that I'm not all that far from that daunting milestone myself. In many ways, though, I feel pretty good about the state of my corporeal being. I'm not in the best shape of my life, but I weigh the same thing I did 10 years ago, and I can play soccer for two hours every weekend, keeping pace with dudes 15-20 years my junior. And while my memory isn't what it once was (used to be aces at trivia games, which ain't the case these days), I generally make up for it with anticipation and experience. Just got promoted, and I've learned a whole lot this year, so I've retained a capacity to pick up new tricks, older dog status notwithstanding.

I look pretty good, too, at least by my standards. Got all my hair, skin's in good shape, eyes are bright and clear. All of that's subject to change.

So I took advantage of modern technology to freeze my avatar-self in this moment of reasonable pulchritude. Eat your hearts out, Gheorghies.

“Yo rob, I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but The Teej has one of the best memoghis of all time.”